Remember that time I was all: "I think I know what I wanna be when I grow up." Yeah... I was wrong. But maybe I'm right this time? · 5:29am Mar 17th, 2017
This is a continuation of Chinchillax's ongoing career drama blog series.
TL;DR: I got a job.
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Imagine, if you will, that you've never used FimFiction before. And on your first visit to the website you come across this story, and you'd like to read it.
Where would you click to start reading this story?
I did this to a friend once. I linked them to a story I had written on FimFiction and they looked at the page and wondered out loud how on earth they were supposed to read the story.
Now, someone used to reading FimFiction knows what to do instantly. Click on the emoji. Usually an author is smart and names their chapters something like: "Chapter 1" and it's obvious what it clickable. But there are crazy people (like me) that will title their chapters in emoji or kanji or something unintuitive. For a first time user of the website, it's impossible to know where to click. This is a problem of design. How discoverable are features on a website? What is the experience like for a normal user of this website? What is the experience of a first time user?
This example is a microcosm of what a UX designer, or User eXperience designer does. Use/create a product, watch someone else use it, realize a problem, and propose a solution that makes it easier for them to use. (In the above case, a small "Start Reading" button at the bottom of the description could go a long way). Continue iterating on that until you have a really well done software product.
I think I like doing User Experience design enough that I'll make it my career. Probably.
I want to sum up UX design by saying it's "telling programmers what they should code." But that doesn't seem to fit.
For larger context than the above FimFiction example, and why this is a job and not just unnecessary complaining, I need to explain how a UX designer fits in the overall software business environment.
The Software Development Cycle:
Step 1) Manager in charge wants some software made, has a vague idea of who it should be for and what it should do.
Step 2) A UX Designer takes that vague idea, and researches the people that will use that software, slowly figuring out the ideal software features that are needed for the target user. They sketch out fake mockups of what the software product might look like, and make recommendations.
Step 3) A UI Designer (User Interface Designer) takes the work of the UX designer and photoshops together an ideal user interface.
Step 4) UX Designers test the User Interface in front of actual users using software like Invision or Marvel. Would they use this product if it existed? Would they pay money for it? They iterate until they find a good—easy to use—software product.
Step 5) Designers get approval from the Manager and programmers that this is the product they want to make, and developers give the seal of approvable that the idea is feasible to be coded.
Step 6) Programmers take the specifications from from the UX/UI design team and actually code the software.
Step ???) Lots of steps in here for programmers because writing software is hell. At least it was for me. Thank you so much programmers!
Step ∞) UX Designers continue to refine the design based on feedback from everyday Users.
For most people, they just assume this is all a job for one guy: the programmer. A programmer thinks something up, designs how it should probably look, and then codes it. For a one man dev team, yeah, that's right. But there are very few teams of one that do everything, especially well. This is why organizations thrive on people specializing. Even the smallest tasks can be extracted out into whole job categories.
Even the field of UX/UI has sub specialties you can go into.
UX Researcher: Devoted entirely to market research of ideal users and their needs (We want to corner the market on Bronies that read fanfiction, what do they need in a website?)
UX Writer: Full time writers that describe what products should be like, how they behave, and what users expect/want.
UI Motion Designer: In charge of mocking up what animations should look like in a product. (If you use After Effects, check out Lottie, it's gonna be big. We're about to see A LOT more animations in our software in the future)
This is especially the case for crazy large organizations with 30k+ people. You're gonna need specialists.
But what's interesting about UX design is that by the nature of the job, they have to be a generalist.
How do I learn this?
You can't major in User eXperience anywhere (at least not yet). The closest educational opportunities are some Master's programs in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). While people have been doing software UX things since well... the Apple II back in the 80's, the name "UX" hasn't really been in use except for the last seven years.
Because there's no undergraduate degrees, UX people have degrees in whatever they want. English majors? Yep. Psychology majors? Uh huh. Any other major? Why not.
UX is something people have to learn on their own via reading books, listening to podcasts, attending UX "Boot Camps," and trying out stuff in their software development jobs.
It's almost as if User Experience is a tech job... but without the tech.
So UX is in a very odd position. It's something that no one has really been officially taught how to do, yet is INSANELY valuable in a company. It doesn't matter how gorgeous software is—or all the functionality it has—if it's not "usable." Software has to be easy to use and follow the principle of "Don't make the user think." If the user has to stop and google how to use the software, the UX guy has failed.
More and more companies are starting to realize that without easy to use software, no one is going to use their product. Or they're going to go after a different product that is easy to use. The high demand but low supply has led to some rather nice salaries for (experienced) UX people.
