As developers discover more and more things that web tech can do, and as business analysts identify more potential use cases, UX Designers’ contribution to the process will be increasingly vital. It is also a great career for those who thrive on creativity and collaboration. Plus, by improving user experience, you are making life better for your fellow human beings as they interact with the technology you have helped create to fulfill their needs.
Join a Growing Field
UX design is a great field to join because it is constantly growing. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, the job outlook for UX Designers is excellent. Over the years 2021-2031, the BLS predicts that the growth rate for UX design as a field will be 23%, nearly five times the average growth rate of 5%. During this time, they anticipate that 45,400 UX jobs will be added to the US economy over this time. Training as a UX Designer will significantly increase the likelihood of your finding a well-paid role in a career that provides you with long-term job security.
When you think about the purpose of UX, it’s easy to see why it’s growing so fast. In recent years, websites and even apps have become a much more common and expected part of doing business. Say that you and a friend are craving Mexican food on a trip, and when you look up Mexican restaurants in town, you have two to choose between. One has a professional-looking, easy-to-navigate website, and one has a basic, dated-looking site that makes it hard to find simple information like its menu and hours. Which one will you choose? You’ll probably pick the first one, but as a UX Designer, you’ll also see the second restaurant as a potential client. A successful business needs a web presence that feels good to interact with, and as a UX Designer, that’s exactly what you can create.
Not only are strong websites increasingly required for business success, but more and more companies are creating dedicated apps as well. Apps aren’t just for tech giants like Facebook or Uber–companies in nearly every type of industry, from medical offices to local newspapers, are increasingly turning to apps to find and serve their customers in our connected world. These apps have the potential to make interacting with these businesses a much more pleasant experience. For example, a patient could employ a chat or message function to interact with their medical provider in a way that fits their schedule, rather than waiting on hold or playing phone tag. But that function has to work smoothly and intuitively in the app–and that’s where you come in.
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Businesses are increasingly recognizing not only the importance of having a site or app, but also the importance of UX specifically. After all, the experience of a user interacting with a business’s app or website is part of the user’s overall experience with that business. So any business that cares about customer service needs to think of their web presence as an extension of their customer service, and companies are increasingly realizing this. So lots of businesses that may previously only have had developers on board are currently seeking to hire UX Designers to improve their customer service in the realm of sites and apps. Also, as with the Mexican restaurant in the example above, there are many businesses that don’t yet realize they need a UX Designer. If you’re interested in pursuing a freelance UX design career, it will serve you well to learn to identify these needs and make a habit of pitching yourself to these companies. They may know there is a problem with their website, but be totally unfamiliar with the science and art of user experience, and thus have no idea how to fix the issue. You can change that, applying your UX skills to improve the situation for both the business and the users while earning a substantial wage.
Expand Future Career Opportunities
Studying UX design is an excellent way to improve your future career prospects, especially if you’re upskilling from a related field or transitioning from one that gives you relevant transferable skills. Understanding what makes for a positive user experience and how to create one is a significant advantage in many industries and roles. If you’re looking to change careers, you likely have skills that will be directly transferable to UX design. If you’re already in design or tech but want to grow your career, gaining a knowledge of UX design is a great way to make substantial career progress. Regardless of your background, if you find yourself interested in UX, studying it will facilitate making a smart and successful next move in your career journey.
Say you’re seeking to upskill from a related field. If you’re a Graphic Designer, getting into UX design will allow you to apply those skills in a growing field that is highly in-demand, and you’re also likely to see a significant increase in your pay. Are you a Web Designer? Then you’ve probably already been doing UX design, but without the advantage of having studied how it works. Learning the principles of UX design will make you better at the work you do in your current role, and it will also qualify you to move into a more challenging, and correspondingly more lucrative, career. Maybe you’re a Front-end Developer, and you already do a lot of thinking about user interfaces and how sites and apps look and feel to the user. Your practical experience in creating interfaces, combined with your studies in UX, will make you an attractive candidate for high-level, well-paid roles that blend development and design.
