What nobody told me before I became a UX designer

How I ended up in design

Looking back a few years, I never would have guessed how my career would turn out.

I always wanted to work creatively – as a photographer, or maybe a media designer. I got lucky and came across a game studio in my hometown, where I first did an internship before working as a game designer alongside school.

Looking back, that was probably the best time of my life. It's a privilege to live with your parents and carry zero responsibility :-D. Unfortunately, the game we developed never found the success we'd hoped for, so the plan to start a formal apprenticeship as a game designer fell through.

Applications for apprenticeships at other studios didn't work out either, so I decided to study game development, with the big vision of eventually developing my own games. That's really where my journey into development began. What fascinated me most were PHP, JavaScript, and working with databases. Databases just make everything possible! Yes, unfortunately that includes exploiting security vulnerabilities.

When I was tinkering with code at work, I especially liked refactoring, optimization, and of course frontend. That interest eventually led me into my full-stack role at KMH GmbH.

For KMH, I designed and built a company website and worked out an employer branding concept, which I implemented through photography. During that time, I also helped build our corporate design.

It didn't take long before we built our own marketing team, and my responsibilities shifted more and more toward product development. It got especially exciting for me afterward, when KMH asked whether I'd be interested in taking responsibility for product design and moving into the role of UI/UX designer.

I took on the challenge without hesitation.

What I misjudged at the start

At that point, I had a pretty clear picture in my head of what UX design was. I thought it was mainly about designing interfaces, making them visually appealing, and making sure a product felt good.

That's exactly why the first while felt confusing.

As part of my transition, I did a UX certification and dug deep into the fundamentals. A lot of it revolved around processes, research, understanding users, and structured approaches. Design in the classic sense played a much smaller role than I'd expected.

Honestly, I had quite a few question marks in my head at first, because it didn't match what I'd imagined the role to be.

Over time, that changed.

The more I engaged with the material, the clearer it became to me what UX design is really about. It's more about making well-founded decisions.

That shifted my perspective quite a bit.

I noticed that this is exactly what interests me: understanding how people use products, where problems arise, and how to develop solutions that actually work. Design is a part of that, but not the starting point.

What I especially appreciate about it: the work isn't limited to digital interfaces. You think about usage situations, about processes, about context. That made the whole thing much more tangible than I'd expected beforehand.

Studies, expectations, and reality

Alongside work, I started a degree in communication design, thinking it would help me on the design side. I found the content interesting, but I fairly quickly noticed that it only partly matched my actual work.

A lot of the content interested me, but the direct connection to my role was often missing. At the same time, I realized that a lot of things can also be learned outside of a degree program, if you go looking for them deliberately.

That made me reconsider my degree and eventually switch toward UX design. The timing worked out well, because the program's curriculum had just been revised and included many topics I already knew from practice and from my certification, but wanted to understand more deeply.

Combining work and studying still wasn't easy. The effort involved is noticeably higher than I expected at the start. At the same time, it was the right decision for me, because the content is now much closer to what I actually do and want to learn.

What I see differently today

Looking back at how I got into UX design, my biggest misjudgment was defining the field too strongly through design.

Today I see it in a more nuanced way:

• UX design is based on understanding, not taste
• Decisions should be justified, for example through metrics
• User context matters more than visual trends
• Design is a means, not the starting point

That sounds simple, but really understanding it took me a while.

I now work as a UI/UX designer and feel like I see much more clearly which direction I want to develop in. The path there wasn't straightforward, but that's exactly why I take so much from it.

Above all, I'm grateful that I had the chance to develop in this direction and try things out. At the same time, I've gotten a better sense of what I'm capable of and where I still want to grow.