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I love creating. I love to draw, sew, write, make home movies, and make music. And over the past year, I’ve learned that I love design—making Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop high priorities. I’ve also been learning how to create 3D designs and animations with Blender.
I even started a self-guided UX design course. I was on a roll; I was making progress, but about halfway through, I lost interest. Which leads me to this perpetual struggle of mine: seeing things all the way through, task completion. (Though this may have something to do with the sheer number of tasks I initiate in the first place.) Since I’ve abandoned my mini UX/UI designer dream, signs have come up time and time again, telling me to continue to pursue it.Yet another sign was sent to me the other week when Product Manager, Mathew Krizmanich, came to present to my marketing seminar class. Mat shared how he got started in product management and went through the roles and processes involved in product management and development––one of which is UI/UX design!
After sharing his journey with us, Mat took us through the product management process in greater detail:
1. AUDIENCE RESEARCH
Talk to people, get feedback.
Observe your audience. Watch how they behave and interact with products and services.
2. Understand Challenges
Consolidate your data and analyze it to identify and understand your audience’s challenges.
Develop personas, journey maps, theming, information architecture.
3. UI/UX Design
Develop your wireframe to establish your product's structural foundation.
Develop your high fidelity design. Your design should be usable, clear, compelling, recognizable, innovative, and accessible.
4. Build and ShiP
Establish and outline requirements, technical stack, integrations, timeline for development.
Build the final product.
Test the final product on your audience.
Repeat the process until your product is finely tuned.
The way that Mat laid out the project management process made the role of UX/UI designers all the more clear. It is hard to imagine what working in UI/UX would really be like, but it really is a collaborative process. I think what made me lose interest in UI/UX design before was that it seemed quite boring, tedious. But most things are quite boring when you’re a beginner and you have to learn the rules and basics before really getting into it.
Mat's presentation renewed my interest in UI/UX design, and product design more generally. Having the whole process laid out, helped me to visualize the design and development process in a new way. Especially with the clear passion Mat has for what he does, it feels like this fresh, exciting aspect of work in advertising that I hadn't considered. It inspired me to see some of my personal projects all the way through to the finish line, to not just stop at the wireframe. That week, I finished sewing a bag I’d had sitting in my drawer for months and I finally got to shading and rendering one of my 3D designs.
Final 3D rendering of shell design
It’s even more motivating to know how connected UX design is to marketing. When I chose to take this digital marketing program at George Brown, I was pretty unsure. But I knew that there were good jobs in the field, so I didn’t give it much more thought than that. As graduation nears, I'm starting to feel that same anxious feeling of not being any closer to a solid career than when I started. Now, to understand that work in design and other similar creative career paths are not so far away, I feel affirmed in my decision to study digital marketing.
Sometimes it’s hard not to panic and think of things as sunken costs when all the time and resources invested don’t pan out the way you think they will. It’s good to be reminded that everything we do, in some way, can help us get a little bit closer to where we’d like to be. Even when we don’t know what we want, we won’t know what we don’t want until we really try.
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