Why I’ve decided to ditch my personal site and publish in Medium

I am in user experience design. I love how multi-disciplinary this field is. There are ethnographers and researchers, interaction designers and content writers, interface and visual designers, and even front-end designers that work with code. In this vast field, job titles rarely gives one a sense what a UX professional does. Anyone in our field knows that titles do not quite capture the professional maturity, relevant experience and functional skills a UX professional has to offer. This is why our field rightly puts a great emphasis on a portfolio.

On a side note, it is astounding to see a lack of understanding of the UX profession when I come across job postings that expects to hire a UX professional that can do customer research, interaction design, visual design and yes, code HTML / CSS prototypes — I believe the catch-all term for this insane set of expectations is Unicorns.

We owe it to our field and to the businesses that are looking to hire UX professionals a geninune sense of what we do, how we do it, and the range of artifacts that comes from a UX designer or UX Design Team. This means that we need to show what we do and how we do it, and the kind of impact it has made to the business and the customers.

Unfortuantely, I keep putting off writing about my experience as a design lead. My primary excuse (and yes, it is an excuse, because it is matter of prioritization) is that I already have a lot going on, and the thought of having to distill what I do down and write about it, and write it well so I really do justice to my craft feels like such as chore.

My second excuse (thought I surmise that this is more of a reason than excuse) is the technology itself. My online wordpress site is such as bear to deal with. There are just too many distractions. If dreading about writing was not bad enough, availablity of zillion themes and plugin glaore gets the best of me. I know this is not WordPress’ fault — the service is perfect for the needs of millions of bloggers and companies who love it.

Enough preamble. Enough excuses. Enough reasons. I decided today that I am going to give Medium a try, and simply ignore my online portfolio site. My plan is to share my experience and reflection as an experience design lead.

So far I have found Medium to be :

• Simple to setup.
• Simple to Use.
• Accessible — the tone and writing feels comfortable. I feel like my freinds wrote it, not university professors.
• Restrictive, the right way — I’m looking forward to not getting distracted by themes and palettes)
• Easy to Write — even on a mobile
• Easy to Read — particularly on a mobile
• Lots of content already here to inspire

So, I guess, as the saying goes — write like noone is reading…or, first draft is always crap.

I loved writing this first draft, and its crap. I love it!

Ranjan…