How I shifted from art marketing to UX
My journey from a Communications Manager in fine art to a UX Designer in tech. It’s never too late to make the change.
A year ago, I decided to fully shift my career focus to UX design — as my “new year revolution”. Luckily enough, I successfully transitioned from a Communications Manager in fine art to a UX Designer in tech by self-taught.
I found a lack of resources and anecdotes for people who come from the fine art industry switching to UX design, so I want to share my challenging yet rewarding journey, to help guide those who seek to transition into UX, but don’t know exactly where to start.
Why I left the glamorous fine art industry
After I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, I worked as a Communications Manager for world-renowned international art galleries for about 3 years. Being able to travel around the globe to meet talented artists and art collectors was eye-opening and fun, yet I felt a dark foreboding cloud following me everywhere I went.
The gist of the problem was the scope of my work:
- I worked for creative artists all the time, but I was rarely able to use my own creativity in work
- The fine art audience is not that big, especially in the for-profit art world, I was only able to connect with a small group of people
- As a Communications Manager who was responsible for both communication design and marketing campaigns, I mostly worked on “old-fashioned” media, like printed newspapers and magazines, but I was more into pixels than offset printing
In fall 2017, I encountered the term “user experience” for the first time, when working with external web designers and developers to set up an e-commerce website targeting art book lovers in Asia. It was a refreshing experience for me. I found myself more excited when illustrating user flow and discussing the features with the designers, rather than mapping out branding strategies and calculating the ROIs.
After that, I talked to my supervisor and expressed my will of participating in more UX/UI design initiatives. Fortunately, my supervisor was very supportive and encouraged me to work on the gallery’s Hong Kong microsite design and global website redesign. I got able to conduct competitive analysis on my own, create wireframes with my colleagues, and even set up design A/B tests.
Over time, my desire to fully transitioning into UX design became clear. I also want to connect with and work for a more diversified group of people, and keep up with the media and technology trend. Thus at the end of 2019, I finally decided to say farewell to the fine art industry and take the leap.
Keep asking, keep reflecting
Similar to many other people who seek to enter the UX realm, in November 2019, I started my journey by enrolling in some online courses on Udemy and Coursera. Since I already had tactical experience in responsive web design, I focused more on courses that introduce mobile UX design. Most of the courses only taught basic knowledge of human-centered design, however, they helped newcomers to UX to get an overall picture of what “user experience” means and what does UX-centered process consists of.
Along the way, some questions popped up in my head: How to approach different design components for iOS and Android? How to better leverage the personas to inform my design decisions? How to ensure accessibility in design planning, execution, and handoff?
I was able to find some of the answers by reading online articles, however, I still felt uncertain if I fully understand some of the issues. I started to reach out to alumni who are in the UX industry, via Linkedin and friends’ referrals. Having quick coffee chats with people who are already in the industry was truly helpful — not only I learned how people utilize UX methodologies in their daily work, but also gained a deeper understanding of how cross-functional teams at tech companies collaborate in general. That was when I started to realize:
Cultivating my UX research and design skills through individual design practices can help me knock into the UX world, however, in order to build a UX career in the evolving tech industry, gathering more practical experiences by collaborating with people across disciplines is also essential.
Through mentors and friends’ referrals, I took on side projects for both 2b and 2c companies to enhance my skills of collaborating with cross-functional teams more effectively. It was crazy when chasing my daily work deadlines while chasing my client’s project deadlines at the same time. However, I could sense my progress in both design thinking and design execution: I was able to form more compelling stories on my portfolio, I was able to critique digital applications from the user perspective, and I was able to tackle problems discovered in the first place while meeting business goals all the while.
Your previous experiences are precious to help get where you are now
Not having a formal degree in HCI or digital design can be a barrier to get the first UX job, but can also be an unexpected advantage to help you stand out in the market.
In March 2020 — right at the beginning of the global pandemic, I started to interview with tech companies for the UX Designer role. I observed some patterns: there are a few companies that hire junior designers care about whether your degree matches their expectation; however, many other companies are much more interested in your practical design experiences rather than your degree, even though a lot of them listed “HCI degree preferred/required” in the job descriptions.
