Down the rabbit hole of UX
As a clueless high school student, I always wanted to become a programmer since I thought it would be a decent challenge and it always sounded cool. So I went to a technology/management course wherein I could still dip my toes into tech but still have the familiarity of management subject to not get overwhelmed by more technical subjects
Come to my first CS class, I was excited to finally get to study a subject that I was looking forward to in college. Can you guess how that turned out?… Well, the few weeks were fine but eventually, the difficulty started to ramp-up and I lose the will to pursue coding. A few months go by, around the time the first quarter of my second year of college, more and more of my friends started joining this organization called UX Society.
Before I joined this org, I thought that UX was just another term for designing on a digital canvas. Compared to conventional designing such as physical posters, arts and crafts, etc. I thought UX was just that but translated to a digital aspect such as digital posters, illustrations on websites, photoshop or adobe illustrator, etc. That was the main reason why I was hesitant in joining the org since I was never an artistic person, when it comes to projects I would volunteer to do anything else as long as I don't have to touch anything that needs to look artistic.
Eventually, I caved in and joined my first event as a member which was UX&Chill, this was the event where Figma was first introduced to me, at first I disregarded it since it seemed like another app substitute for photoshop, that is just used to make posters and such so it was another semester of me not fully understanding what UX was.
Come the third year this was when my definition of UX changed. When classes were canceled due to the Covid-19 virus, our home organization (BYTE) opened up a discord server for a place for students to be able still to feel a sense that they were attending school since they were able to study with others. Every day at 9 pm, I would always see this group of the exact same people in a channel till 2 am, naturally I was curious on they were doing for 5 hours a day so I joined in and talked to them. They told me they were interning for a start-up and making mockups for their app, with a shot into the dark I mentioned that I was interested in learning UX too but didn't know how to start. Well, they just told me to join more workshops from UX Soc, I took that with a grain of salt since that's what anyone would say. Fast forward a month, that same group of people invited me to join them in a UX internship wherein we had to make mockups for their app. This was my first experience with UX so from not knowing anything I was headfirst into an actual UX project with no workshops at all.
As of present, my understanding of UX would be categorized into three roles.
First the UX researcher, this would be the person responsible for the first part of the UX process is to do the first round of interviews during the design study, wherein they would ask people about similar apps/websites and what are their pain points of each website, they are also in charge of Usability testing once the mockups are complete to see if the designs they made actually give the users a better experience.
The next category would be the Designer, these are the people in charge of guiding the group with wireframing and Hi-fidelity mockups so that the flow of the screens is presentable and professional. They are also in charge of making the design system which contains colors, fonts, components so that the screens look consistent, inconsistent screens will make the whole app look faulty.
Finally, the last category would be Copywriter. This person would be in charge of which words will be used for labeling parts, sentence construction, and keeping the app in line with the branding in anything text related.
Even if I separated these three categorized in a team setting, all members will usually do a mix of all three but it is just good to know what you are doing in each stage of the UX process.
So what's next for me?
Well, the next thing I want to learn and delve deeper into is understanding what dark UX is, from my understanding so far it is using UX to manipulate the user to do what you want.
One example can be how Facebook creates these Memories pop-up sometimes in order for you to post more content which in turn makes Facebook have more website activity. Another example would be how Instagram gives notifications when someone likes your photos and how easily you and others can see the number of likes and followers you have. This pushes people to feel good when they get likes and crave it each time they post, it almost becomes somewhat of a competition between people on who can have more likes or followers.
We will never know exactly if this was the true intentions of these sites but for sure these are effects that we are currently seeing.
Lastly, what would I tell myself or someone who is just trying to get into UX?
Well from what I have gathered in this article is that it would be just to talk to people about it. Meaning that you should join a community or show interest in others since it's always way easier to learn something new with others compared to yourself. Let's compare these two scenarios, either you start your own UX project by yourself, have no feedback and overwhelm yourself with the amount of work needed for that project or, work and learn with others so that you can focus on certain parts of the UX process and get feedback on your work immediately.
