My journey into UX design as a software engineer
Pursuing User Experience 1/3 — Exploring Verticals
“The world needs a lot more people who are two days into something to help educate people who are one day into something”
I am not an expert in UI or UX design. The purpose of this blog is to share my process and learnings because I believe if you share knowledge, you revise what you know and it reinforces the subject in your brain.
To begin with, let me introduce myself:
I’m Asim, software engineer and designer. I like to call myself a creative technologist. I graduated in June 2018 with a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science. I began exploring different verticals of design and technology to discover where my passion truly was during my sophomore year. Being an artsy kid since elementary school, I enjoy hand lettering, sketching and painting. After much explorations into digital marketing, graphic design, business development, app and web development, I found my love for design and to build products, marrying my developed interests in design with technology.
Caveat: This post is not “An easy guide to learn UX design”. It is my honest journey and in no way I say it is the ideal way to go about learning UX or UI design. However, I am sure a lot of you will relate to my experiences and definitely find it resourceful.
Inception
I believe my journey started when I taught myself the fundamentals of design. From reading countless articles, books, youtube videos and podcasts, I dedicated more than 8 hours a day learning and practicing. Let me share my experience so that it can help you be more efficacious than I was.
1: Learning the Tools
Pick your weapon and stock your inventory. For me Adobe Creative suite was the way to go. These tools are very powerful and might seem too complex and overwhelming but I would encourage you to learn them by yourself. I started with Illustrator and Photoshop. You will find a bunch of tutorials on Youtube. Tastytuts has an amazing beginners’ tutorial for both. Coming from engineering, I had a good knowledge in Image Processing, knew the differences between vector and raster and it helped me pick up the definitions and techniques fairly easily.
I would strongly recommend you to learn Photoshop and Illustrator because once you are decently comfortable to use them, I bet you can learn any designing tool in no time.
Next: Adobe XD, Sketch, Figma? Pick any. I preferred XD because it was familiar to use and it enabled quick prototyping without the need for a separate software.
I hear a lot of good stuff about Figma like real time collaboration and the entire application is on the web which means you don’t have to download and install anything.
However, if you want to purely stick to UX, wireframing and prototyping tools such as Balsamiq should be enough.
2: Learning the Skills
Learning the tools is similar to learning the alphabet. You still need to learn to write sentences and beautiful essays. Design is no different.
A big shout out to The Futur and Chris Do. Their videos are pure gold. From Typography, Layouts, Color theories to pitching for projects, they have it all covered. Learning Design Fundamentals is an ABSOLUTE MUST.
A few MUST read books:
- The Design of Everyday Things — Donald Norman
- The Essentials of Interaction Design — Alan Cooper
- UX for Lean Startups — Laura Klein
Why are these books imperative?
The Design of Everyday Things — It talks about design in general. People who do not have a formal education in design confound it with visuals or art, labelling it as being subjective, generally speaking. This book will give you the right mindset to approach a problem and form objective solutions.
Essentials of Interaction Design — Isn’t the title enough? Alan Cooper elucidates the very basic elements and atoms of design for interaction with digital products.
UX for Lean Startups — This book is fun to read and will share useful techniques to research, build and validate products quickly.
3: Practice
Practice and implement. This is when you actually learn. Do I really need to emphasise?
You have a startup idea? Great! Create a prototype.
You don’t like an existing app or website? Redesign it.
You like an existing app or website? Reverse engineer it and make a case study.
Here is the interesting part, you don’t have to actually design to be a UX designer. That is UI design. You can work with only wireframing and prototyping tools, and analytics. I will discuss more about research and experience design in my subsequent posts. Stay tuned.
4: Continuous Upgradation
Steps 1, 2 and 3 is only to get the engine started. You have set upon an endless learning curve. It can seem daunting to remain abreast with the pace of changing technologies and how we interact.
Base your foundation on the fundamentals. Read everyday — research papers, articles, blogs, books. Listen to podcasts over music. Browse through Behance over Instagram.
The amazing thing about technology in the current age is, it’s a level playing field. Everybody is an amateur and anybody can be an expert — what separates you is your drive to become better — every hour, every day.
Some resources I go to daily
Reading:
Smashing Magazine
Medium
NNGroup
Google Scholar (for research papers)
Podcast:
Hacking UI Podcast
99% Invisible
UI Breakfast
UX Podcast
Additionally, you can try your hand at coding and writing too. A unicorn in design is the one who can — Design, Code and Write.
You can never learn enough — Micro-copy, behavioural and cognitive psychology, micro-interactions, color theory, etc. I will be putting out detailed posts on these in the future. Stay tuned.
Conclusion
UX design is an umbrella term which encapsulates various disciplines. Be unafraid to take challenges, whether it be in research or design, or even animations and illustrations. Explore and find your niche interest. Don’t let lack of knowledge hold you from trying. I am a proponent of “Start before you are ready” — the anti-fragile way to learn (as explained by Nassem Nicholas Taleb in his book Anti-fragile).
Practice Everyday — Learn Everyday.
