Who ya callin’ a designer?

My university degrees say that I am a mathematician and a computer scientist. Yeah, i am obsessed with data and measurement, and my apparatus serves me well, but I have also worked as a graphic designer for the most of my life. I got my first paid web design gig when I was 15, and never stopped doing that stuff and improving in it.

When I got accustomed to my last job as a software developer a couple of years ago, my boss looked at my work process and said “oh- so you are a UX designer”?

I never thought of calling myself that way. I was a double bloody scientist who does his own design. I cringed at anyone calling me an engineer, let alone a designer. But if the boss says so — and is willing to give me a raise for it — I figured I was going to fake it ‘till I make it.

Like every good nerd, I stocked up on literature, booked my tickets to a couple of conferences and started learning how to do my new job. Figures, it was mostly something I was already doing, in one way or another. I was doing user interviews as a software developer. I was sketching designs and creating mockups as a UI designer. I was doing extensive AB testing on mobile Games I was making…

Here and there, I was already doing most of the stuff UX designers did. I was creating simple games, and the insanely detailed multivariate testing of physics engine parameters was something I was doing to make the gameplay as satisfying and addictive as possible.

A couple of books later, I was starting to recognize that what I did actually was UX design, and I was doing a lousy job at it. I was performing pretty well at every individual step of the process, but I was awful at chaining it all together.

On my friend’s reccomendation (the only person calling herself a UX designer that I knew), I took a Coursera course on Human-computer interaction.

Among the other things I had learned, the detailed framework for doing the process of UX design opened my eyes toward the most beautiful fact:

The client does not have to “see what I need to know what I need”

The process consisted of structured walk through interviews, wireframes, prototypes and mock-ups allowed me to get structured input and quickly make changes on rough drafts of the interface rather than on fully-flashed mockups. It saved a lot of my time. It felt like my designs were annealing — slowly reaching finer granulation without the need to scrap huge chunks of fully-finished work after figuring out that what the client said they needed wasn’t what they really needed.

A wireframe flow for an interactive web banner after a days-long discussion with a client on what they really want and need from an ad.

It felt like a superpower. Rapid prototyping techniques and heuristic evaluation allowed me to more objectively test my “gut feeling” when it came to design, and the multivariate testing and analysis of variance gave me not only a tool to measure the design decision more objectively and with much more certainty — they gave me a perfect excuse to use advanced math while designing.

Rarely have I felt more like a scientist than after I started being a designer.

The capstone project had me design a mobile application. I had wanted to get as far away from the comfort zone as possible, so I chose to participate in the “Remix project” where I built on ideas and research that were not my own, but my peers’ instead. That gave me a vision on how it is to build up on somebody else’s work in UX design.

Even though the process was often frustrating, due to the technical limitations of the system, nurturing a project from a simple comic-strip storyboard to a full-blown mobile app was an extremely satisfying experience. Dreams to ideas to reality — witnessing ideas become lines on the paper prototype, lines becoming mock-up blocks and those blocks becoming interactive elements under my fingers was something magical.

Dreams to ideas to reality

I got a feel on how to fake technologies just to measure if their development is something that would benefit the user. I have learned on how to be my own strongest critic, and I have learned that no amount of planning can prepare me for some of the reactions of real people, once it gets to the user testing.

There was a system failure on October 12th resulting in wrong measurement. R studio to the rescue.

I’m not sure if people will call me an UX designer in 5 years, but learning how to become one has certainly connected all of my skills into a single logical whole — and given that whole a pretty, human-facing side. If you are a software developer, you should take a UX class or two — even if you never intend to use that knowledge.