Actually finding a job
Fun Stuff right? Awesome! Good luck getting a job, because it's really hard for an employer to evaluate if you're good at UX or not.
UX is this series of tasks that is incredibly vague and covers a lot of different parts of the software development pipeline. While technically anyone could decide to jump in and start being a UX guy, it's hard for a company to give that person a chance. What makes a UX person valuable are so many different "soft" skills. Communication is huge. How do they communicate with: managers, developers, other designers, and most importantly—users? That's really hard to figure out in a ten minute interview. How about the soft skills of diplomacy, idea generation, pattern finding, reading people, and accepting criticism when their designs aren't good?
How do you interview someone for that? You can't really. This has lead to an absolute must for UX designers to have a website portfolio in which to show off case studies showing off their design process for multiple UX projects. But you can't have case studies... unless you have a job... for which you need a job via case studies... and life is suffering.
And even with case studies, longevity is better. How long have you had a job of "UX?" None? Sorry, this ain't gonna work. Two years? Oh, we're interested. Five years? You're hired.
Even for me... I think I lucked out finding UX six months ago and incorporating it into my Project Management job with a small team of developers. And somehow it was still hard for me to find a job. How are people even alive? Humanity makes no sense.
But once you're in... it's so cool! I get to make software... without coding! I just tell someone else what to do! (And I gather evidence to prove that it's what should be built). It's like a Lawyer/Graphic Designer/Marketer/Businessman/IT Guy all got smashed together and were told to figure out what customers want and report back.
Basically, I graduated with my Japanese degree and three minors, and found a job that needs crazy generalists like me. I've been unemployed for the last two and a half months, but I start work on Monday. We'll see how it goes.
That, or you'll see a post from me a year from now explaining how great [DIFFERENT CAREER] is or something.
I dunno. Life is weird.
Being unemployed post mortem:
Being unemployed is a full time job. And it sucks.
I found it absolutely difficult to be creative on FiMfiction or drawing or animating or anything because it all felt like I was distracting myself from working on something else that might get me a job faster. Even if I had already done a lot on any given day, it never felt like enough :(
Nobody wants to meet someone via a resume. They'd rather hire someone—anyone—they know than a piece of paper, no matter how good it looks. Having to look at a resume is ALWAYS a hiring manager's last resort. Basically networking is good for employers, but I—as a job seeker—hate it.
I made some cool things I can never show FimFiction. Because there's a brick wall between my work/play life that should never be crossed for any reason under any circumstance. But MAN do I want to :(
Like, I want to do a User eXperience breakdown for Fimfiction... but that's the kind of thing I could put on my work blog... except not because then that'd let employers know I'm a brony. And just doing it for Fimfiction seems... huh... I guess I do that. Hmm... I'd need to find a few people that have never used the site before and watch them use it/see what trips them up >__>
If any of my followers are experienced UX Designers/Product Managers, I would love to have a nerdy mentor :D
In the end, IF you're a writer and are looking for a career to support your writing lifestyle AND you like technology AND helping figure out ways to make it easier for people to use technology, UX design might be for you. The demand keeps increasing and salaries are good.
Congratulations!
In my company (a small web agency) we don't have any dedicated UX people; generally "good UX" is just what's expected from whoever designs or implements the site's front end. This is likely because the company is currently too small to be able to afford a full-time UX person though.
I do recall knighty making an interesting post about Fimfiction's UX choices years ago.
Congratulations! And don't worry about what you want to be when you grow up. There aren't cutie marks in real life. We just have to pretend in job interviews that there are.
You wish to design UX? With great power comes great responsibility.
I think UX, like graphic design and visual arts in general, sometimes goes off into its own little world... I mean people come up with theories or aesthetics about it to impress other UX people, without testing them in the real world, with naive users, and you end up with abominations that seem intuitive or beautiful to UX people but confuse people who don't spend all day on the web. Like the new icon being used for "Menu": 3 horizontal bars, or 3 vertical dots. JUST PUT THE WORD "MENU" THERE. Those 3 horizontal bars take up just as much space, and there's no indication that they're part of the interface to anybody who doesn't already know that idiom. And they don't look like a menu. Nor does everyone in the world know that a picture of a gear means "settings". Not intuitive. The trashcan icon is intuitive... but only to Americans, as the ribbed galvanized trash can is American. So that defeats half the purpose of using an icon.
Or like the Android convention that a toggle to the left means OFF and a toggle to the right means ON. Just !@%$ label it! There's no way for normal people to know whether an Android setting is on or off. A darkened or colored circle does not intuitively mean "on". Or the Android "triangle, circle, square" icons. Screw those. Screw them hard.
