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Nobody told me UX would be like this
In late April I was asked to participate in a question and answer session for Brooksource, a national staffing agency whom I have worked with extensively in the past. The session was one of many they have orchestrated and designed as a means to educate and help new designers in their career path. I always enjoy these types of sessions and feel an obligation to help those designers who will, someday, replace me. The following is what I drafted for my session, entitled, “Nobody Told Me UX Was Going to be Like This.”
A few years ago, I wrote an article titled, “Do You Really Want to be a UX Designer?”. It wasn’t an article to talk people out of becoming designers. That wasn’t my intention and that isn’t my intention here either. The central tenet of that article was that certain truths are self-evident within the design profession. Those truths, however, do not become self-evident until one has developed a certain level of experience in the field and they’ve taken the time to reflect on that experience. This article is an attempt to share those reflections with you.
The majority of these reflections have been sourced from more than 4 years of my own writing on the topic of design. I have taken those thoughts and compiled them here. They are lessons I have learned throughout my career.
But let’s return to this question of whether you really want to be a UX designer. For most of you, it is probably too late to sincerely ask this question. You are either already starting your career or, perhaps, halfway through school. It is more of a rhetorical question designed to generate thought. It’s also a question designed to derail the idealistic notions we have when pursuing any new endeavor. Life lived (and careers in progress) rarely mirror our imagined states.
Your path through life and career will obviously be different from my own. But what follows are the challenges I have experienced as a designer. My notion of what a career in design would be was far different from what it has been. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Nobody told me UX was going to be like this. I don’t remember when or where I was when that thought entered my head. But I carried it with me for a number of years, repeating it under my breath as I worked through trying projects in difficult…