Now, what if you’re making a career transition into tech, but you currently have no tech experience? For some career changers, UX design may appeal more than the idea of learning coding. If that’s you, good news: you probably have many skills that are highly transferable to UX. If you’ve previously worked in a creative field, those instincts will serve you well as you move into the tech world through UX. Maybe you’re switching careers from education. If so, the understanding of psychology and the human learning process you built in your previous career will prove very useful as you incorporate research into your designs. Or say you’ve worked in customer service for many years. User experience is simply another type of customer service in which the customer interacts with the site or app instead of directly with a human being. Your knowledge of what makes customers happy and encourages them to return will allow you to make a vital contribution to any UX team.
Almost every field will give you some skills that are transferable to UX. And your prior experience will also help you in creating sites and apps that are relevant to it. If you were once a nurse, for example, a business developing a medical app will benefit a great deal from your experience in the field. UX design is a great choice for career changers because no matter what your previous field, there will always be something valuable you learned there that you can bring to the UX process. Within tech, this is a particular advantage of UX that does not necessarily apply to other types of tech roles. If you were a math teacher, coding might come naturally to you, but if you were a history teacher, chances are that you won’t have a ton of skills that are directly transferable to programming. No doubt there are some exceptions, but in general, it is much more common for budding UX designers to discover obvious transferable skills than it is for those working purely on the development side.
Apply Your Creativity
One vital advantage of UX design as a career is that it provides the opportunity to exercise creative skills while also earning a substantial and secure salary. There are many careers that provide one or the other, but a lot fewer that provide both. UX gives you both of these elements in a field that is also growing rapidly and a type of role that is in high demand. Thus, many people who enjoy creative pursuits but want financial security find an excellent home in the UX world.
There are many elements of UX design that challenge and stimulate the creative skills of those who work in the field. Some of these are obvious such as those that overlap with visual and graphic design: shape, color, typography, negative space, etc. The word “design” in UX design refers in part to these elements. But a UX Designer applies their creativity beyond the world of static images. In an aspect of the field called “interaction design, ” UX Designers also creatively shape the experience of a user as they move through a site or app–the user interface, rather than merely what they see on one page. This includes elements like animations, as well as functionalities like buttons, scrolling, and other ways that users might interact with the interface to accomplish the tasks that they seek to complete in the app or on the website.
Before the phase of actual design, however, there are multiple stages in the design thinking process that also draw on a UX Designer’s creativity. One aspect you may not typically associate with creative pursuits is research. But in addition to designing the app itself, UX also involves designing the tools that you use to do research. Making an excellent user survey or set of interview questions requires creative problem-solving to find the phrasings and indicators that will help you elicit accurate and relevant information from the users you interview. UX designers also do competitor research to see what comparable sites or apps have to offer. You’ll be a better competitive researcher if looking at competitors’ sites stimulates your active imagination to identify what they might be missing or what you can build on. The creative ability to see what’s not there, or what might be improved on, is vital to the UX research process.
After doing the initial research, UX Designers analyze their findings. Again, “analysis” may not be a word that immediately suggests creativity. Yet the particular techniques that UX Designers use to approach their work require a great deal of imagination. Part of the research analysis process is creating “user personas, ” which are imaginary people who have the characteristics and needs that show up in different groups of users during the research process. There are a number of these tools that require imagination in the UX research analysis process. Another is a user journey map, which lays out the experience that each user persona would have when navigating the app or site for their particular need. All of these tools make it possible for UX Designers to identify what users are seeking from an app or site of this kind, a knowledge base that undergirds the design process and would be impossible to form without creativity.
There’s another phase that comes between research and design in the UX process, and again, it’s one that uses a lot of creativity. This step is called “ideation.” Here, designers brainstorm creative solutions to fulfill the needs that they identify in the research process. Design leads highly value creative thinking and unexpected insights from their team members. The ability to look past the obvious in coming up with solutions is vital to designing an excellent user experience. The more creative you can be, the better you’ll be at your job, and the more valued you’ll be by your supervisors.
At this point comes the initial design phase, which we’ve already discussed. Once UX Designers have created a prototype, they get users together to test the prototype and provide feedback. After the testing comes “iteration, ” or the repeated ideation and design of refinements to the design that incorporate the feedback from users and improve its ability to serve their needs. Since you already know how ideation and design are creative, there’s no need to say more about that. The main point is that almost every phase of the UX design process will draw on your creativity.
