Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Jessica Lascar

One day, at work, I was quietly sitting at my desk, one hand rested on the flat white keyboard and the other one moving the mouse around to drag and drop different shapes across the screen of my big shiny iMac. A guy, who I don’t recall I’d ever seen before that day, just passed by and decided to suddenly stop behind me, his gaze flickering down the screen.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he simply asked after a while, eyes glinting with curiosity.

“Well, um,” I promptly tilted my head in his direction looking genuinely surprised as I was caught off-guard. “I’m just designing some stuff for the website like, you know, creating the web pages that you see online and I am, like, thinking about how to do them” I tried to explain in the simplest way possible.

The guy remained quiet for a moment, almost like he was trying to absorb what I’d just told him before speaking up again, “But that’s awesome! So, you kinda like Think about where and how to put stuff on the website? Are you the one who gets to think about how to make it and then decide where things go and why? Did you design the whole website with all this stuff? Isn’t that hard to do? Do you really do all of this?”

I simply nodded astonished and slightly overwhelmed by all of those questions. That was the first time ever I could see someone really excited about my job. Usually, when people ask what I do for a living, I always receive confused smiles and disappointed looks (my mom is still convinced that I make drawings all day 😂). But this guy seemed to understand that there’s more under the surface and, thus, he was reminding me what I really do.

“This sounds awesome!” he continued eventually “What you do is so incredible! I wish I could do it! That’s nothing like what I do. You can literally shape people’s vision with your designs”

“Oh… well… thanks…” I mumbled quietly. I was also embarrassed cause I didn’t seem to remember either his name nor what was his role. Luckily, he didn’t know that.

“This is just amazing, you have the best job in the world!” he beamed before walking away.

I stood there for a while looking at my screen, his last words still resonating in my mind.

Ok, I was a little bit dramatic with my intro, but this little conversation really happened and made me realize that we do have, indeed, the best job in the world.

When questioned about design, most people think of us designers as the creative ones, the people who can make things pretty by magically moving pixels around. But I like to think that we designers have the power to turn pixels into experiences instead. And such power shouldn’t be underestimated at all.

Through our work, when done well, we can really make an impact on people’s lives in a tangible way. We can inspire, we can guide, we can bring ideas to life, we can craft better solutions. Whether it be to create a better world or just to make someone’s day, we can definitely add real value.

And I can’t honestly think of a better feeling than knowing that what you do can make a difference, even if it’s for just one person. We design for people, thus being able to help them out while putting a smile on their face is purely satisfying. This is the kind of reward that is invaluable.

And this is exactly how it feels to have the best job in the world.

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Dear designers, you have the best job in the world. was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear designers, you have the best job in the world.

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