3 Insights From My Budding UX Career

Alternatively titled — What I’ve Learned Since Leaving My Job in Advertising to Design Digital Products With People Who Also Love Designing Great Digital Products

I recently made the transition from designing at an advertising agency into an awesome opportunity at a stellar software studio (Livefront!). As a designer new to the UX industry, I’ve quickly garnered some insights that I hope will help other designers who are just getting started or for designers that are transitioning from another industry into their UX career.

I’ve been interested in UI/UX since my graphic design program in college, where I spent my time creating websites and concept mobile work for my portfolio. After college I was hired at an advertising agency where I worked on a multitude of different types of design projects. Still, I gravitated towards the work that allowed me to flex my digital experience muscles — branded websites for PR and advertising campaigns, as well as a little bit of mobile design. It was a great experience, but it didn’t totally scratch my itch for digital. In parallel, I also enrolled in a UX design course through General Assembly which allowed me to apply the basics of UX research and design implementation. The GA course solidified my decision go all-in on digital experience design and begin my journey at Livefront as a Digital Product Design Intern.

For designers on a similar path as me, here are a few key learnings for you to consider as I’ve encountered them.

Apply Empathy to Your Process

Practicing empathy — it’s the classic UX trope, but it really is the real deal. Empathy, along with being an important human characteristic, serves an active, functional role in UX when applied correctly. One of the things to keep in mind when creating UI designs is that you aren’t always making subjective, artistic choices, but often objective decisions on behalf of other users and stakeholders. It’s easy to make assumptions about how something is used based on how you would use it, but ideally the design decisions will be informed by other inputs.

Some of the most important insights and crucial pivots I’ve gained were from quick, 20 minute phone calls with a user or stakeholder. This goes to show that sometimes a hearty conversation about the design can have more of an impact than any amount of theoretical musings. If you’re feeling stuck in the process, collaborate with others to work through any hangups!

UX Is More Than Design

A great UX designer can create beautiful, elegant, and functional designs, but that’s only half the battle — there are other facets of UX design that are equally important. A successful digital designer should also participate in effective communication, priority management, and thoughtful decision-making.

You can create the Mona Lisa of UI designs, but if you don’t know how to explain why you did what you did, then you might have a hard time getting people on board with the concept. It’s crucial that you’re able to explain your decision-making to others to justify how and why you did something — this will help facilitate even better collaboration, and create a more robust outcome. Make it a habit to explain to others why you made your design choices; if you’re struggling to justify your decisions, you may have to revisit your work.

Gracefully Receive Feedback

Receiving feedback isn’t a concept novel to UX design, but it’s an essential part of the digital product design process; your ability to receive and process the feedback as a designer is fundamental to the design process. Feedback from your team isn’t a direct criticism of you as a person or designer. Rather, feedback is the means to creating a better outcome for the user, client, or product, all in the name of collaboration.

Our job isn’t to blindly consume and implement all feedback; instead, thoughtfully consider the feedback, understand the motivation and intentions from who gave it, and articulate how it could fit into accomplishing the common goal. Sometimes it’s best to leave your emotions at the door while you process feedback from others!

User experience design is an awesome field for creative people who also love to problem solve with others. I hope these insights are beneficial to those of you who just getting started in your UX career like me, or for those who are thinking about working their way in.

Chris works at Livefront as a Digital Product Design Intern, where he makes sure ‘Layer Copy 2 finalfinal’ doesn’t make it to production.