Beginner's Journey in UX Design #01

As a person with graphic design background having mostly done print designs, moving into UI/UX Design (User Interface/User Experience Design) one may think it wouldn't be too different from the traditional medium. However, it still poses its range of challenges, especially having to navigate through troves of information on the world wide web to learn while on the job. Even within UI & UX itself, while they relate closely to each other, I've come to understand their roles and tasks coverage are quite different. 

UX Design stands for User Experience Design, which mostly deals with understanding the needs of users, their interaction with products/services, and the process of researching and developing products/services that are easy to use and valuable.

UI Design stands for User Interface Design, which focuses more on the visual aspect of the product/service, decisions on what the product would look like and how to make it visually appealing, hence dealing more on the aesthetics side of things, closer to graphic design.

As Mockplus puts it:

UI is how things look, UX is how things work.
UX is a process, while UI is a deliverable.

A Full Guide on the Differences Between UI and UX Design

In Goalist, we have a product called jopus career, a job hunting service where we assist foreigners who are looking for jobs in Japan. Though it has been slightly over a year since its release, we're still constantly making improvements on it to continue ensuring the service meets our customers' needs.

jopus career | Work in Japan!

In the past few months our team have been talking about wanting to do a more thorough user research; going out to the field, asking foreigners in Japan about their job hunting experiences and to better understand how we could help ease their process of looking for a job in Japan, which can be rather overwhelming especially in a place where the language, culture and etiquettes are different from back home.

And so, as part of the product development and design team, that has been what I've been working on recently - UX Design. It's pretty much my first time dipping my toes into UX Design, so along with the developers on our team, we've been digging online, learning about UX Design and user research before we actually head out for field work.

To get things rolling, developer T-san introduced this UX Designer online course and we've been carving out bits of time from our schedule to learn. 

UX Designer

We started with Dive into UX Design course, where we learnt about what UX Design is, its role, key concepts, how to embrace thinking as a UX Designer etc. It's packed with a lot of references and useful information, and definitely helps establishing a basic foundation before we go into topics like user research. 

In the upcoming posts, I'll be sharing the things learnt from this course as well as other resources we've been reading up on to help make it a digestible reference for my future self, as well as for team mates and those who may at some point find themselves on a beginner's path like I have now :)

Till the next post! ✫