[Rachel] The field of user experience requires skills from many different areas, including
psychology, architecture, library science, and visual design, among others.
Because of this, everyone's journey into UX is different.
I'm at the UX Conference in San Francisco, and had a chance to ask a few people how they
got into UX.
[Raj] I used to talk about design and UX all the time.
One day, what happened — my manager was like, "Why don't you talk about user experience
in the lunch team meeting?"
And that was the first time I realized that I don't really know how to define user experience.
I was desperate to find what out what it is.
I looked into a lot of books, and I came across this book by Don Norman.
The Design of Everyday Things.
That opened my eyes completely into what exactly is user experience, and from that day, that
was a turning point for my life.
I moved from engineering as a creative technologist, and now I'm working as a UX architect.
That day and today.
I feel like a much different person from that day.
[Christina] My background is psychology, global marketing, and design.
And UX is a new world of all of those things together.
I just started with a new company, and they've got a UX team.
We're just starting to build it up.
They sent me and two other members here to figure out what is the best of the best doing
in the UX world.
What are those trends?
How can we adopt those and bring those back into our company?
As I'm learning more about it, I want that to become a big part of my world, because
I see the value of it.
I see how it's so important to see that end-to-end perspective of what is our customer, at the
end of the day, going to experience with us.
[Joe] So, at our company, we found that we weren't delivering solutions in a way that
matched the consumer's mind.
What we found is that there is often a discrepancy between what we thought we were delivering
and what they were receiving.
All throughout my academic and professional career, I have always had an interest in the
human mind and I've come from a background in software engineering.
So really, UX is the marriage between those two.
And I don't just want to deliver a functional solution; I also want to deliver a solution
that matches my users' needs.
[Juan] I was working in an advertising agency, and my boss always asked for really creative
work, but usable work.
So it was a very big challenge that forced me to study and to learn more about UX, and
that's why I am very in love with UX right now.
I've been a visual and web designer and front-end developer and kind of jack-of-all-trades for
maybe ten years now.
I recently had a project where I completely failed at giving my client what they needed.
So, I've been learning over time that what my client needs me to do is figure out what
their client actually needs.
That's something I've been doing intuitively, but I didn't know really any clear methodology
around it.
When I had this total bellyflop with this client, a friend of mine who I knew of as
an SEO guy kind of saved the day and introduced me to the Nielsen Norman Group through online
resources and set me up for success in that situation and it did end up working out so...
after that I felt like this is really the next step for me to take for my career.
[Tim] I started as a graphic designer in packaging, in fact.
Every company I went to, I'd always done a different thing.
But I've always been looking for "What's the next step from graphic design," basically;
besides asking about what font size to use, spacing, and layout.
I thought that, "There has to be something more than just making this thing look pretty."
When UX came into the picture I was like, "How do I get into that?"
*laughs* "How do I get into that?
This is what I've been looking for."
[Katharine] So, when I graduated undergrad, I started working in media planning.
After a while, I realized that wasn't really want I wanted to do with my life.
So, I enrolled in a marketing certification course.
In one of my courses, they had an industrial designer come in and talk to us about what
she did.
I was just like, "What you do is amazing!"
Kind of does what I did in undergrad, brings in the research that I do in my current job
for media planning.
But I want to do digital.
So I kind of attacked her after class, "Tell me about what you do, and is there any digital
equivalent?"
She told me about UX, and it was like, "This was what is right for me."
And I left the course.
I started looking up graduate degree programs, and signed up, and I haven't really looked
back since.