What is your UX ambition or goal?

Are you aiming for something specific with regards to your career direction? Is there a UX star that you’d love to meet? What is your ultimate UX goal?

Mine is to build the most engaged and organically growing UX community in the world.

Currently I’m focusing on becoming a better UX designer - identifying my strengths and weaknesses so I can develop a T-shape skillset, learn more UX concepts and techniques, and get more projects and experience under my belt. :slight_smile:

Well, my dream is to do some studies on interaction design, after that to work for a while as a UX designer in my country, and then change to freelanceing. But, now I’m focusing to develop my ux skills.

I want to get into doing some real world UX testing and see where it leads. And to get back to doing good design, that makes a difference.

You stopped doing good design? :wink: Or you stopped doing design at all?

Hi Hawk, I work in a situation where there are account managers between designer and customer. This skews massively the whole design process. Design is seen as giving them what they want, not what they need. I want to get back to face to face interaction with customers. Where the process begins with finding out their needs and solving their problems with good solutions. This is why I find UX so worthy, its so much easier to convince design merits if user data backs it up. The I like/don’t like argument becomes unsustainable when faced with this information. P

Interesting point. So you think it comes down to form vs function almost? Do you think that there are times when ‘pretty’ design has to be sacrificed for the sake of good UX?

Hi, I think commercial design is always about compromise, I see it as fashion & function. For example a website can’t be all pretty and high brow design, without proper function. Equally if you present a simple functioning site and don’t think of its visual look, it will end up bland. Too much design is closer to art and has no commercial consideration. Am just listening to Matt & Luke talking on an earlier podcast, where they talk about letting go of the design and sharing it with everyone, becoming a design facilitator more than just the designer. This makes so much sense, even though it can be difficult, I always feel that showing why something works better, is much easier than, simply saying ‘trust me Im a designer’. Also I feel a lot of us designers don’t have the selling skills to convince people of design merits. We may know for example that a simple change to a button or font will make a massive difference, but convincing the stakeholders can be difficult. A UX process from the start give a solid base to the entire process. And if everyone buys in then hopefully everyone gets it. P

My goal is naturally to expand my career. At present I am a generalist with my hand in a lot of different things - eventually I would love to become a specialist in a more specific area.

I’ve getting some inquiries about graphic facilitation lately, and it’s something I’d like to get more confident at and better at. It’s one of many natural directions to go with UX skills, I think—visual thinking and using sketching to communicate. It’s always come naturally to me when working on my own; now I hope to improve my ability to apply those skills in a group environment. :slight_smile: