So, I have made a lot of career changes throughout my professional life. One thing that has always persisted is the desire to understand how things work and how to make them better.

I was first introduced to UX design by a company that I work with as part of my current job. I sat down with their product team to talk about how to visualize some key metrics for a new web-hosted report.

Once they took my requirements and feedback, they showed me some prototypes and I started to think that I would have rather liked to be on the other side of the table actually doing that work.

Taking an idea from concept to production can be a very gratifying experience. It’s great to look back and say, “I made that!”.

Granted I’ve been playing around with front end development for awhile, but I always got stuck thinking about what to actually put on the pages that I was working on. So, I started to look more into design to fill the gap and discovered the UX community and I was hooked!

When trying to decide if I really wanted to make a career switch, there were a couple of things that helped make the decision easy.

Interaction with people

Designing a user experience requires finding out what people think about a product and how they would use it.

Getting to sit down and talk to people about their thoughts and getting feedback on your ideas is a lot of fun. You would be surprised by what you would learn from even friends and family.

Getting different perspectives, and building something they would want to engage with is amazing.

The design process

Starting out with an idea and some lose requirements, and gradually building something new is something I have always enjoyed.

It’s hard for me to pick out a particular aspect of the design process I like the most because I just really enjoy all of it.

Close ties to past experience

I’ve done some work designing processes and user interactions in past roles. Taking user feedback and improving their experience using our enterprise customer service application.

Turns out that I’m finding a lot of similarities between what I did in this role, and what you might find in a UX Designer job description.

Looking back, there were a lot of aspects of that role I enjoyed. I was moved into a management role when the company made some changes, so moved on up the latter when they needed me too, but never wanted to stop doing the work of finding opportunities to improve the experience of our customers and co-workers.

The community

Everyone I have interacted within the design community has been so welcoming to beginners.

From the staff at the school I’m attending to the local designers I meet at meetups, everyone is so passionate about what they do.

I currently work in operations and see so many people that don’t necessarily enjoy what they do, and it refreshing to see so many people that actually enjoy their work.

Now, I’m starting from scratch, and so far I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed this first stage of the learning process.