The reason why I love UI/UX
A story from an IT student who love to design
To start things off, 4 years ago I went to college and majoring in Information Technology.
To be honest, I only majoring in IT because I like using the computer for gaming purpose only.. lol! (I know I’m not the only one) and I know that I will do some coding here and there.
Moving blindly was a bad idea. You will stumble upon a lot of bumps on your way, and some may be big enough to break your ankle.
I finally know that for me coding was hard. I really struggled to find a way to understand the code and how to code.
Because of that, in order for me to get a good score, I tried multiple things:
- Learned from the internet ✔️
- Copy paste the code from the web ✔️
- Asking my friend to teach me ✔️
- Cheating on a test (and get caught of course) 👌🏻👌🏻
When you feel like there is no hope left, there will always be an open path for you to take. You just have to be patient and keep going.
That’s when my friend introduced me to design. He was using photoshop at that time, designing banner, brochure, etc. This stuff seems interesting to me because I loved to look at something beautiful and clean.
I started designing since then, I joined some event as a graphic designer.
It’s like finding your passion. The more you do it, the more you love it. That’s designing for me.
As an IT student, designing stuff seems a bit weird. I thought about transferring into design major, but it will be a waste of time for me because I’m already a third-year student.
At that time I thought, is there any field in design where I can use my knowledge in IT (even though it’s almost none) and my passion for design? And… voila! I found out about UI/UX design. It’s more to the UI side at that time.
I start designing apps for my university project, trying to code an interface in android and I finally met Medium!
I know that this is the path that I want to take… and 1 year later here I am, becoming a UI/UX designer in Taralite.
The past 8 months made me realize why I love it and here are the reasons:
It’s not always about a pretty interface
Don’t get me wrong. I love the pretty interface. I love to find inspiration on Dribbble and Behance.
But in reality, some of those interfaces is hard to be developed. It’s like creating a pile of brick, throw it to the developer and wish that they will catch all of the brick at the same time without some of the brick falling.
Surprisingly, my knowledge on IT helped me on this. I know what it feels to be a developer and the kind of interface that is time-consuming to develop.
My role is to create an interface that is easy to develop and beautiful at the same time, it is a challenge of course to balance those two things…but again, a challenge is what makes you grow even more.
It’s all about the user
Remember the terms of UI/UX. It’s user interface/user experience, they both had “user” word on it. With just that you know that you are designing for your user and you need to be the user. Raise your sense of empathy while designing the interface will help you a lot in this.
If you just create an interface based on your like or taste, it will become MI/MX (My Interface/My Experience) instead of UI/UX…haha…get it?…no?…okay, let us move on.
Getting feedback and improve
What I like from becoming a UI/UX designer is that you will receive a lot of feedback variations, they will tell that whether the product it’s good, bad, wanting a new feature that you never thought off before, or even they will tell how the product helped them a lot.
The feedback that you received will eventually help you improve yourself and the product that you designed.
Finding the business goal
A company always have a certain business goal. It will become a challenge as a UI/UX designer itself where you will need to match the user needs with your company needs (business goal).
Designing without considering the business goal is like when you entering a restaurant, open up the menu, decide to order but notice there is no single waiter inside. You get confuse on how to order the food, so you decide to leave the restaurant.
You need to think a way how to attract the new user, how to gain their trust, how to gain more revenue, how to keep the user retention as high as possible, how they can contact your company, how can they try the software that you sell, and the list of how keeps on going.
Keep an eye on the new things
There always will be new trends and new software for you to try out! It’s like a never-ending journey of learning.
You think you got all the tools in the world that you need, but when you scribbling around Medium and saw an article with a title “20 new tools for you to become a super UI/UX designer that everyone worship”, there’s no way you’re gonna click away from that!
In the end, you will click almost every link from that article and see the what product that will improve your workflow. You will tell that to your colleague, try it out, and if it doesn’t work out, well no problem, try another one. Well, you never know until you try it.
What? Why? and How?
What is this?
Why do we need to build this?
How are we going to build it?
As a UI/UX designer, I always asked this sort of things. What I learned from my past experience, when my IT lead told me to design a new product, I jumped straight designing it without knowing the requirement. In the end, what I designed was mostly based on my assumption and I struggle a lot in the process.
Now is different, I always ask what? why? and how? for every product that we are going to make, sometimes the basic idea is not enough.
When you keep asking these question, it will create a new question and a new question that will finally lead to an answer.
Finally, we reach the end of my story. There are still a lot of things that I don’t know about UI/UX, but I always challenge myself to keep learning and be a better designer every single day.
Also, this is my first article and I know it’s not perfect. There is still a lot of room for improvement, I hope you can help me with it.
I hope this article will be useful for you and especially for the one who wants to jump on the UI/UX train. Prepare yourself, it will become a wild yet wonderful ride, so good luck!
You can find me on Dribbble, Behance, Linkedin and my Instagram.
See ya later in my next article 🙌
