Becoming a Designer
It’s been a little over 7 years since I’ve been growing into my skin as a UX professional. Over this period I’ve met people who, like me, didn’t have a formal education in design and want to seriously explore this career route. Therefore, I dedicate my first Medium post to all the designer hopefuls who are wrestling with this important decision.
My Backstory
Growing up I had a deep appreciation for both math and art. I didn’t know how to put a pencil down; you’d always catch me doodling or sketching during class. I was also equally enthralled with math, as my father would make a game out of challenging me with his lovingly crafted algebra puzzles. Eventually, when the college years hit, I majored and graduated with a degree in Computer Science with two software engineering internships under my belt. Though I had assumed as a kid that I would be an engineer and genuinely loved learning about it (and still do!), I realized at the tail end of my last internship my suppressed intrigue for user experience design.
I was very fortunate to have worked for a manager who had such an empathy for design and who intuited my need for finding myself. He had pointed me to another advisor who asked me the very question that was the catalyst for my professional identity crisis:
“What is the problem that you’ve been itching to solve?”
If you are wondering about a switch to the experience design field, I have a series of gut checks for you to consider. Do note that this is my personal journey that I’m sharing with you, and meaningful career paths are never (and shouldn’t be) formulaic. However, I hope that these following tips can serve as initial guide posts for your decision process.
- What is your most effective expression of problem solving or communicating?
- What are the kinds of ideas and pain points that you find yourself talking or fantasizing about often?
- How do you want to shape people’s world view around you? What’s convicting you?
1. What is your most effective expression of problem solving or communicating?
When you’re a designer, you’re a problem solver. You’re not a beautician, you’re not just expressing a cool idea with fancy graphics; you are a problem solver. You carry your weight of considering a deep pain point a bit differently than engineers or other product stakeholders (e.g. you bare the responsibility of providing the visual direction), but nonetheless, you are a problem solver at the core. You want to streamline a cumbersome workflow. You want to inspire a user’s daily smile. You want to invent an experience that people crave and couldn’t live without. You want to solve deeply human problems, and you want to do this through a primarily visual vocabulary.
If you find yourself enamored with the idea of crafting product scenarios and communicating visually through sketches, mocks, and prototypes, then perhaps design is a viable option. If you’re like me who was hesitant of leaving the coding world behind, don’t make this a blocker. In fact, maintaining your roots in programming and using it to augment your design process gives you a different dimension. Personally, I still make it a point to attend engineering conferences, code all of my prototypes, and assist with the fine details in the final engineering build. However, you will have to make a concentrated effort the first few years in picking up the basics in graphic design, cognitive science, and related design sub-disciplines in order to be competent as a design contributor.
2. What are the kinds of ideas and pain points that you find yourself talking or fantasizing about often?
I recall the first emotions I experienced when using my first iPod. This was the first time I had looked at a piece of technology not as an encapsulation of circuits, but a beautiful form that I could play with and find equally efficient. To me, the iPod was a crucial product in our industry that began the thinking for following generations of media experiences and hardware design. It was a pre-cursor to the first iPhone, which to me sparked the narrative for today’s smart device market and the explosion of interaction paradigms around us. (Yes, I’m an Apple fan!)
Examine your thoughts about how and why you use products and what they’re doing to mediate your emotions and decisions. The beauty of being in the design field is that you have the opportunity to work on things that are ubiquitous. So if you find yourself fantasizing about how you’d design “everyday things,” perhaps that’s another indicator that you have a designer’s heart.
3. How do you want to shape people’s world view around you? What’s convicting you?
As I stated in my second point, you’re going to need to be considerate of how your user feels and makes decisions every day. That could be seen as a pretty daunting responsibility or a humbling privilege. The news feed that you read every few minutes, the videos that you stream on your tablet, this very Medium post that you’re reading: these are all experiences that are designed. They impact the way you seek and digest information, communicate with your dear family and friends, and navigate a crazy world. When you are designing for people, you truly are working on problems that re-frame the human condition.
Concluding Thoughts
The three questions I’m prompting are truly starting points I’m suggesting when pondering the switch to a product design role. As with any informed decision, you should seek varied opinions from very different design thinkers. The key truth I learned over the years is that there really isn’t one specific way to learn and execute design. Whether you studied human factors or graphic design, UX is truly a multidisciplinary field and you will also need to adapt to the types of product problems, teams, and companies who care about design.
On a final note, I’m completely blessed by my decision to become a designer and proud of my particular path of becoming one. My goal with my Medium blog is to share more about my design journey and the types of interaction and technology problems I learn about and wrestle with daily. I also may dive into geeky rants about my various side hobbies which refine my perspective as a professional. Happy reading!
