Advance Your Career in a Seriously Under-Appreciated Field: Design
What is design and why should we care? To be completely transparent that was something I asked myself as I prepared myself to head into the User Experience (UX), User Interface (UI) design course at ISDI Digital University.
Designers in my mind up until that point were sudo-stereotypically visualized as beret wearing, black turtleneck sporting, red wine sipping folks, who perused around the MOMA and actually were able to hold intelligible conversation about what all the art pieces actually meant.
But as I quickly realized, that stereotype couldn’t be further from the truth (although I’m sure there are some designers who love the MOMA!). Instead I came to understand that by-products of good design are things we take for granted every single day. But, almost every stressful, vexatious, and annoying aspect of daily life can be traced directly back to poor design.
I’ll give a simple example. About a year ago I attended a Sound Healing Meditation Symphony in San Francisco and going through the check-in process was honestly soul-sucking. There were mobs of people crowding the single entrance instead of orderly lines, confusion and annoyance of whom to check in with, and a severe delay in event start. All unfortunately common by-products of a poorly designed check-in process by the organizers.
On the flip side, I attended another symphony, hosted by the same people recently and needless to say they learned from their poor design faults. They had succinct communication to arrive early, markers guiding people where to line up outside, and people scanning tickets throughout the line, which allowed the event to actually start on time. This functionally designed check-in process created a less frictional user experience, in the end producing the highest ROI for any business: happy customers.
So why does all this matter? It matters because events like these, and all other businesses, understand the power of word of mouth marketing and how positively or negatively WOM can affect their bottom line. However, the influence of this powerful source can often be controlled through a user’s experience of a product or service, and that’s where a designer’s job comes in.
Additionally, it matters because after Salesforce and Amazon emerged and proudly (and mostly truly) abide by their golden promise to always put the customer first, there has been a mass paradigm shift in the business world to customer-centricity and a capturing a customer’s lifetime value. And in order to truly put customers’ needs first, again, that’s where designers come in.
Designers do the “on the ground” research to really get to know the customer, to understand their true wants and needs, and then reverse engineer products and services based on what those wants are. Basically, any company trying to drive customer loyalty should weigh good design skills in gold.
There is a plethora of information confirming the stability and lucrativeness of design jobs, like the article linked here states: “There are currently over 150,000 open UX design jobs” and the “UX Design is #1 out of 7 in-demand careers for design and planning, with job growth up to 30%”. With such a supply-demand gap the average national salary for a UX designer was already $90,000 in 2015 and continues to increase year-over-year.
To emphasize the stability of UX job growth, even with the increasing trickle-down effect of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, the overall consensus is all jobs relating to creativity, like designers, will likely never be eliminated by AI. Although there are differing opinions on this and some argue AI will have the capability to “be creative” one day, jobs requiring creativity like designers will likely only be enhanced and not eliminated by AI.
The pervasiveness, gravitas, and importance of customer-centric design could not be summed up better than our UX/UI Design course leader at ISDI Digital University Greg Petroff, the Managing Director of Google Cloud, stating:
“All this means there is a new way to build stuff!! This is why design matters when you can dramatically increase the speed of information that creates an obvious disparity between the haves and have-nots — so what is the differentiating factor? Design.”
So go out there and do some exploration into the entirely pragmatic and incredible world of design, you may be surprised at just how fascinating and omnipresent design truly is.
