Why Design, Why Now
Why I left behind a job in IT to create a new life as a Designer.
My background
Computers have always been a part of my life. As far as I can remember, I’ve always used them as a tool to help me gain knowledge, explore new worlds, and connect with people.
I was crazy about combining my creative side with modern technology. From undertaking my own personal projects and coding webpages to designing my own graphics. Ingenuous, self-taught, and unafraid to experiment, anything was possible to me, earlier on my life.
It was at college where I discovered programming, first with Pascal and then Visual Basic. Everyday problems became small, programming challenges that I’d spend my evenings working on. But to begin my professional life in the IT field, I had to put the creative endeavours aside. I started working as a desktop support technician and then continued into network and system administration.
Life as a system administrator
As a system administrator, I had access to everything. Everyone needed me, I rarely needed anyone. I learned to be surrounded by and communicate with machines. Servers, switches, routers, network printers and storage devices. And then hundreds of thousands of folders, subfolders, files, rows in database tables, IP addresses and MAC addresses in rule lists.
Slowly, as time progressed, I started understanding people’s habits as well.
I have many stories and, in all of them, one fascination: how different our perspectives were. My perspective, as the person responsible for setting up the system, by the book, and following best practices. And then the user’s perspective, with their experience when dealing with the system, a mix of innocence, survival and subterfuge.
That’s how I remember the CEO who exported every email to a separate file outside Outlook. He didn’t want to hear from me about automatic rules, because he had taught himself and was willing to craft his own email “database”. The accountants who printed every document and email for their paper archives. The lady who kept saving her travel photos on the company server. Or the last guy leaving, who would flip the switch on the electrical panel and shut down the entire office’s power supply in an instant. It took us a while to figure why the nightly backups were never reaching completion.
It wasn’t always easy to discover the reasoning behind these actions. My understanding came from questioning, observing, and sometimes testing. Not necessarily from intervening. This thorough and deep understanding was part of my problem solving process. And it was a contributing factor to my success on the job.
Tough realisations
I watched Steve Ballmer steering Microsoft down the road of complex product design. And over the years I started losing faith in the big tech companies I once looked up to. Their products were the ones I used, assembled, configured and offered to users everyday. But no matter what I did, they would always release them with usability issues, show-stopping bugs, and major security flaws. These events made people’s lives a living hell and increased my workload and stress levels.
Smaller software companies are at fault as well. I’ve had my share of terrible accounting, invoicing and payroll software. Corporate software often sucks. End users and tech support both know and feel this pain.
Later, I realised that so many mistakes made by users were not their fault at all. It was bad product design. When failing, these products were not “helping users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors” (which btw, is one of the 10 heuristics of usability).
If you’ve worked on a corporate environment with computers running Windows, you’ve seen the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death):
My career in IT was worth it, while I was fixing “computer problems” and helping people. There was no awards but there was true love and passion. What I started missing was the curiosity.
The things I first saw as great challenges started to feel like very repetitive tasks instead. And the satisfaction in my job dwindled in that routine. It got to the point where I had to say: This is enough! No more! Enough business-thinking. Enough engineer-thinking. No more PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard) jokes. I had to change my job otherwise I’d resent going to work every day.
I realised that I needed to equip myself for a job in which I would be able to help users by designing better products, rather than just being the repairman.
My initial approach to become more human-centered
I decided to reconnect with my creative side. I went back to college and enrolled on a Multimedia course in Lisbon. It helped me improve my abilities with graphic design and do a refresh on coding.
It was during the Multimedia course that something interesting — and a little scary, at the time — started to happen. Creating new concepts for group projects was a very convoluted process. Hours and hours of brainstorming resulted in nothing. The course was giving us knowledge on tools and technology but something was missing.
Soon after, I discovered a way of solving problems with Design Thinking — a mindset and a framework that outlined a process of launching new and innovative ideas. It was a new way to look at problems. The human centered and interdisciplinary approach made sense to me. It was exactly what I found was missing in my past experiences. And as someone who values structure, I was inspired by world-class designers using a framework, a systematic process, to solve important problems.
It was around this time, while working as a freelance generalist web project manager/designer/jack-of-all-trades, that a fellow developer who I was collaborating with told me about “UX”.
As I read about it, I learned that user experience was the accumulated result of interactions between user and product in a given context. A clear distinction started emerging between user experience and usability, which was a more familiar term to me, at the time. UX can be any type of experience, be it happiness, or pleasure, or even frustration and as such, very subjective. Usability is a quality attribute that refers to how easy to learn and efficient to use a product is.
Exploring and connecting with the community
I went to an event called Microsoft WebCamp in late 2015. Listening to discussions about UX challenges and solutions, UI patterns and simplified software development — all in the space of one afternoon — was like peeking into a brighter future where products were designed the right way.
I started attending meetups where designers were either presenting UX/UI work or giving talks about the design practice on their companies. I saw their projects, asked questions and met new people.
I continued exploring UX design further when I bought my entrance to a two-day workshop in Lisbon. I noticed most of the attendees were working as graphic designers and developers at a renowned digital agency. They too wanted to learn more about the UX Design process.
I found that the community has plenty of nice people, willing to share experiences and knowledge. I even made some new friends.
Getting serious about human-centered design
Since January of this year, I’ve been studying Design at The New Digital School. I’ve learned from professionals like Christopher Murphy, Vitaly Friedman, Paulo Fonseca, Javier Cuello and Stephanie Troeth. They took us on a ride through their creative process. And showed us the role of researchers, product and service designers and how valuable design work is.
I’m spending my days in a diverse class with smart, life-loving people from all over the world. I’m writing and speaking in English on a daily basis. And I’m learning, rediscovering and even reinventing myself.
It’s been a constant trial, collaborating with stakeholders as well as fellow designers and developers. And this experience is giving me so much more than just hard, technical skills.
My educational journey doesn’t end there, either. I participated in many projects, some of them with cool startups like Velocidi, Tonic App and Last2Ticket. I’ve seen how important it is to align company goals with the needs of the users when coming up with design solutions. And I realise how companies can innovate through design and how impactful that can be for them to stay relevant and ahead of the market.
Now I understand having a user-centered design process means focusing on the right things. And the outcome is not eye-popping visuals, but optimised experiences. A good user experience is one that meets a user’s needs in the specific context where the user is using the product.
And UX Designers have to go beyond that consumption moment, they can and they should design the entire process of acquiring, owning, and even troubleshooting the product. And advocating for that vision (inside and outside of organizations) will be part of my job as a designer.
Now, given everything I’ve done, all the elements of psychology, research, ideation, prototyping, usability testing, business analysis and project management, I am aware of the power of Design.
I am aware of how much more I have to learn and grow as a designer. To help me in that journey, I got back my curiosity.
And I can’t stop thinking, as a designer, afterall, I’m the one who needs users. And I’m learning to be surrounded by them and finding ways to understand their needs and goals.
The uncomfortable zone
The premise of my journey to Porto was that design is, of course, important. And part of that premise was that I would be able to learn and practice on the creation of good experiences. The other part was uncertainty, risk, adventure, a way of challenging myself.
There are tough, painful moments where I question if I’m on the right path, and there are moments where I don’t look back because the new views are way better than before.
I have decided to own a new direction. And this brings considerable excitement and stress. It’s my mission to help others around me understand this is a better way to go.
All of this is a huge task. And an even bigger responsibility.
But right now, this is what drives me.
Before you go
What’s your career like? How did you end up doing what you do? What makes it thrilling for you to get up in the morning? Share your story in the comments and don’t forget to hit that 👏 button!
