My Path to UX Design
The first time I heard the term, “UX Design” wasn’t very long ago. Like many digital product designers, I knew about UX design before I knew there was a term for it. It wasn’t until I started looking for a new job that I found that the world had shifted, and all of a sudden what I thought was just plain old web design had a fancy new title that encompassed all the other stuff I do—very exciting!
I remember reading a description of what a User Experience Designer does, and thinking, hey, that sounds like something I would be good at. The more I learned about it, the more I realized this was something I had already been doing for years. It’s design with its heart in the right place. I loved that the end user is always at the center of the process. I loved that empathy is necessary to do this job. I really loved that it marries design and scientific processes.
Before I was a designer, I was just a super curious kid who loved making stuff. My path into product design started shortly after I graduated from art school and moved to New York from Oklahoma in 2007. I was really interested in textiles, so I enrolled at FIT in their Surface Design program. It wasn’t long before I got a job as a textile designer, and started designing products for the home market. This is where I really cut my chops as a graphic designer, learning to design quickly and efficiently for major retail customers like Target and Walmart.
Meanwhile, in my free time I started a knitting blog using a free Wordpress template, which I used as a platform to publish and sell hand-knitting pattern pdfs that I designed. As my blog gained popularity, and my product line expanded, I began iterating on my platform. I took what I learned from my previous experiences, and tweaked, and tested... and tweaked again. I entirely redesigned the site three different times, eventually ending up with a completely custom responsive website—KnitDarling.com which I continue to iterate on to this day, 10 years later.
In the middle of all this, I began working on a little startup with my husband and two of our friends—Charitysub.org. This was a philanthropic subscription service where users could give $5 every month to a different charity that we curated based on a theme. Working at a startup required that I wear many different hats—designer of everything, copy editor, researcher, freelance manager, brand ambassador. I learned how to wireframe and how to perfect user flows. I storyboarded user journeys and created original on-boarding experiences. I conducted impromptu user tests on my friends and family, and stumbled through many other UX design processes that I didn’t know had a name. I loved this. It was exhilarating! Unfortunately, after three years, the company was unable to acquire significant funding to continue, and we had to close up shop. The experience was incredibly valuable though, because I discovered myself as a UX designer.
So I find myself now, learning once again how to do this job. I love how the field is constantly evolving, and revealing new challenges. I love every step—the process of discovery, refining and iterating, interviewing and testing with real users, and ultimately delivering a thoughtful, beautiful concept that I know will work. These are all the things that make my heart sing, the things that I can’t stop thinking about, the things that drive me to keep learning and working. It turns out that I am a UX designer, and I’m pumped!