User Interface Designer

User Interface Designer Career

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A User Interface Designer makes technology easy and intuitive for people to use. User Interface Designers work on the areas where users directly interact with technology, such as the images on a computer screen or the layout of a car dashboard.

Your job as a User Interface Designer is a combination of research and creation. You figure out how a user would want to use your product, then see how those preferences fit with your product’s function. For example it takes many different programs to make your computer turn off when you click the “shut down” button. In that process, a User Interface Designer was responsible for figuring out how users would access that command.Depending on the size of your company, this testing phase might be conducted by User Experience Researchers. If thats the case, you’ll just drop off your initial designs to the researchers, then wait to hear their feedback on how it went over.

Your next step is to incorporate user preferences into basic models of designs, then test those models by watching users try to use them. In the “shut down” case for instance, perhaps you tried “shut down” as a pink button in the middle of the screen in one test, and buried it amongst obscure files in another. Through these tests you discovered that users hated these buttons. They wanted an unobtrusive button that was easy to access.

This should lead you to a better design, as in this case where the “shut down” command now appears as a gray button in the left-hand corner of your screen. Once you find your conclusion, you polish up your work, put it in with the rest of the package, and send it along to a soon-to-be-happier consumer.

How do I become an User Interface Designer?

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There are two trajectories to consider in becoming a UI Designer: if you want to work on computers, or if you want to work on objects that are not computers. If you are a UID for computer programs then you fall into the broader category of computer programmers, or someone who writes the code that underlies digital programs. One of the degrees below will help you start in this field, or a related position like Information Architect. If you want to work on other things, like airplanes, then your path could start with Industrial Designer. This is a field where you are designing and making objects rather than programs. For that check out an industrial design degree.