Why UX for Me
I made a decision to make a career switch in early 2020. I went through coding bootcamp and learned that jumping into backend coding after only knowing a little frontend was not the best idea or for me. I wanted to change careers to continue to help people by designing and creating great products.
As I was nearing the end of my coding journey I was self teaching myself again on the frontend coding (HTML, CSS, JavaScript). As I self taught I came across what is now my new career path, User Experience Design. UX Design fit me because I am naturally curious and love to find out the why, what, where, when, and how of things.
‘Why does this person do things this way? What does the website do well, doesn’t do well? Where the heck is the next page button?! When are they going to change this so I don’t have to go through 8 different screens?! How can I contribute to fix these problems?’
These were the questions going through my head when I would come across an out of date mobile app or website. I didn’t realize there was a career path I could have taken a long time ago to contribute to fixing these problems. I ended up being referred to Designlab that has a UX bootcamp called UX Academy.
Check out Designlab here: https://designlab.com
I first started in UX Foundations which was an amazing program that gave me the basic ideas and got my feet wet with learning about the different principles that go into UX as well as getting me to think outside the box and get my hands dirty with some design software.
Going through the bootcamp was a great experience and was a real grind to get through. Some concepts stuck right away and some didn’t. Some things were easy to learn on Figma or Sketch, some to this day are not perfected by me. The hardest part was getting use to submitting incomplete work or failing hard at soemthing and learning from it. I have learned from mistakes my whole life and grew from them, but in the workplace it always felt like a bad thing.
Getting feedback was refreshing to me. I was in a career my whole life up to this point that it was always ‘What are you going to do for me tomorrow?’ not ‘Great job!’. UX Academy was a community and come to find out the whole UX industry is a real community with people that want to learn, teach, connect with other humans and build each other up.
It was like that scene in Wizard of Oz when it goes from black and white to color. Switching careers into UX was the best decision I have made for myself in my professional career. The community is growing everyday. The job market is always growing. Why is UX for me? I help people grow their businesses with freelance work, I enjoy everyday of work, and the possibilities of products to work on, people to work with, and companies to work for are endless.
If you are looking to switch careers then I hope this gives you a little more insight of why it is a good move to switch to UX. It is hard work and constant learning, but that is just the fun part of it all.
