Bringing the Software Developer in Me to the UX Space

I started my career as a software design engineer developing Windows and UNIX applications using C and C++. The software design engineering discipline that I was accustomed to was done in waterfall and V-model methodologies where analysis and design were precursors to implementation.

During analysis and design:

• requirements are gathered
• researches done through resources such as books, the internet, and experts
• use cases defined outlining user interaction to the software
• and other user-system or system-system interaction expressed through different Unified Modeling Language diagrams

Below were a few of my projects:

• An in-house library system developed in Visual FoxPro. I was given free reign of the system that I designed based on ease of use, ease of learning, extendability, and visual simplicity.
• A GPS visualization system used by other developers for evaluating GPS algorithms. Given free reign, my design approach was collecting information from would be users and experts on GPS algorithms.
• A data intensive calculating application based on my boss’ algorithms. It entailed working closely with my boss while responding to fast and quick needs of prototypes.

How do the above relate to UX? Designing was already in my veins. This time around, I want my design to be customer-centric.