In the shoes of a UX Designer - And is that actually a job?

Today, we meet Chloé, a 21-year-old student who joined the Digital Campus adventure in September 2021. She shares with us the key aspects of her profession: UX Designer.

As a UX designer, I mainly work on applications and websites.

Let's take your phone as an example. There's an app that doesn't work and you don't know why. You get no feedback, or it's too slow and you're struggling with it. That means the person who did the same job as me did it poorly. The goal is that when an application has good UX, you know where you are, things go smoothly, and when there's a problem, you get real-time feedback to guide you. You need to take care of the user — in this case, you.

In UX, since we are the first to work on a project, there is an ideation phase. It can start on paper, with what we call 'Zonings' and 'Wireframes'. These are really the early stages of the screens. So we sketch out our web page and place the blocks we want on it. There isn't necessarily any text at the start, and it doesn't matter if it doesn't look great. The important thing is to lay down our ideas and think about how we organise the elements on the page: on paper with a pen, and we use a lot of post-its in UX. You often see people in meetings moving post-its around — that's it.

No, thankfully — or at least I hope so. You don't need to know how to draw to work in UX. When we create our 'Zonings' or page layouts, it doesn't matter whether you can draw or not. A ruler works just fine, and even that's optional. Drawing matters more for the other side of the profession — those who focus more on creation, making logos and illustrations. For them, being able to draw is a plus. But for us, no — we're not expected to draw, unless you're in a start-up where you cover several roles at once. When things are properly structured, a UX Designer doesn't need to draw.