How will you start your working day as a UI/UX designer?

Research activities take many forms. You might do observational research of your users in situ. For example, if you are designing a system for a supermarket, you might hang out in a supermarket and watch people shop. You might interview people in person or over the phone, conduct group workshops with users and business stakeholders, run a survey or look at site statistics. Basically, you spend a lot of time working out how to get inside people's heads to figure out how they think. Then the magic happens. You take all this data that you have learned and draw insight from it. Look at everything you've seen and heard... what does it all mean? If mothers with young kids look like they have a hard time getting through the shopping without being harassed by their children, so what? What is the insight from this that you can use to spark genius in your design? Once you've got your insights you need to put them to use in a design. In years gone by the designs were pretty much limited to what you see on the screen, but now UX is closely related to CX (customer experience) so you need to consider the real world impact of your design. Once you've drafted a high level design you should test it. This is a skill in itself, as you need to know how to observe suers interacting with your design without steering them in a certain direction, and without being defensive of your baby. You should test it with real live users, and then refine it, and test again, in an iterative fashion. This prevents you from going too far down a design path that doesn't work. At all times you should be working hand in glove with the technical team and business stakeholders too. Co design with all parties, the user, the business, and the tech team, yields much stronger results than designing in isolation. UX is an incredible field to have a career in. You will develop a well rounded set of skills that you can apply to many different settings, and you'll also develop great interpersonal skills too. It's a challenging career, but also incredibly rewarding. And it tends to attract a really nice bunch of people too, so chances are your colleagues will be warm and friendly and you'll enjoy working with them. UX conferences are the only conferences I've been to where everybody greets one another with hugs and kisses in the lobby! read less