From journalism to UX to user-centered thinking

I’ve spent half of my working life being ashamed of my “non-designer” educational background. I started working in technology when I was at journalism school. Back in the day, (2007) IT careers were better paid than the few attainable jobs for journalism available in my city, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Due to my personal situation, I had to work from an early start, so when studying at school I took whichever IT job I could. I’ve spent some time doing data entry, or even got a job as a domain registration lookup, a quality assurance or ‘tester’ and even did some content moderation for websites. But It wasn’t until I finished college that I landed one of my first jobs doing web design.

I found out at a very early point in my career, that web design was something that I was good at. I did some work designing websites or playing around with Dreamweaver, but I always believed that I could bring more to the table. I also always felt a void about not being able to include my journalism background into my work. I sometimes had the chance to write my own content so it’s not like all was lost, but that never felt enough. At that point, even though I knew I could profit from Design, I never felt that web-design (or at least what web design was at that particular time) was ultimately my true passion. I knew I needed a change in my career path, but felt lost because the only available positions were “Designer” or “Art Director”.

As I started to cultivate my professional life, I found out about UX. In hindsight, UX was a real life-changer in my career and also in my personal life.

I will never forget the first time I heard a colleague tell me about her job description as a Uxer and what User Experience was. She was the first UX I knew! At that point I knew I had to do anything & everything in my power to work with her…

I couldn’t believe it, it was the first time I felt like my educational background could be put to use. It was also the first time I felt that I could mix my two worlds: Journalism and Design. Even though I never felt that web design was my passion, from an early age I painted, sculpted, or even doodled every free time I got so I always knew that I wanted to pursue a creative career. I just chose communication instead of design…

My first years as a designer, I spent them in the Advertising world or around Consultancy type companies where designers were king. I will never forget how every time I went to a job interview, all the recruiters asked me exactly the same question: “But wait… I can see that you are a journalist, why would you apply for this position?” or something like “Why are you not working as a journalist”? I remember always feeling not so comfortable about saying that I wanted to work as a designer just because I had to pay the bills. I guess that after 3–5 interviews I got a speech prepared about how since I didn’t want to work as a journalist, and I’ve learned about design software at journalism school I decided to pursue that instead. Recruiters were always happy with my answer, but there was something inside me that never felt right.

Was I lying to the recruiters? Was working as a journalist something I wanted to do? Or was I lying to myself? I also remember feeling ashamed amongst designer coworkers when trying to defend my work.

I know that the impostor syndrome is something quite common in our field, but I always felt as if it had an entity of it’s own in my work life.. as if I was less than.

What UX means for me

It’s funny though, what started out as a way of paying the bills, turned out to be the best thing that happened in my life. User experience was a way of connecting all my passions. Thanks to all those different IT jobs I had, I landed my first UX job. After that, the rest is history. I rapidly got a chance to work as a consultant for an International Company and that positioned me as a professional. I not only learned everything I know today about design there, but I also discovered the importance of being interdisciplinary.

As I started changing jobs throughout the years, I discovered how my journalism techniques gave me an advantage in the UX field. I soon started thriving in strategic consultancy and had a deep user-centered understanding. I once read a medium article that said that there are many overlaps between journalism and UX, and I couldn’t agree more. For instance, since I had a lot of ethnographic practice in college, I was always the first to push research methodologies in my projects.

A change in paradigm

As user’s evolve, our job positions start to evolve as well. Now we have an array of different specialties that a Uxer can do, like UX writing, Ux Research or Interaction designer. Being a ‘Uxer’ now is not the same as what it meant when I started out. Actually, a lot of designers always joke about the fact that when we started out, we were doing some “UX” work but without calling it UX.

I’ve been leaning my career in the last few years towards consultancy and a mix between Ux Strategy & Service Design. I’ve also started being more active in the community and attended a lot of Service design & UX events. I must confess that in the last two years, I have seen the Design community here in Buenos Aires evolve as well. And it was in those events where I finally saw the change in paradigm for how we value our field.

We now have a better understanding of what makes a team actually work, and we embrace interdisciplinary and a co-creative team spirit. We also now gather that we can -and should- add different backgrounds to IT teams such as psychologists, journalists, philosophers, anthropologists, and that therefore just like the DXS’s motto was “Design is not just something for designers”.

Thanks!

This post was a long one, but I just wanted to share a little bit about my career and how I got to where I am today.