Hello Product Design 👋
Why I made the switch from Graphic Design to Product Design
When I first graduated with my Bachelor of Design, my dream was to work for a magazine or in prints for books. But I got into designing Neon and Wayfinding signage. In these first 2 years, I learnt about user experience in designing for the real world. As I changed jobs, I started doing print marketing and ad campaigns, so user experience didn’t come across my mind for several years.
In 2015, I was working in a design studio at Woolloomooloo (for those who don’t know, that is a real suburb name) in the beautiful harbour city of Sydney, Australia. I found my interest in designing UI for websites, so I became the lead digital designer in the team.
We got many requests from clients to design landing pages for campaigns with a simple style guide and navigation. So when Sydney Market asked us to redesign their website, I was thrilled. This project became a turning point for me and it made me realise good design is not purely about UI.
When we were given briefs from clients to redesign websites, they were always the same — please make this ‘beautiful’ or ‘modern’. But how can I redesign this website if I don’t know what is wrong with the existing design? UI was definitely not the answer.
I knew from looking at the page views that the majority of users were coming to the website for markets’ trading times and festive events info. So I set up a few scenarios and tried navigating through the site. The experience was bad. I struggled to find the right links on the homepage and ended up jumping around different pages.
I decided to talk to the client about my findings and they immediately agreed it was one of their biggest pain points. Yay, jackpot! After a few discussions, I proposed to redesign their site map and content layout, as well as UI. They ended up giving us a bigger budget to complete the work.
A few months later, I completed the Industry UX course at Tractor Design School and learnt about Design Thinking. This was a Eureka moment for me. Digital products are like wayfinding signage. Good designs naturally solve problems for its end users. It gives meaning to all the work I do, not just making things ‘beautiful’.
And that’s when I knew, that I’d found my calling as a product designer.
