The phrase “user experience” was coined in 1988 by cognitive psychologist and designer Don Norman. He was also one of the first user experience or UX designers at Apple. As the name suggests, a UX designer is responsible for giving the customer a satisfactory experience of any product. Olivia Swaminathan has been working as a UX designer for the last seven years. After graduating in retail and exhibition design, she did her master’s in UX design from Loughborough University in the United Kingdom. She is currently working as a UX designer at Adobe. Fatema Sohangpurwala asked her about the dos and don'ts of pursuing a career in UX design.
q What is user experience design?
UX design is about understanding what the client wants for a particular product, what they want to showcase on the official website, how they want to communicate about it with its core customer base and then providing recommendations to meet those business goals. Typically, UX is divided into multiple steps. First research then analysis, design and testing.
q What does a UX designer do?
Say, there is this product and the company behind it wants to build it in a certain way, depending on who is going to use it. For this, they would need the services of UX designers.
q How did you come to know about this line of work?
For my bachelor’s, I studied retail and exhibition design after which I worked as a retail designer. But I realised that I was more interested in the research side of the industry, which included understanding the market and the users. After some looking around, I learnt that whatever I liked was a part of UX. So I did a very short certificate course in UX from a design school in Bangalore called DesignBoat and then proceeded to do my two-year postgraduate course.
q How many years of study does it require? Is it an expensive course?
You can do a certificate course that lasts between three and six months and teaches you the basics of design, mostly pertaining to colour and typography. But you won’t understand the why of things. The better option is getting a degree from a design school because there you are taught everything — right from how to draw a straight line. It teaches you the meaning behind each of those lines, the meaning behind texture and a lot of things that we use in our day-to-day life. The undergraduate course for design is for four years. If you haven’t done your bachelor’s in design, go for a master’s course. Such courses tend to be expensive.
q What did you learn in your postgraduation course?
I learnt the techniques and methods of researching for UX design. I learnt that UX design is beyond apps and websites and can be extended to service design and system designs. The course focussed on the research aspect of things.
qWhat is the basic qualification required to apply for a master’s in UX design?
You have to be a graduate. If you are creative and good at problem-solving, critical thinking and innovation, you can explore UX.
q What are the career opportunities here?
There’s UX research, interaction design, digital design, system design, UX writing, UI design and UX strategy. UI is short for user interface design that is the process of building interfaces in software or computerised devices, focusing on looks or style. Other job roles are customer experience designer, service designer and user researcher. If you’re interested in the marketing space, you can get into the marketing side or even product design.
q Name some top institutes in India where one can study UX design.
Some of the institutes are the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad; MIT Institute of Design in Pune; Symbiosis Institute of Design in Pune; Srishti Institute of Design in Bangalore; Indian School of Design and Innovation in Mumbai; as well as IIT Roorkee and IIT Hyderabad.
