Designer’s Journey

What is a designer’s journey?

A designer's journey is a tool developed by my mentor Petr Kosnar and me. It’s essentially a timeline of the project where I track my confidence levels, what went well and what could be better, all in a clear manner and in one place. It is kind of a user journey of me as a designer through a specific project.

How and why I started using it?

It was early 2019 when Petr agreed to be mentoring me for a school project. As we were setting up the mentorship, Petr came to me with one idea to start a designer’s journey. 

Originally the idea was to also write a designer’s diary, but that ended up being not so efficient and hard to come back to, thus I ended up using designer’s journey which brings the reflection part of the diary but helps me to put it in a structured way that is easy to glance over and understand a lot quicker. In other words, it gives me a lot higher chance I will come back to it and fully utilize my learning in my future projects.

The main benefits are

• It allows me to reflect on a whole project in a compact and visualized way and see my progress.
• It helps me to realize and highlight the mistakes and successes so I can learn from them.
• It serves as a great communication tool between me as a mentee and my mentor.

Examples of how I used it

I used designer’s journey in two projects which are also included as case studies here on my website. The first time for a usability testing project and the second time for my graduation internship.

In the first case, I made the designers journey only after the project was over, reconstructing it from my design diary entries. I won’t do it this way again and wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else either. I learned it’s a lot harder to remember all the details after the project which makes reconstructing and reflecting more challenging. 

My first ever designer's journey in a usability testing project.

In the second case, I used the designer’s journey as a living document and I was adding to it throughout the project. It allowed me to also reflect on the present and re-evaluate if I’m doing things in the best possible way. I also brought it to my mentoring sessions and it served well for reflecting on my work together with my mentor.

Second designer's journey tracking my graduation project. See the original full resolution version in Miro.