The Designer I Wanted to Be

This fall, at Ironhack, we are introducing a brand new UX/UI bootcamp. Despite this writing has nothing to do with that — well maybe a little bit, but more on that later, it is a great segue to a more personal story that recently has brought back some memories from my 23-year-old self.

The launch of any new product at Ironhack always involves the industry from the very beginning in order to craft an educational experience that trains students with valuable skills for employers. Since we started researching for this new bootcamp, we have already met with a lot of companies to understand their needs, reached out to dozens of experts to iterate on the curriculum or gathered our industry friends to discuss the importance of UX.

Because of it, I would say all the team is right now pretty fluent in UX parlance. But at a personal level, from the beginning, I was especially passionate about this new bootcamp. I kept providing resources, apps, blogs, people doing great work in the field… and consequently, my team kept asking me the (reasonable) question: how do you know all of this?

And I know all this stuff because believe it or not, when I was 23, fresh out of college, I wanted to become a UX professional. Maybe back then I did not coin the exact UX term, but it was crystal clear to me that I wanted to be the guy who designed the interactions with products.

Crafting the experience, what actually happens when you tap that button, felt absolutely mind-blowing to me. Back then I did not understand how this role played out within a team or if it even existed inside a regular company, but I loved the idea of designing a holistic experience: Design with capital D.

But despite this has been a recurrent theme of mine after college, it is obvious that I have failed to become a UX professional. Life routed me to other paths, but the obsession with interaction and design, has stuck with me in every single thing I did.

That is the reason why regardless I have been pulled away from explicit design roles as my day job, I have always tried to embrace design principles when making product and business decisions. I quote from iomando’s design recap I wrote last summer:

During my years at iomando I understood that design is a much more profound concept than “how it looks”. To me, design means falling in love with the problem. You are really designing when you break the problem down to pieces and get to the roots of it. Because getting features out of the door is an easy task, but getting the right ones, the ones that are really solving a problem in a meaningful way, that is hard.

Yet this precise thing, the joy of building great products and putting them in the hands of people is the ultimate reason why I started this company. And my job, every day, is to just try to instill this enthusiasm in every single corner of iomando.

We built an entire company around this foundation because we deeply cared about what people experienced when they interacted with our product. That is exactly what I mean with “embrace design principles.” I loved the idea of designing for experience, and despite I could not allocate all my time to this endeavor, I have always made sure we were putting attention to the last, smallest detail. I think I put it much better in here (emphasis mine):

I co-founded iomando almost 4 years ago with just one goal in mind: building an amazing product and putting it in the hands of people. That’s all I cared about. I was thrilled watching our customers fascinated by the fact that they were able to access their parking, factories, or whatever place, with their mobile phones. That feeling was the fuel that kept me going, and to me, the most tangible expression of happiness, aside from my family.

Crafting this experience, building something that people were actually in love with, has always been my guide, my little contribution to the world.

I have countless examples like these. But going back to the point, despite learning some of this fascinating stuff on the side, and doing my best to deliver a great experience in everything I did, I did not become the UX designer I wanted to be.

Back when my professional career started, I did not know where to start. I did not know what the hell a UX job was. Plus I was afraid because it was not clear to me how I would get a job out of this. It was 2011 and some industries have changed a lot since then, but I am sure nowadays someone who wants to become a UX professional, still shares the exact same fears.

Luckily for all or them, there has never been a better time to be a UX designer. I keep hearing people talking about UX and how we desperately need to put more care in the products we design. I hear it and read it over and over again. How we need to humanize technology and ask ourselves whose problems we are solving. Without a question, the demand for these skills is right in front of us.

As technologies commoditize entire product categories and industries, the experience will be the differential factor that will drive the next generation of successful products. The information age has brought us stuff that we could not even imagine a few years ago, but it has also overwhelmed us with tons of products and data.

Now more than ever, we need to allocate time and resources to make sure the products we build are actually useful and aimed to address real needs. Circling back to the beginning of the post: what an amazing time to be a UX designer.

It made me think a lot about my 23-year-old self.

The doubts I had back then, and what would have been of me I had pursued that path. I wish I had found a program such as the Ironhack bootcamp to kickstart my career back in 2011 because I was not brave enough to go on my own. The frustration that derives from knowing where you want to go, but not where to start, is usually the precursor of giving up.

Looking back it seems that all I needed back then was somebody to trust. Somebody that clearly knew what was talking about and could light the path up.

Maybe a mentor, or maybe a program that not only would teach me how to build stuff but also connects me with the industry and create the opportunities so I could get a job at the end.

I have never thought of that from this perspective, but this is exactly what we are doing at Ironhack for our students.

UX designers have one of the best jobs in the world. It is a job for the curious minds, a field that nurtures itself from countless disciplines spanning from Technology, Psychology, Data Analysis… being in this intersection must be fascinating.

I could go on and on, but for you, aspiring designers of the world, you have been presented with a unique opportunity to become the UX I have always wanted to be.