How a doctor-wannabe became a UI/UX Designer
My journey to becoming a UX Designer
I am Ruben Cespedes, a Dominican Product Designer residing in the United States with more than 15 years of experience creating attractive, intuitive, and simple user experiences who wanted to be a doctor.
This is my story of how I became a Product Designer and not a Doctor.
It all started from a very young age, I always liked the anatomy and physiology of the human body. At the same time, I was a very artistic boy who liked to paint and draw. Since I was little, I always used to say that I was going to be a great doctor. During junior and high school, I always stood firm with the decision to become a doctor.
At the age of 17 and recently graduated from high school, my parents decided to move us from the Dominican Republic to the United States. As you should know in the Caribbean, only Spanish is spoken and in the United States the first language is clearly English.
It was actually a very frustrating thing to come to a country where you can’t speak the language, I had a hard time trying to learn the basics in the shortest time possible because I had to go to college.
After several months in the United States I started to find out everything about how to become a doctor in this country, oh God! The truth is that I was stunned with all the requirements that you had to meet to enter the program. Remember that I was in the middle of learning English.
At that time, my dreams of becoming a doctor fell apart, since I could not speak or understand English and medical language and its terms would be another barrier for me.
How I started
With guidance from my cousin, I decided to take an admission exam at a college of technology, and you know what? I passed the exam and they offered me remedial classes to improve my English while doing a career. This really moved me a lot and I decided to take the major of Digital Media Arts since I was very creative, I liked art and based on the result of the career test I took.
This is how my career as a graphic designer began, I was working in New York City with well-known design agencies and I fell completely in love with this field.
As designers, we need to evolve, and grow professionally and personally. One of the big problems that led me to venture into UX design was when I saw the gap between developers and designers. This was a huge challenge, since back then designers usually created landing pages and mobile designs without considering if it was feasible and without taking into account the user experience.
Due to this problem, I started learning basic HTML/CSS and Javascript to better understand the development world. By empathizing with developers, I would definitely make better design decisions when it came to digital experiences.
With several years of design experience and no more than 6 months of learning basic HTML/CSS, I got my first job as a Web/UX Designer. I was so excited to embark on this new role because I knew this would be my future. This opened so many doors for me to learn more about the user experience, web development, and design trends of that time.
Something I wish I knew at the beginning of my career was the importance of working with developers. This would help me better understand their world, so that I could design those digital experiences with an improved approach.
I think that future UX designers have so many resources to learn all these things, and at the same time evolve according to technology and design trends.
Recommendations
If you want to be a great UX designer, I recommend these things:
1- Learn to code basic HTML/CSS
2- Truly understand the nature of the problem
3- Always keep learning about the user experience
4- Be humble (no egos)
5- Exercise listening
6- Read
7- Practice, practice, and practice
8- Teach all you have learned to others
Conclusion
This was my story of how a Doctor-wannabe became a Product Designer. If I had the opportunity, I would not change anything. This was the path that I chose and the circumstances led me to be what I am today. I am proud of myself and that is what it is worth.
If you want to see my work as a Senior Product Designer, please feel free to check my website and also my Instagram account where I teach young designers about visual design, UX, and a little bit of coding.
I recently released my first ebook for UX Design, feel free to check it out:
https://mailchi.mp/5831324ec421/wtfisuxdesign
Website
Dribbble
Instagram
LinkedIn
Thank you,
Ruben Cespedes
