Breaking into Tech Stories 3: Becoming a UI/UX Designer from English Major

My tech journey started in March 2020 – a few weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic. I had just gotten a Content Developer job at a digital marketing agency. This marked a significant shift in my career path since I graduated college as an English major.

The job required me to use a lot of software and tools for content creation. The first software I used were WordPress and Canva. They seemed very strange and gibberish to me. I did a lot of research and learned on the job. It was not easy, and I was very frustrated.

My go-to platform for ranting was Twitter. I completely forgot my boss was following me on Twitter until he sent me a DM. It was a link for a Zuri Team Scholarship. He wanted to encourage and motivate me to take courses that would make things easier for me. From my Twitter rants, he saw how I had been struggling with design, and the scholarship would be a huge help.

Around the same time, I found an article on material design, a design language that sits between UI and UX design. I fell in love with it. My boss saw me reading the article and advised I learn UI/UX design first.

I did a bit of research on UI/UX design – a no-code tech career. From the beginning of my tech journey, I knew coding wasn’t for me. I had seen how my colleagues struggled with writing codes and all the stress they went through. I did not want that for myself.

The Zuri scholarship was a four-week program, and I was lucky to be accepted. 

I worked full-time, attended school part-time, and still made time for the scholarship courses. It was a very hectic period in my life. In spite of the stress, I scaled through. I graduated with good grades in school and finished the four-week program with a 77% grade. 

Due to moving to a new state, I quit my full-time job and got another one. 

In December 2021, I decided to upgrade my UI/UX skills on Coursera since I had time on my hands—the new job was stress-free. One of my colleagues enabled me to achieve this. 

Coursera helped me learn the basics of UI/UX design, and learning on Coursera showed me how broad UI/UX is. Eventually, I had to choose a niche, and I chose Material Design. After a while, I realized that UI Design (the visual aspect) was not my forte. Once again, I focused on my strength, which turned out to be UX Design.

At my previous workplace, I had learned how to design on Canva, so I had the brilliant idea of supplementing my design skills with lessons in Adobe Photoshop. That is probably one of the most frustrating things I have ever done. It was so difficult to make sense of the software. I still can’t wrap my head around using it.

One of the courses I took on Coursera required the use of Adobe XD, which reminded me of my struggles with Photoshop. Coursera gave me free eight-month access to Adobe XD, but I couldn’t use it because the interface wasn’t as simple as Figma. Nevertheless, I still found the learning experience fun and exciting. 

I always look forward to learning new things about Design, especially wireframing, prototyping, content writing, and research. 

Discovering design inspiration platforms like Behance and Dribble was a game changer. I uploaded my projects on these platforms and started pushing myself (even while knowing my work was still crude). These platforms helped me to hone my craft. I also follow a few design folks on Twitter to keep my morale high.

I still struggle with designing web apps, and I am working on learning that as well. 

This is my breaking into tech story. It’s been a series of twists and turns that have led to more self-discovery.

I’m learning and improving myself daily, which is something you can do.

PS: Breaking into tech stories are personal journey stories of people who have transitioned into tech, especially from non-technical backgrounds.