Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Ankita Dhyani “It always seems impossible until it is done” — Nelson Mandela

I recently made a career move from being a visual designer to a full-time user experience designer at StudyPortals. I have been planning to make this shift for quite some time and did a lot of research on internet. I have read many articles about how to switch from visual to UX design, explaining what skills I should learn. As I learnt a lot from those articles, now it is my turn to share my experience of what I did and am still doing to grow into a User Experience Designer. If you also wish to learn more about UX, I hope you can pick up some ideas and shape your way.

I believe the best UX designers are the ones that don’t know the answer, but know what questions to ask — and that is how my journey began. After working as a visual designer for almost 7 years now, I asked myself “How can I move from thinking about aesthetic preferences to objective discussions?”. StudyPortals was a big help in inspiring and pushing me to grow. We have 5 core values that guide our work. One of them is “Personal growth is the key” and we take it seriously!

I joined StudyPortals two years back as a UX and Visual designer, my expertise were in user interface and visual design. When I participated in conducting a usability test at StudyPortals, it was the first time that I observed a user browsing through the website. I learnt what their pain points are and understood how crucial it is to think about the user when solving a design problem. At that point it was clear to me, that I want to grow more into the field of user centered design.

Thanks to the world-wide web, there is plenty of material that you can read; but the challenge is where to start: “Which book to read?”, “Which site to follow?” — all kinds of questions came to my mind. Apart from where to start, the other challenge was finding the time to do it along with a full-time job. What I needed foremost was a plan. After considering my daily routine, I could figure out that the only suitable time would be an hour in the morning dedicated to UX. The dark winter mornings of Netherlands at times demotivated me to get up early but enthusiasm to learn something new kept me going. Now that I had a plan, it was time to get going.

It was time to execute my plan and get to the dreams!

The first course I took

The first course I followed was an online course called “The ultimate guide to usability and UX” by David Travis. The course is structured in a way that I could easily finish a section each day, clear and straight to the point with examples on how to apply what I learnt. The course made me familiar with many practices to design better solutions. One of the good things about taking the course is getting regular emails from David with links to useful articles that add up on the knowledge I gathered.

While taking the course, I wrote down the most interesting topic covered in the course each day and later the day, read at least one article about the topic. This habit helped me learn in depth about those topics and get updated with the latest industry standards as well. I also bought a membership at http://ift.tt/1baJRgw as they offer some amazing courses in UX.

My first UX book

After completing the course, the next thing on my list was finding out the most relevant book that I can start with. After doing a lot of research, I picked up “Designing for interaction” by Dan Saffer, an excellent book to get a good understanding of the idea behind interaction design. The book offers good case studies explaining the problem, the process followed and the solutions.

Since I was involved in conducting usability tests at work, the next book on my list was “Don’t make me think” by Steve Krug. It explains how we actually use the web and gives a lot of insights on why testing is important, how many users we would need, how often to test and many other things. The book was fast to read and immensely helped me in improving my skills at usability testing.

The current book that I am reading is “About Face” by Alan Cooper, the creator of goal-directed design methodology. Although I am only half way through, I am thoroughly enjoying the book and learning new things with each chapter.

Yes, you can!

Experience is the best form of learning

It was almost a year long journey, from being responsible for all visual design work to moving completely into the User Experience Design Team at StudyPortals. Along with taking online courses and reading books, I pro-actively took part in design meetings at work like critiques, heuristic evaluations and common design language. This helped me understand how UX designers approach different problems. During each meeting, I wrote down interesting topics to read later. This was a very demanding time in my career yet very fulfilling. I can proudly say that my growth was exponential.

I feel lucky to be part of an international team of designers. Sharing good resources, giving honest feedback and supporting each other are the most essential components of our team. I am excited to share, that till now I have conducted stakeholder interviews, tested paper prototypes with users, been part of design sprints and what not.

This is my journey till date and I am happy to share it with you. Hope you enjoyed reading my first article. If you have any suggestions or want to share your experience, do leave a comment below.

Good Luck!

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My journey from being a visual designer to a UX designer was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My journey from being a visual designer to a UX designer

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