Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Chic Geek YYC

Carrie Mah

Design is a growing and vital need in today’s tech world. Think of your favorite app or website that you use — maybe Airbnb, Slack or Facebook. I bet they have a dedicated design team that thinks about every detail in the user’s journey — from the loading graphic to the words you’re reading.

UX and design have become a vital and growing discipline within the tech industry. Following up on our first blog about UX Design and our October MeetNTech on Behaviour Design, this post looks at the various different types of design you can get involved in, and how to kick-start your new design career!

Understanding design

Design is all about problem solving, and offers a variety of areas to get involved in.

Product Design

A key skill to designing useful and usable solutions is building it for people unlike yourself. This involves empathy to understand others’ stories, needs, and limitations. Once you identify people’s issues, you need to figure out which problems are important to solve within time and technical constraints.

Product designers research users, find their problems, and then iterate to come up with different solutions, test these ideas, and refine them to create an ideal solution that fits users’ needs and various constraints. One essential skill to have in design is to accept critique with open arms and avoid getting attached to ideas that don’t work.

Check out:

User Experience (UX) Design

Once a problem and solution has been identified, it is time to dive into the solution’s UX, working within the identified constraints. How do people experience the product through sight, touch, or audio? How does the product respond; and what are people’s reactions?

UX designers aim to make things feel intuitive by maintaining a good relationship between the user’s mental model and a product’s overall experience. This involves big-picture thinking about the product and how it is used before and after interacting with the product.

Check out:

What is UX? User Experience defined in 10 videos

Information Architecture

After the initial design is complete, an information architect structures and organizes the product’s basic elements such as data and content. At this point designers will draw a product’s screens, the main user flows, its secondary functions, and the layout.

Check out:

IA: History & Origins

User Interface (UI) Design

UI designers will arrange the elements on each of the product’s screens. The goal is to make the screens make sense and look nice using best standards in usability. They will answer questions like whether an element is easy to touch on a phone, or how long it takes for people to notice the elements.

Check out:

Crash Course: UI Design

Visual Design

Much like the icing to a cake, visual design aligns the product vision with its visuals. Visual designers determine if their design style make sense, looks nice, and delights people. They understand graphic design and think about pixels all day.

Check out:

How To Make Your Not-So-Great Visual Design Better

Interaction / Motion Design

The last piece of design provides feedback when users interact with the product. Interaction designers provide reactions when the product changes, transitions, or receives a user response.

Check out:

Creating Usability with Motion: The UX in Motion Manifesto

For even more insight into the different design fields, here are some good reads:

Getting into design

Once you’ve identified at least one field you’re interested in, you’ll need to gain some experience and knowledge. There are many ways to get into design, such as pursuing a formal degree, taking part in condensed boot camps, or earning an online certificate.

Just be aware that your background and education does not necessarily define your qualifications and knowledge of design. Whether you received formal UX training or worked in a seemingly unrelated field, you may be more experienced in UX than you think. Doing work that’s related to the field and developing skills that transfer to design are invaluable and helped many design experts find a passion for their field.

Getting experience can be a difficult job though if no one’s willing to hire a newbie. You’ll need to build a repertoire of skills and work to impress employers. When first starting out, expect to work on projects that don’t pay: personal projects, volunteer projects for non-profits, or even making a site for your friend. Once you become familiar with designing products, you’ll be able to position yourself as a designer and apply for positions!

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Hopefully this post has shed some light on design and how to get into it. At the end of the day, you have to actually experiment with design to see what you like about it and what kind of roles you might want to pursue. And if all of us, regardless of our day-job, learn to think like designers, we’ll be better off — with usable products that leave us satisfied instead of frustrated.

Anyone can design: navigating careers in UX and design was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anyone can design: navigating careers in UX and design

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