Design diaries: Breaking into UX design
Let’s start from the beginning. The very beginning.
Spoiler alert: I’m no Seth Godin 😂. Also, this is a long one, with underlying hints of personal rants and unpopular opinions — mostly mine. With this in mind, please proceed with caution. 😬
Journal entry: January, I-can’t-remember-the-day, 2021.
Unlike most people who switched careers to UX design or the usual “How I got into design” stories, I was not really in search of a more fulfilling career or “my passion" when I decided to enrol in a UI/UX Design Bootcamp.
I mean, who am I to say that UX or Product design is a more “fulfilling” career field than Art-curation or civil engineering or HRM (or is it just HR?) or Project/product management? Everyone’s built & designed differently. Honestly, if I had my way, and I had no iota of ambition, and if life wasn’t so complicated and filled with a ton of expectations (inclusive of my own expectations, which in true essence stems from the expectations of my family, society, and some random people I really don’t care about and they don’t care about me either, but in some messed up way they’ve managed to shape our premonition of what a “successful life” should look like), I would definitely have gone into DANJLMLM; Doing Nothing, Just Living My Life Management.
So, my journey into UX design was not birthed from a search for a “greener pasture” or an exciting career path. It initially sprung up from intense curiosity, then a bit of cynicism towards the romanticisation of the tech industry, and finally… unemployment.
Background
I heard about UX design or UI/UX design or UX/UI design or Product design or Digital design or Interaction design (seriously though, can we just stick to one title?), during my service year but never paid much attention to it.
“UX? What’s that? University of Xerjoff? Nah, not interested. ”
I was 'safe' in my own world of Project management/Human resource management/Business development/ Strategic Business management/Content Strategy … too much? Well, that’s what you get when an average Nigerian youth graduates from an average Nigerian university with an average degree and with no clue what they want exactly, asides just getting a job. They try out everything, become poorly baked Jacks of all trades, gather as many certifications (both valid and invalid), rack them up on their CVs, so they have enough papers to display at job interviews. I speak for myself though, and 66.7% of Nigerian graduates. It’s fine if you’re not a part of this statistic. Good for you.
But I digress.
Fast forward to a few months later, I’m done with NYSC and I’m ready to take over the planet by storm. But to effectively achieve world domination, I had to take out time to rest (from one whole year of NYSC stress), self-introspect and come up with a career strategy. So I got back to Lagos, took a few weeks to rest, and then began my plan to figure out “What’s next woman?”.
During my free time, I watched a lot of TED talks, read all of my Dad’s hard-cover business books, bookmarked a lot of articles on psychology and the human mind. I’ve always had a soft spot for research, psychology, business and storytelling. It still baffles me why I didn’t get a bachelor’s degree in psychology instead. What was I thinking???
I was carrying out a personal research on the measurability of empathy in humans when I stumbled on a particular article on Medium; it was titled “The Art of empathy and Listening”. Empathy and effective listening are two things I’m very particular about, not just in my professional life but also in my personal life. In fact, I’m a self-proclaimed Empath — which is also a fancy word used to describe an overly emotionally sensitive sponge, like myself.
Again, I digress.
The author kept using the word ‘Design’ to refer to his chosen career field, and I kept wondering “what type of design is he referring to exactly? Architectural design? Graphics design? Interior design? ... Fashion design?”
Curiosity
So after a bit of professional stalking (*ahem* emphasis on professional please), I finally figured what type of ‘Design’ the author was actually referring to; User Experience Design, otherwise known as UX design. The University of Xerjoff found me again. And the first question I had was, “Why UX? Why not UE? It’s just simple logic to abbreviate it as UE for Heaven’s sake. Who exactly came up with this stuff?”
My life-changing quest to find out why it was termed UX and not UE (or even UEX, I love this one) led me into a black hole filled with articles and content from Medium, Career Foundry, IDF, Springboard, DesignerUp, and my forever beloved, Youtube. It’s insane how much “What is UX design/ Introduction into UX design/How to become a UI/UX or Product designer” content we have out there, it’s like a trend. It all seemed like some semi-shady marketing to me, dare I say. And the way the industry was glamorized, beautified and embellished with promises of earning cool money, doing what you love, working in a hip-culture, free lunch giving, games-room providing, 401k, FAANG company with fancy office spaces… was just too good to be true. Too good that I became somewhat cynical about the design industry.
