Transition from Designer to UX
I’d been a ‘designer’ for 5 years. I was always much more interested in websites, apps, emails — anything digital. After reading a few articles on UX, I thought I put it into practise about a year ago. I thought UX was digital design, but with the added mindfulness of how the user interacts with the product. A year and a tech team later, turns out that wasn’t even the half of it.
VITA are in the process of building an exciting tech team. Being a digital designer interested in UX, I moved into a recognised UX role at the start of the year. Actual design (UI) is now around 30% of my role. The other 70% is research, solving problems, verifying assumptions, sketching, user testing — all to ensure we create a product that users will benefit from, and not just ticking a box for the business. Basically, UX is all about really understanding our users and creating products for the right way, for the right reasons.
I’ve learnt an awful lot over the last 6 months but two main things stand out for me.
Team work makes the dream work. I’ll never work on another project again without a collaborative design process. It’s so important to have user, team and even stakeholder feedback — another creative eye but then a complete outsiders input too. You bounce ideas around, explore different angles, assume problems for the right reasons, then to solve these to the best of the team’s abilities. In the right team, no idea is a bad idea and you can only build on them.
Create an MVP. As a fast growing, innovative business, we have so many great ideas, but we want everything, yesterday. From past experiences, this only means a project isn’t delivered at its best, and therefore revisiting them sooner and more frequently. We now break down our ideas and deliver an MVP. We then gain feedback, learn how users interact with our products, all in order to build on the MVP in the right way.
In my new role, the hardest thing to adjust to was having time to do things properly. Which sounds daft! I was used to working under a lot of pressure, which really motivated me. However, since having the time to perform UX research and exercises, I now realise a lot of previous projects were not completed at their best.
Wireframing for example. I didn’t see the need to wireframe — I just saw it as a waste of time when I already had an idea in my head. I now wireframe every project from initial ideas (Crazy 8s) through to full working, low fidelity prototypes. This has enabled the team to really push ideas to ensure they are right, and help us test ideas quickly.
The future is bright for UX. It’s interesting, fun and rewarding. Especially working in-house where you have complete understanding and respect for the brand, project and stakeholders you are working with.
