From Graphic Design to UX

A lot of us who call ourselves UX designers, as complicated and polemic as the title can be, may have a similar story; we didn’t get out of high school wanting to spend our days sketching and creating user flows, but eventually, in one way or another, life took us there.

The foundations

Women and men like me, who have a graphic design background, know pretty well how we started our careers as artists, the “creatives” of the family, the kids making greeting cards for Christmas and birthdays and designing logos for our relatives’ small businesses, and if you got to this point in the blog, you might be familiar with this.

We all learned every single design principle from composition to color, and we spent entire nights drawing perfect 3D cubes and trying to finish projects that failed because we didn’t convert the text to outlines, or we forgot to embed the image to the Illustrator document, Murphy was our best friend.

The question is, how and why does someone shift from being the artsy kid to becoming a data driven problem solver?

The path to UX

Many reasons can lead a designer to take the UX path. To me, it was a Hackathon. 48 hours of intensive developing and coding in a close environment merging technology and design, and just a few months later I was pushed completely into the tech world as I became part of a successful Startup in Costa Rica.

I didn’t have any formal education in product design, and yet, I loved the idea of creating something that would actually be used and why not, loved. So I pushed myself and spent hours reading about the topic; I was mentored by awesome people that I will always admire, and suddenly I was there, confidently evangelising people around me about the power of a well-tested prototype, talking about heuristics and eventually, more doors were quickly opening.

Don’t get me wrong, I love art and admire artists very much, I have good friends that are creating awesome stuff as graphic designers, but this post is oriented to those who are curious about the nowadays so trendy UX topic, and why we like it.

It’s all about generating impact

One of the best feelings one can experience, is having a meaningful impact on people’s lives, wether it is by being kind to a stranger or finding the cure for cancer, as humans we should go towards that. And we, as product designers have the tools and the responsibility to do it.

“Design can’t be just incidental. Our work has impact on people’s lives.”

We have the power to shape up human interactions, improve the economy, and put a smile on people’s faces, and luckily, every day more and more companies are starting to realize how important it is to incorporate a UX team in their structures, as well as giving something positive back to society.