Transitioning from User Interface Designer to User Experience Designer
Before we begin, lets unveil industry’s confused and misused words:
Graphic Designer : Covers all facets of design, whether that be print, web, advertisement etc. Primarily responsible for creating a visual concept.
User interface Designer : Create Interfaces for Machines, Web and Mobile but Print.
User Experience Designer : Improve the usability, accessibility, and interaction with the product.
User Interface Designing was one of the hyped keyword in the last decade. However, in the last few years User Experience Designing has overshadowed it completely.
Transitioning career can have multiple motivations, such as, learning new technology, better opportunities, better pay scale. If you enjoy designing and talking to user, want to participate in project journey from the inception to going live, UX designing may be for you. But remember both the roles are crucial for the success of any product. Also, If we compare pay scale, as per Glassdoor, UI designer is earning avg $51,360/year, whereas UX designer’s salary is whopping $95,363/year to $1,01,306/year*.
Difference between User Interface designer (UI) and User Experience Designer
User Interface Designing aka Visual Designing is a subset of UX design. Graphic designer plays with colour, fonts, shapes and images to create an emotional and visual communication. Whereas, UX designer deals with user’s experience with a service or product and strive to make experience better. UX designer think broader and covers the whole journey includes research, interaction design, information architects and usability.
The Big Benefit of UI Design Experience when Moving to UX Design
Both the fields includes Analysis, Research and Development at various stages of product development. Also, both work for user and help user to communicate emotionally with product.
What Should I Learn?
There is no fixed route to be a UX designer. There are art majored, computer science graduates, web designers and developers producing usable products every day. Following steps will help you to understand various aspects of UX design.
The best technique to learn is by doing.
Read UX Books
There are plenty of good UX books available and it is hard to recommend the best. However, following books are recommended to every UX designer.
Quantifying the User Experience
Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience
100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People
Revamp existing products
Okay, enough with reading, time to kick-off some ideas. You may want to follow below steps:
- Pick any app or product you use in your day to day life. You may pick your own idea, you always wanted to design
- Check if it is frustrating to use
- Note down all the pain points
- Browse similar products and see how they are solving the problem. Don’t steal but inspire
- Start creating prototype and test it with real user
- Follow the step 3 again till there is no pain.
Voila! you’re done.
Join local meetups and be a part of community
Learning with groups is fun and reduce the self learning curves. Just get out of your comfort zone and join local meetups. Industry professionals who shares the same passion attend meetups across the world and can be useful to learn things. Also, it doesn’t have to be UX specific. Go and show your ideas to people and ask for their feedback.
Find a mentor
Finding a teacher is privilege. Learning for a passion is ultimate dream but it is hard work, and there are challenges around every corner. Fortunately, having a mentor at your side help and reduce the learning process. Check for research colleges and educational programs near you and ask if they can suggest any of their professors, alums, or current students as mentors.
Workplace could be another place to find mentors. Ask teammates if they’d be willing to mentor you, or if they have any recommendations.
Follow UX folks on Twitter
There are plenty of amazingly talented and highly recommend people available online. I’d recommend below gentlemen at any time.
Jared M. Spool
Find him at @jmspool
Steve Krug
Find him at @skrug
Don Norman
Find him at @jnd1er
Luke Wroblewski
Find him at @lukew
Browse free or paid content
There are plenty Free and paid resources available online which can be beneficial and should address your need.
Free online courses: Open2study, UXtree, SpringBoard
Paid online courses: Interaction Design Foundation, Coursera, Udemy
I hope this post will be helpful to those of you who are switching careers from UI to UX.
Good Luck!
- *Pay scale is driven by variuos factors from location, industry type and experience
- Image credits : https://www.pexels.com
