My Learning Journey in UX with the IxDF

Early Career

My career path was not intentional. I really admire young people who know exactly who and what they want to be. I loved music and art, but in the mid- to late 70s, these weren’t considered serious career paths. So, I went to university to study electronic engineering in the hope of becoming an audio engineer –?and failed that. As a young man and military veteran, I had an idea about what I liked or didn’t like and a vague idea of what or who I wanted to be. Trying to do something remotely artistic, I pursued a job in the television industry and became a lighting director. On the job, I learned a lot about proper planning, production values, efficiencies and, to my surprise, how to create things that people loved.

I left the TV industry to become a graphic artist with a friend who was formally educated as one. Together, in the mid 80s – at the beginning of the personal computer revolution – we started a small computer-aided graphic design studio. During that time, I met Robert Kiyosaki at a seminar. He told me I should do something I love. I told him I didn’t know what I loved. He said, “Then do something about the things you hate.” I thought, “What do I hate?” All I could think was I hated mediocrity and carelessness. I thought, whatever I do, it has to be magnificent and I pledged to be committed to excellence in everything I did.

In the late 90s, the Internet became main-stream and our creativity transitioned from the traditional media of print, radio and television to websites and interactive media. Without realising it, I started to learn UX design. Our biggest client acquired us as an internal marketing department and I became the Global Head of Marketing. I started to learn new skills other than graphic design; skills like leadership, project management, business development and digital transformation.

Professional UX development in the last decade

As the early 2000s started to roll out, I rolled along and became an independent marketing, design and project management consultant. The diversity of clients I consulted with gave me broad-spectrum experience across the range of industries, personality types and behaviours. I discovered that technical skills, important as they are, are not nearly as important as interpersonal skills – at all levels of business.

Around 2012, I decided to go back to school. I formally studied project management through the Project Management Institute (PMI), and, in parallel, UX Design at the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF). Studying again, I discovered just how much I already knew and just how little I knew. You can gain a lot of organically-derived experience in life, however, if you’re learning the wrong things, your experience doesn’t mean much. On the other hand, knowledge alone is not nearly enough. The ability to ‘read the room’, as the Japanese say, and understand all the people affected by what you do is just as important as what you do.

The power of learning standardised frameworks is that you develop interoperable skills. What this means is that you can take your skills anywhere and apply them in most situations. So I became, what my colleagues call, a ‘certification addict’.

Learning UX with the Interaction Design Foundation

No matter how much industry experience I have, IxDF courses challenge my thinking, add to my understanding and improve my capability. The quality and accessibility of IxDF’s on-demand learning sets a benchmark for meaningful and contemporary education. IxDF’s courses are not static: they are evolving with the rapid changes in both the world and in the Design Domain. I‘m proud to be a student in such a dynamic organisation dedicated to making the world a better place.

What drew me to the IxDF and keeps me going is the self-paced and accessible design of the learning. The mixed media learning assets and the gamification of learning makes doing the courses both engaging and motivating. The variety of educators and teaching styles means that some courses are going to resonate more with your style of learning than others. However, there’s always something new to learn, whether that is a new skill or a new perspective on your existing skills.

If you want to become a self-taught UX designer and kick-start your career with the help of Interaction Design Foundation, be warned there are no shortcuts. There is so much to learn, and it’s never enough. The best approach is to combine technical learning with practical experience. If you don’t already have a job as a UX designer and you're studying at the IxDF, then ask around your local coffee shop or businesses if they need help with their website or with an app and work pro-bono to build a portfolio and your experience.

Even if you can’t find a business that will let you do any design, start redesigning things around you anyway. It will build your confidence and you'll discover what designing in the real world feels like. As somebody who leads a team of designers I don’t pay all that much attention to portfolios. What I do pay attention to is your understanding? of design fundamentals, your character and if you can work well and communicate effectively with others. As a UX Designer, you need to be the synergist between the stakeholders who pay for your designs, the engineers who build it and, of course, the users who use it. It’s like being the translator between three groups of people who speak different languages and they'll likely have different ideas of what good looks like. You will find that you’ll become more of the negotiator and diplomat and not just a UX designer in front of a screen.

The IxDF provides a range of courses that addresses most of what it takes to be a UX Designer; from the very beginning as a novice to leading design teams. It’s also great to have access to the learning material after you have completed the course to refresh your understanding and knowledge. It takes a very special mindset to become a UX Designer because it’s an infinite game. What I mean by that is, when you think you’ve reached a destination or? finish line, there is always the next horizon or the next innovation challenge in front of you.

I don’t know if you remember the movie “The Witches of Eastwick”. In one scene, Jack Nicholson is enjoying the passionate cello playing of one of the ‘witches’. He makes a comment, ”Passion without Precision is Chaos.” Few UX Designers have studied or been exposed to project management approaches. So, they try to deliver 100% of a scope or more, as defined by the client or stakeholder, on time and on budget. Sure, there is lots of passion, but very little precision. The result is a kind of chaos they're almost proud of, but in today’s business world that approach is unsustainable.?

Professional/Personal view on UX nowadays

When you examine the disciplines of the UX professional, they cover such a broad range of skill sets from human-centred design, human resources, change, project and process management, digital transformation, data and analytics, as well as accessibility, psychology and behavioural economics. That is an incredibly broad-spectrum of skill-sets and it is hard to believe that any one individual has a grip on all of them. If Shakespeare was right when he said, “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”, then a well-rounded UX professional could be described as a generalist and synergist of these subjects. However, that’s not how it is taught or understood.

From a personal point of view, I’ve always been driven to do something that I’m proud of and that brings joy or makes a meaningful difference in someone’s life. Let’s face it, life is hard and designers are people who look at the world and exclaim, “Surely it can be better than this!” The thing is, the world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous and, when we endeavour to fix things with all good intentions but no deep understanding, we discover the law of unintended consequences.

Everyone has an opinion, even scientists. Yet, the scientific method has consistently proven to be the best approach to problem-solving. Like in most disciplines, there is a science to UX and there is equally an art. The art of any discipline comes from our humanity and compassion. The one thing technology and science cannot do is make moral and ethical decisions. At the core of UX is the intent to do the right thing. This is an art, not a science. Maybe the key UX message should be like the Hippocratic Oath: “in the pursuit to extract or create value, do no harm.”