“UX design is marketed as some sort of superpower.”
- Lena Simons
Cynicism
My cynicism became the driving force that pushed me to dig deeper and find out what exactly the hype was all about, what’s so special about it. And it turns out, there was nothing really special about it.
Apart from being the driving force slowly pushing “Web-design” into extinction and ultimately oblivion (remember Interior Decoration? Yeah. No one says that anymore. Blame Interior Design), UX design is not a relatively new field like “Multi-cloud Integration” or “VR engineering”.
Like every other career field, UX/Product design is not all la la Land, beds and roses.
But it is indeed a lucrative field and it had its perks;
First; Creativity — or I should say, the Romanticization of Creativity.
Side note: We all possess some level of creativity and there’s fulfilment when we’re able to express it; because of this, and with the extent to which UI/UX Design is continuously sold as this forever-happy, glam, 10-step easy to learn discipline, “Designer” becomes a box that anyone can step into and many people desire to step into — myself included.
Second, and everyone’s favourite; “You don’t need to know how to code”. It would be nice if you knew how to, at least have a basic understanding. I feel like I’m shooting myself in the foot for saying this though. 😂
Third; Thriving, culturally relevant (noisy sometimes) and supportive coterie, aka Design-twitter: How many online or offline communities for civil engineers do you know of? How many HR communities on Twitter have you heard of? Very few? None? Yeah. I thought so.
Fourth, “Anyone can design/Everyone is a designer”: Watch a few tutorial videos and voila! You’re a “Designer”.
Side note: “Everyone/Anyone can design” stems from the fact that there’s no universally perceived ramification or qualification or license of any level or kind, for practising Design. Not sure if this is a blessing or a curse for the design community.
“Both Design and design can now be embraced by everyone… but if everyone’s a designer, who’s a designer?” — Van Schneider
These perks were worth the hype, but what really got to me was that UX design was like a marriage of some of the things that sparked my interest on a normal day. Psychology, empathy, strategy, structuring, visual acumen, storytelling, writing, creating, research; were all fields I was enthusiastic about. So I commenced my personal study on UX design. I read and explored extensively.
There were a lot of things to take in; Design thinking, Design process, UI vs UX and the famous Ketchup bottle analogy, the infamous “Do UX designers need to know how to code?” debate, colour theory, User personas, User stories, User research, wireframes, the Figma vs Adobe XD vs Sketch battle, the gazillion tools mentioned in job descriptions, etcetera etcetera.
Intermission
Okay… so maybe I wasn’t necessarily in search of a more fulfilling or challenging career or whatnot, but the idea of shaping, creating, ideating digital products that could equip and impact people even in the minutest of ways, really resonated with me. I’ve always loved understanding how things, especially people, work; and being able to influence and leverage on that in a positive way is super cool.
“Design is how we explain and manipulate our environment”
— Mike Monteiro
After an excruciating period of sending a thousand cover letters and going for various interviews, I finally got a job at a financial consulting startup. It wasn’t the “dream job” but at least my mom would finally stop telling every single human being (in church, in her cell groups, in her community groups, in family gatherings, in parties, and every single time she paid a visit to the bank) that her beloved daughter needs a “good job”, and people would stop sending me links to weird job-vacancy sites and Whatsapp groups. Apart from other “out of my job-description” duties that sprung up day after day, my role at this startup was centred on product, content and strategy, which was actually satisfying for me.
Build-up
While working 9 to 5, I took up some free UX design courses (and a few paid ones), read a ridiculous amount of articles on Medium — still do, patiently waiting for my reward from the Medium team, subscribed to as many UX newsletters as possible, watched a good number of youtube tutorials, but all these were not yielding pragmatic or tangible results. I was taking in a lot of information and theoretical jargons but not really putting what my mind was soaking into work. I needed discipline, I needed a routine, and I needed accountability. A friend recommended I enrolled in a Bootcamp, but I felt balancing my 9 to 5 with Bootcamp classes might be difficult, so I held out on the idea of a Bootcamp for the meantime.