Getting interviews from both established tech giants and startups gave me the opportunity to improve my storytelling and presentation skills, more importantly, it helped me realize that a lot of the employers were actually very interested in my prior experience in fine art and digital marketing, and they appreciate my broad experience collaborating with people across cultures.
Two months later, I accepted an offer from a top-ranked tech company in the San Francisco Bay area. I was thrilled to officially start my adventure as a UX Designer, and to me, all my previous experiences come into play to define me as an art and design professional.
Looking back, I would say nothing is wasted time. Every professional experience, every skill I acquired in the past, play important roles in how I am as a professional right now.
Discover your competitive advantages, and use them!
After intensive studies on different aspects of UX, it is easy to nod and say “Yup, now I have diversified skillsets that make me qualified for most of the entry-to-mid-level UX roles”. And that is great! But how can you distinguish yourself from all the well-trained candidates in UX interviews? In other words, what is your uniqueness of being a marketer-turned-designer versus designers with other backgrounds?
I mainly used 2 ways to continuously discover and grow my competitive advantages:
- First, apply transferable skills in design practices and job hunting
The experience from the previous career will almost always be an asset if it is well utilized. My backgrounds in fine art and digital marketing provided me with plenty of transferable skills, including soft skills such as empathy to customers, time management, stakeholder relationship management, and teamwork; hard skills such as extensive knowledge of visual design guidelines, ability to communicate ideas and tell stories in an articulate and lucid manner, and ability to drill down insights in data through analytics tools.
I strived to utilize these existing skills as much as possible when working on design projects and setting up my portfolio. For instance, I created a set of illustrations and inserted them into my portfolio case studies to showcase my visual abilities. I also demonstrated my quantitative analysis skills by explicitly listing the UX success metrics and corresponding outcomes.
Figuring out and utilizing your strengths in a new job field is not easy, but if you can get to a place where yours has true meaning and power, it gives you a valuable advantage in everything you do.
- Second, conduct UX skill self-assessment periodically
Every other month, I used the provided sheet in this article to do UX skill self-assessment by giving myself a score in each of the 18 UX sub-disciplines. In this way, I tracked my UX learning progress, and gained a clearer idea of how to proactively “sell” myself to different types of companies.
When interviewing with companies that seek candidates with solid research backgrounds, I presented case studies that can best showcase my thorough understanding of UX research methodologies, and my ability to use synthesized findings to inform design decisions. When interviewing with companies that look for candidates who can also handle visual design initiatives, I emphasized my visual background and aesthetic sense by giving concrete examples.
However, there were times that I inevitably exposed my shortcomings — some companies prefer candidates who understand front-end coding, and I had zero experience in that. It was frustrating that some good opportunities slipped away because of this weakness, but after following up with some hiring recruiters, I realized that the companies didn’t really expect all UX Designers to ace programming languages, yet they preferred well-rounded candidates that can work seamlessly with the development teams.
Therefore, I booked an hour on my calendar every day to learn online courses that could broaden my technical knowledge. Right now, I am still not a designer that you would ask to code, but I can confidently say that I can collaborate with the engineering team to ensure feasibility during all the design phases, and I always keep technological constraints in mind.
It’s critically important that a UX Designer has no real weakness in skillsets — after all, in the highly competitive tech industry, every employer is looking for talented UX designers that can handle different kinds of projects.
Be a lifelong learner, as a curious person, and as a UX designer
Transitioning your career to a new role in a new industry takes courage, but it’s not intimidating at all, as long as you hold the belief in lifelong learning.
Like many people, even though I struggle to balance that we have limited time and capacity to keep learning while meeting all the work deadlines, I still believe that growing skillsets and learning new things can help me become a better person.
Being a UX Designer allows me to connect with a diversified group of people in a resonant and emotive way, and it teaches me to always be empathetic, always be curious, always think about the world from different angles.
Maybe a few years later, I encounter some other exciting career opportunities and I will dive into the new world without hesitation — who knows? Being curious and open-minded will always be a blessing, and I’m thankful for all the accompany, encouragement, and opportunities I received along my career adventure.
