You don’t need design experience to be an experience designer
Experience as a human is enough to get you started.
You’re in a room full of new faces. The one person you actually know, and latched yourself onto, just got pulled away into another conversation. Crap. You take out your phone and see you have no notifications that need your attention. Double crap. You know it’s going to happen. Soon. Remember to explain it like you practiced.
Hi…Yes…Nice to meet you… You smile. She smiles. You think you’re in the clear, then it happens.
“So, what do you do?”
You mumble, because you know you’re going to repeat it anyway.
Ex-pe-ri-ence-De-sig-ner
“Aaahh, a designer! One of those creative types, eh? Nice.”
Not exa-
“Designer, like pictures and logos?” — No, more li-.
“Oh, you design websites.” — Here we go, then.
You leap into an explanation of what an experience designer does. You say words like “users”, “interfaces”, and “flows”. Their eyes are a bit blank but their heads are nodding. It must be going well. And then,
“Oh wow. How did you get into that? What did you study?”
Psychology.
From Psychology (student) to Design… how?
To be honest, I chose psychology at 16 because it was on the cover of the aptitude test and I thought it looked interesting. So, 5 seconds later when I got to the part of the form asking what I wanted to study, I had an answer.
Then I said it out loud to my parents. And they were chuffed. So I went with it. The more I said it out loud, the more excited I got. I started imagining my life as a psychologist. Oooh! Listening to people. Writing down notes. Helping them solve their problems.
Shortly after enrolling, I learned that I’ll need to study for a long, long, long time before I can be a psychologist.
As you may have deduced from the title of this story… life happened. And I ended up on a different path.
A breakdown of my job titles looks like this:
Waiter → Nanny → Receptionist → Software Lecturer → Admin → Personal Assistant(ish) → Product Manager → User Experience Designer.
But job titles don’t really explain what I learned along the way. Here’s a few highlights:
Understanding stakeholder requirements (or should it be steakholder in the hospitality industry) → Curiosity (kids ask the most random questions) → Talking to customers → Explaining stuff to people → Information architecture → Adapting to change → Failing, learning, iterating → Listening to people. Writing down notes. Helping them solve their problems.
What I see now is I was secretly learning some aspects of design by just being a human who hasn’t figured out her purpose quite yet.
“But, I’m not a designer. I can’t draw.”
Bullshit.
I was too shy to ask other designers how they ended up in design, so I didn’t know that drawing is not actually needed. (Looking back now, being shy was stupid and you should read this other thing I wrote about how not knowing everything is actually okay.)
It wasn’t until I met a designer with a psychology background, who built questionnaires for user interviews, that I thought “Oh,whaaaat? I can do that!” Months later, I took a short course in user experience design and realised that design is not all “making pretty things.” It’s about finding solutions. And I’ve been doing that all along, no matter what my job title was. So, I built up the courage, reached out to the company I wanted to work for, and I switched tracks.
If you remember only one thing from this story, let it be this: don’t wait until you “feel like a designer.” Your humanness is the only qualification you need.
If you’re also an experience designer, please leave a comment and tell me (and a few future experience designers) how you got to there. If you’re thinking about experience design as a career, tell me what made you interested.
This is the first in a series of stories for new (and experienced) experience designers. Watch this space. And ask questions. I like questions. (Did I overuse the word experience? Tell me in the comments.)