If you’re interested in going into tech, you’re probably looking for a more secure career, and if you’re interested in UX design, you’re probably looking for a creative one. This field provides you with both—two great reasons to start studying UX design.
Work Collaboratively
Another great aspect of a career in UX design is that it provides the opportunity for fruitfully collaborative work. A UX Designer will almost always be working as part of a team. You may be one member of a UX team, or you may be the sole UX worker on a team of people with other specialties, or somewhere in between. But whatever your working environment, your process will always be collaborative. If you enjoy collaboration and building something with others, UX design could be a great career for you.
What is it like to work on a UX team? Naturally, it varies, but there are certain categories of workers you can expect to encounter on a UX team. For example, you may work with a UX Researcher. Although many UX Designers do their research themselves, some UX teams also have dedicated researchers who focus specifically on user research, from user interviews at the beginning of the process to user testing later on. UX researchers often come from a background in anthropology or psychology, which helps them design good interview questions and get at what users may not know themselves about their needs when using a site or app. You may also work with an Information Architect. These UXers specialize in the structure of apps and sites, and they are experts in how users take information as they navigate your design. Information Architects identify how content should be grouped and structured on a site or app, which is vital knowledge for the creation of a smooth, intuitive user experience. Another potential member of your UX team would be a UX Writer. UX Writers are responsible for all the text users might see while interacting with the product, from button labels to error messages. You will likely also work with a Design Lead, who is responsible for coordinating the whole team. Design Leads are part designer, part project manager.
If you are the only representative of the UX world on your team, there are other categories of workers who you’ll likely be collaborating with. Unless you also know how to code, you will almost certainly work with a Front-end Developer. These programmers are responsible for coding the user interface of a website. They generally have a strong understanding of design and user interaction, but without specialized UX training, their knowledge of these topics will likely be more experiential and intuitive than your own. Having studied UX, you’ll know to articulate the principles behind it and convey them to others. Most UX certificate or bootcamp programs include instruction on how to communicate a design to the developers who are charged with implementing it. In addition to a Front-end Developer, you may also work with a Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer. These engineers are specialists in testing products to see whether they meet the desired requirements. Incorporating feedback from QA Engineers can be a key part of iterating your designs or, if necessary, revising them after product release. You’ll very likely also work with a Product Manager, who is in charge of defining the “when, what, and why” of a product and then bringing the product to completion. They work at the intersection of UX, business, and tech, making sure that all team members collaborate effectively.
Whether you work on a UX team or a broader product team, your daily life as a UX Designer will be filled with stimulating and productive collaboration experiences.
Improve Others’ Experience
In addition to security and creative scope, another thing you might want from your career is to help make the world a better place. While being a UX Designer may not be as obvious a contribution to social well-being as something like non-profit work, it’s important to remember that user experience is human experience. When you make an app pleasant and intuitive to use, you help the user satisfy the need that brought them to the app while making them feel good as well.
UX Designers call the hindrances and difficulties that users encounter when navigating a site or app “pain points.” This term may seem a little dramatic, but sometimes having a negative interaction with tech genuinely is painful, at least in the sense of “a pain in the neck.” For example, say that you’re worried your rent check may have gone through before your paycheck landed in your account, potentially sticking you with an overdraft fee. You go into your banking app looking for reassurance, but it’s the first time you’ve actually used the app, and you can’t tell where to go for the information you need. You’re already stressed, and this poorly-designed app is just making things worse. If only your bank had hired you as a UX Designer! You’re encountering a pain point that good UX design and information architecture could have prevented. So good UX design really does make people’s life experience better, one little interaction at a time.
A great app can even leave people’s day better than it started. If you come up with an amazing design feature that your user never even knew they needed—which is where that outside-the-box creative ideation comes in handy—they’ll come away feeling satisfied and pleased with their experience. If you’re a highly empathic person who cares very much about how other people think and feel, UX design can provide you with the opportunity to have a tangibly positive effect on someone’s daily life in a way that you may never have considered.