Moving forward as a designer — WHAT NEXT?
Irrespective of job title, as designers our job is to intentionally solve problems. At its core, it is our major function, we each play a role in solving various problems.
In my role as an Experience Designer, in over one year, I’ve learned a lot, although one year feels like literally yesterday. At this point, I look back to look forward, knowing what I want to do for the next 5yrs and beyond.
Planning and mapping out a career for the long term is not something I’m an expert in, it’s both scary and interesting because you never know what’s coming and at the same time you are excited by the uncertainty.
I’m excited because now is the best time to be a designer and design for all the endless possibilities of the future.
More than anything, this one thing I know — we are in the experience age and experiences are going to define every touch point of future technologies. Today users are different from those of yesterday. Today, users have access to huge amounts of information at their fingertips that helps them make more informed decisions.
As Chirryl-Lee Ryan says “Experience is unavoidable, whether you intentionally design for it or not”
I see it every day, I read about it, it plays out in my interactions, in my going out and coming in. The more I see it, the more I know that experiences, will become more and more important and companies and businesses who can provide a delightful experience will trump those who do not.
At this point in my career, I’ve chosen to move from User Experience Design to Product Design. The answer to what it means to be a Product Designer is constantly evolving and I’m not going to start a debate. For me, I’m more interested in the ‘product’ part of ‘product design’ period!
Focusing on ‘product’ means dealing more with the business touch points involved in building a product — thinking of your users as customers. Put simply, I want to be more involved in the business side of things where I move from designing from a users point of view to designing from a customers point of view. You can think of product vision and strategy, post-launch activities; designing for scale, growth, retention, etc. Designing for the Customer.
Why the move?
From a very little age, I’ve always been interested in business, selling stuff and making money. From working at my Dad’s factory on the weekends to applying for a holiday job at 10 to exchanging my services for money to my fellow classmates at high school to doing flip sales for gadgets on OLX, and successfully running a pop-up photo booth at college. I spend my leisure time reading books and consuming business contents on the web — trying to understand how successful businesses and companies are built. And then design happened; till date, it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.
More importantly, design at a newly formed startup taught me a lot, learnings I can’t place a price on. It taught me art + science and made me understand the place of intentionality in building products. It brought me closer to what it really is to means to build stuff and get people to pay you for it.
The only way to understand the business side of things is to be ‘closest to the sun’, either by building and making products or working where it’s being built. It’s from these two standpoints I’d be sharing my learnings and documenting my journey in my career path either through the written word (my Medium blog), audio (podcast) or video (vlogging).
You’re welcome to join me on this new adventure.
Hola 🙋♂️and Shalom ✌!
