For today's lecture, we had a special guest Ronan mckinless to give us insight into the UX industry. While working in the industry for 20 years Ronan worked in smaller and bigger companies including Apple and Carlsberg. He discussed what designers we can be and where we can take our careers in the future. We learned the differences between UI, UX, digital, product and service design. when creating the end product we have to be aware of how the “form function”. Larger companies have a larger network and lots of collaborative work but it can be sometimes hard to reach and can sometimes be hard to be recognised. In smaller companies you have a bigger role in a smaller workforce, you connect with the team and there is more focused work.
In-house designer you are creating and designing to facilitate the business, it can be hard to change the design as it will have to be passed by many different people, this can be less stressful and you work as a smaller team, working with these brand can create a brand recognition for CVs and the future. When working in start-ups you will have more responsibilities and a range of design areas eg research and customer feedback.
There are many different ways that we can work in this industry including, part-time, full-time, no time. looking at freelance it is harder to start young in this industry as you will have to have a network of people to be successful.
a book that Ronan mentioned a book which I took a further look into. 0-1 on entrepreneurship good strategy bad strategy
<aside> 📖 design of everyday things
</aside>
During the first chapter of the book Norman starts by describing the frustration that many people my have when interacting with the everyday objects that are poorly designed, he argues that the well designed objects should hint at how you use them clearly, this is what he calls affordances. good design should be obvious and intuitive so that it reduces the cognitive role to understand the object. Norman discusses the importance of user centered design, and describes that impact of well designed and poorly designs objects. after reading this chapter of the book i am going to get another person to navigate my app to see if it is user-centered design and easy to use. To further my learning over the summer break i want to continue reading this book.
<aside> 💡 I found this lecture very interesting and scary at the same time, but getting an insight into the future and what career paths I can take is exciting and I am excited about the future. when discussing the different routes of career paths such as UX, UI and research I would like to find what I want to pursue in the future, looking at what I like I focus on and enjoy working on the branding and the design areas of UI design which I will like to aim for.
</aside>