The Interns Guide to The Industry: Episode 1

“Being the new guy or what is UX?”

Tomorrow I start my second week as a UI/UX Intern at a peer-to-peer boatsharing start-up. When I came in on Monday I got a tiny little dump with links to look through with some material design, various thinkwithgoogle articles and similar. Most of which I had already read through, but I went through them again for good measure.

I get tasked with “doing UX for search” and I start looking around at different existing services, test out their current functions for and around search, look at the filtering options and pretty much everything included. 
I go on to ask if they want me to deliver wireframes and receive the reply “Yeah, sure. But we don’t really use wireframes, we just go design it right away most of the time.”. Hmm.

I am so used to doing wireframes that I don’t really know what I would do instead, so I start working on some really low fidelity wireframes and after about 40 minutes of different sketches I find myself sitting and staring at a paper. And I think: “UX, it stands for user EXPERIENCE, how is this in any way designing an experience? This is just me trying to remove clutter and what — to me — seems like obsolete solutions to the pressed issues with the service in it’s current state.

So I decide to drop what I am doing to kind of try and get a more thorough understanding of what being a UX Designer entails, and after about a full workday of reading different articles on the topic I had lost all faith in the title of my future profession. But on the other had I had understood the importance of it, the importance of good UX. But I had also understood that you can’t really design an experience. It is something very subjective. There are many factors that determine how the service will be perceived, like, what is someone rents a boat and halfway through their trip the gates to heaven open up and the most nightmarish monsoon-like rain of the century happen.

They would always relate that feeling with the service, since, if not for the service, they wouldn’t have been on a boat in the first place. They would have a bad user experience. 
And there is nothing that I, as a user experience designer could do about it?

Perhaps not.

See, this weekend I attended my first ever Pride parade. 
The Amsterdam Pride.
And with all of this user experience jargon fresh in my head I couldn’t stop to think about the user experience of the apparent Pride. Somebody clearly had designed where the boats would go in the canal, in what order they were coming in, decorations, confetti, everything. 
But I don’t think the titles to any of the people who planned this event would sound similar to that of a user experience designer.

And now I am lying in my bed, fighting my eyelids to stay open, just a little longer. Nine hours and eighteen minutes from my second week as a UI/UX Design intern at a peer-to-peer boat sharing start-up.

And I have never been more wise, well-informed and educated on a subject that I still know nothing about.

And I couldn’t be more excited.