I had the privilege to deliver this talk for the first time at UX Cambridge in September 2016, and then to give a home-town reprise at a UX Waterloo meet-up in November 2016.
One year ago, my idealistic view of what it would be like to work as a UX designer in the real world was shattered. I went from being surrounded by like-minded people, learning more about UX and being able to approach projects my own way, to being the first and only UI/UX designer at a transportation management software company. It meant I needed to learn a lot of things, fast. And the things that I did learn were not things that I thought I would be learning when I started the job. This talk, at it’s core, is about those things, the things that I needed to learn and implement quickly in order to go from drawing icons and being called the UIX designer, to running sessions at the user group conference and visiting customers to talk directly to our users.
On the surface, this is a talk about what it is like to go from being a full time student to being a full time UX designer in a place that has never had one before, and the unexpected challenges that came with that experience. But it’s also a reminder that UX isn’t always glamorous, a celebration of how far UX has come as a discipline, and a case study or testimony of how important mentorship can be.