Personally, I think icons are way overused. They are useful when you have multi-language users, but they are not always easier for people who share a language. Like, the T! icon here is not good; it should just say "Size". Since fimfiction doesn't allow non-English stories, icons should be used only when they're clearer than text labels.
Don't even get me started on Windows 8 and its influence on web design. SWEET BUTTERY CELESTIA I HATE THE WINDOWS 8 AESTHETIC.
First of all, congratulations! And good luck with the job. I hope it goes well.
Second, I think that UX fits you. Admittedly, most of my experience with UX is reading a little on the internet and working with a UX guy for a few months a little while ago (he wasn't actually doing UX on the project I was working on though). But from what I've seen, it does seem like the sort of thing that I can see you doing. So perhaps you have finally found your place! (But no pressure if you end up not liking it.)
Finally, we should chat again one of these days. Hit me up on Facebook or Discord sometime.
4459790
Thank you!
The smaller a company is, the more hats everyone wears. That's very true. It's why I like small companies because each person's role gets to be a bit more diverse.
I need to find this blog post.
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Thanks!
I'm surprised how true that statement is. I talked with a Product Manager at Microsoft when she visited my school and I mentioned the idea of saying in an interview: "Yeah... I could fit with Product Management or UX or Motion Design, whatever you need me for." And she thought that was a terrible idea (and yeah... it is). It's so strange we have to market ourselves as one thing when in reality we're complex creatures capable of doing many tasks. Cutie Marks would make life a bit simpler.
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I think I'm up for the challenge.
You bring in a concept that I actually feel is it's own little war in the design community.
UX versus UI
UX is all about researching and interviewing Users and finding out their needs, and above all making products discoverable.
UI, on the other hand, is about "making things look pretty." And there's nothing prettier than nothing there at all. Whitespace is king in Graphic and UI design. This is why we have things like the "hamburger menu" or the three lines you brought up. I feel like a UI designer thought that up. "Hey! Let's just hide everything in this 'miscellaneous' menu."
It gets even more egregious in most modern cell phones. It's impossible to tell if I should swipe left, right, up or down. Or figure out if something is on or off. The user has to experiment because there's no good signals. Even the pioneering man behind UX and product design, Don Norman (The Design of Everyday Things guy) hates what modern companies are doing with their unintuitive but pretty designs.
I wholeheartedly agree on your complaints. Many companies don't make software with good discoverability.
Though I do understand why these big companies keep wanting to push things like icons. Localization is HUGE. Everyone wants a product that can/could look the same in every language. But humanity just isn't as uniform as we'd like them to be. And text is the bane of all localization designers because you end up with languages like Japanese where suddenly menu items are a lot smaller than normal, or the reverse in Spanish where text could expand up to fifty percent, bleeding text off menus.
There's trade-offs everywhere for all these things and every stakeholder has a say in it.
But, it's a fun problem to have! And there's jobs there! Heavenly, heavenly job security... to fuel my side writing projects.
Okay, you don't have go too in depth, but I'm curious what you mean by Windows 8 Aesthetic. Do you mean "Flat UI?" As in: destroy all gradients and shadows on a web page? If so, I'm sorry, it keeps spreading and there's no end in sight. D:
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Thanks man! I appreciate the vote of confidence. Will do!
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Mostly I mean "eliminate all levels and organizational principles and just put all content and links into a giant wall of squares the user has to scroll through."
This often appears together with "replace all information with upbeat three-minute videos that don't tell you what you want to know", tho I don't know if that's a Windows 8 thing.
You know, when I visited fimfiction for the very first time, gotta be a couple/few years ago, now, I had no idea how to work it. I didn't realize you clicked on a chapter title to read it; I saw icons next to the title and thought you clicked those--and thus that you had to download anything to read it. It put me off the site and it was months before I came back and figured out how it actually worked. Now I love the site, but it was weird in the beginning...
Congratulations!
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That isn't all that set in stone. I have worked in small companies where management wants for there to be an impassible wall between back-end and front-end people. Alternatively, at my current job in a certain tech giant, developers have to wear pretty much all hats, from coding to UX to customer support. That is often a good experience, but it can be a pain when you just want to sit down and code, but have to stop to write stuff to be read by upper management, or deal with some weird end-user issue.
And hey, I'm glad that you found a niche in software that you like. Just keep in mind that this is a very diverse career, where moving horizontally is not only OK, but sometimes expected. It is really easy to get stuck in the kind of mentality where you stop seeing things from the perspective of other folks that may, ultimately, suffer from your decisions.
Belated congratulations on the job!
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Those are very good points. I'm just happy to be in tech in some way at all. Well, we'll see what happens from here.
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And a very belated Thank You!