I’ll stop learning when I’m dead
In a busy Farringdon pub on a Thursday night, my colleagues and I talk about everything under the sun — but more often than not, about how our UXing is going and about the latest trends in tech. As my good colleague gets me a pint of Aspalls from the bar and squeezes onto the seat next to me, the conversation drifts to “this AI thing”. I bring up the course I did recently on how to use generative AI to speed up UX research, which I’ve immediately set to applying in my own practice. It’s something I’ve been thinking of engaging with for a while, but this year, I finally have the bandwidth to explore it in depth (I’ll undoubtedly write more on that later, as I gain more experience, including of the inevitable pitfalls of this technology).
The pub crowds are getting rowdier, so we both raise our voices. I yell in my colleague’s ear,
“Hell yeah! I love this! I’ll stop learning when I’m dead!”
He yells back, “This could be your epitaph!”
And indeed it could.
I have no plans for my epitaph just yet, but the path for my immediate future is clear to me.
Change.
Turn and face the strange
It is a truism that in the tech industry, change is the only constant. As a lifelong learner, I saw this as one of my new career’s biggest selling points. And boy, did the journey so far not disappoint!
Over these past three years, I’ve gone from a wide-eyed newbie to someone who can conduct and analyse surveys of hundreds of users; use the Jobs To Be Done research methods; put the findings into practice by turning complex concepts into a single succinct user interface; support the frontend efforts of 20+ developers on the fly. With the aid of an in-house mentor, I’ve learned the basics of practical dataviz to help me construct stories from the user data and to tell these stories to hold the attention of key audiences. I’ve learned what it means to evangelise about UX through building horizontal connections, both across the business and in the wider world. I am hands on with the UX strategy for the various workstreams I’m involved in. My newest shiny toy is the LLM console and learning what it can (or can’t) do for UX.
In the same timeframe, the industry, too, has undergone multiple transformations. The move away from the users’ expectations of passive consumption of online content to expecting sophisticated and interactive data analytics interfaces; the evolving language of design systems; the cleaner and increasingly less pictorial UI trends; several tool switcheroos (who remembers Adobe XD anymore?); the marked improvement in AI automation for user research… And then, the arrival of gen AI with a deafening roar that sent the entire tech world into a giddy spin.
Despite working for a large business, I am free to build my own learning stream by blending business needs with my own natural abilities and interests, instead of relying on a rigid learning curriculum set by someone else. All of these diverse skills that I’ve picked up along the way, have become my own unique deck of UX cards; other UXers have other cards up their sleeves, which is a good thing.
Stealing architects
In 2022, still fresh from the MSc graduation and mere months into my first UX job, I appeared on Rion Willard’s podcast, The Business of Architecture, where I talked about my career transition from architecture to UX. Since then, I have received hundreds of messages and emails from various people across the globe — mostly from architects or architectural students who want advice on how to switch careers. I have struck some interesting conversations and have even talked with a few strangers — from India to the mid-western US — via video calls. I am thrilled to learn that some of those I had spoken to, have now successfully switched to UX. This is why some of my former colleagues jokingly accuse me of “stealing architects”.
I owe this limelight to the brilliance of Rion’s podcast (do check it out!), but also — I am guessing — to the zeitgeist. There’s something in the water, surely… Why do so many architects want to switch to UX?
Whatever the answer, I must be honest with the prospective career switchers who ask me for advice: I can only speak from my own experience. Our paths to UX are as unique as we are — so, what has worked for me, might not work for someone else.
The zeitgeist
A delightful outcome of my career switch was the invitation to act as a judge in an architectural competition in London.
The offer came from the charismatic Amanda Baillieu, the founder of Archiboo Awards, an annual competition for British and international architecture firms. They don’t give any awards for best buildings, though. Instead, they award architects for things like: best podcast, best video, best innovation, best activism, and yes, best user experience. In 2022, I was a judge in that latter category and attended a brilliant, energetic and humorous awards ceremony held at The Lower Third, a nightclub named after David Bowie’s first band, located at the Outernet on Denmark Street. The room was packed with many famous architects, some of whom I would have dreamt of working for, back in the day.
In 2024, I’m back in the judge’s seat again and I can’t wait.
What I find intriguing about the Archiboo Awards is their deliberate shift away from architecture’s raison d’être — the built environment — towards brand and presence, which in this day and age must necessarily be digital. Only a few years ago, viewing the architectural profession in this light might have been novel, but the success of Archiboo is proof that the tables have turned. This shift is a likely contributor to the zeitgeist in which architects think more and more about UX — and some of them even choose to leave their old world for UX altogether.
Evolution
While I don’t write on Medium as often as I’d like, a few entries from this blog have become hits, and some have even been reposted in student forums and elsewhere. As a result, I occasionally get recognised at UX events around London (it’s the hair, Tania, it’s the hair!) and once I even got fan-yelled at.
By the way, chap who yelled at me, ”Hey, it’s you! It’s you with the blog about the fire hose!!”*, why did you immediately run away? I mean, I’m no Mick Jagger — even the tiniest amount of fame makes me melt into my shoes. So, next time, instead of running away, stick around and I’ll buy you a drink!
(* I assume you were referring to this article: Learning How To Make The World A Better Place: A Masters in Human-Computer Interaction Design)
Anyhow, as much as I love to boast, it’s not the M-list fame that matters. The creation of this blog was my first announcement to the world about who I was setting out to become; and while the blog isn’t the exact mirror of my professional life, it reflects some of its evolution.
The field of UX is an ever-changing chameleon. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to describe succinctly what it actually is (unless you are content with a simplistic “UX is designing websites” — somewhat true, but…).
And if change is the only constant, who knows what else I will have learned and will be writing about on here, in three years’ time?