During this time, we were creating a new website for the financial firm I was working at. I was in charge of content creation, structuring of the website, and generally overseeing the website development, which required some UX principles and constantly communicating with the developer and designer. So I was glad I could implement and practicalize some of what I’ve been learning on my own — for free, but I’m not complaining. Or am I? 🤔
Then the pandemic struck.
Unemployment
Most start-ups and medium scale organizations were hit hard by the pandemic and resulting lockdown, including the company I worked for. There’s this popular saying;
The true value a company has for its employees is revealed when it hits a financial crisis.
Okay. I totally made that up, but I’m sure you get what I’m driving at. Employees, myself included, were asked to “work from home” for the time being. For the lucky ones, salaries were slashed by almost 50%, for the rest, no salaries and ultimately got laid off. I, on the other hand, couldn’t be bothered. Not because I wasn’t concerned about my job or the crisis my colleagues and I were facing, but from past experiences and majorly the kind of home I was brought up in, I consciously try not to stress myself or my mind over certain things, especially things that are beyond my control.
Till one splendid morning. I got a call. I was asked to hand over product documentations and key accounts I was solely in charge of, to my direct manager. I can’t really remember the reason they gave for this but I was slowly beginning to “smell the coffee”. So for a few weeks, I was doing absolutely nothing. No emails, no calls, no tasks to be done, I was an employed-Unemployed (not sure if that makes any sense). It was obvious what was coming next. So I thought to myself; why don’t I just resign? There’s a 79% chance that I’ll be laid off by the end of the month and besides, apart from saving my ego, “I resigned” sounds wayyy better than “I was laid off”.
“I resigned” sounds way better than “I was laid off” or “I was fired”. It has a ring of professional pride in it.
So, what did I do? I laid myself off. It was either that or I stayed in my employed-unemployed limbo state till the management remembers me. I don’t entirely blame them though; 2020 was a rough year for most startups and even large organizations, they had to “cut down expenses”. I just wish they had gone about it in a more humane and less robotic/capitalistic way.
After resigning I took a month to just chill and spend time with my family. It was important for me to stay sane with all the craziness happening at that time. Right after my one-month ‘hiatus’ I decided to give UX design a chance, there was no 9 to 5 taking my time, and for some strange reason, I was not ready to go back to the job hunting game just yet — I did some freelance work here and there but it wasn’t so demanding.
After asking tons of questions and shamelessly sliding into people’s DMs (Eniola, how can I ever repay you? 😅), took out some courage AND cash, and enrolled in a Product design Bootcamp facilitated by Stutern. Making this decision wasn’t so easy though. I had to battle — and I still battle — with conflicting thoughts, self-doubt, pessimism, fear that I might never be a good designer, or I might not fit in the design or tech industry… the anxiety was insane, and I procrastinated a lot before making that decision. But I’m glad I did.
The End… sort of.
A few months down the line and here we are; one more month and I’ll be done with the Product/UX design Bootcamp — still shamelessly hopping into people’s DMs though, sending some pretty long emails, disturbing their lives with questions 😂 — I don’t think that’s ending anytime soon.
Was I too brash for resigning? Maybe. Do I regret laying myself off from my job before my employers got the chance to lay me off first? Not really. But then… maybe if I had stayed back, I’d be a Chief Strategy Officer by now, my monthly salary would begin with a positive integer, and with LOTS of zeros behind it ...
Who am I kidding…😏
I’m not sure what the future holds or what UX design holds, if I’ll fit in the design community — I might probably reactivate my Twitter. Might. Probably. I’m not making any promises 😒 — and if I’d call myself a UX designer, UX/UI designer or UI/UX designer, Product designer or Interaction designer or Experience designer or just leave the title to prospective employers to decide. But what if I decide to go full-time freelance? Well, that changes everything.
Next step
Next step? Convincing my mom that I’m not crazy and UX design is a lucrative field, not just some hog-wash I made up. Wish me luck! ✌🏿
