What Can I Expect From a UX Designer Role?

For young professionals feeling indecisive about the next steps in forging a design career, navigating the opportunities offered often involves researching emerging fields. Degrees, professional certificates, and advanced courses equip students to tackle the ever-changing landscape in tech and design, and continuing your education at Tulane School of Professional Advancement can help you confidently define your path as a design professional. Learn more about common expectations for UX (user experience) design roles across industries and other career options in graphics and media you can qualify for with an education from a world-renowned institution.

UX Explained

First coined by former Apple cognitive scientist Donald Norman (though the concept can be dated without this moniker decades prior), UX design delivers value to businesses by narrowing the scope of work to the user experience. That's right—the sole objective of UX design is to create a seamless user experience. As the market, consumers, and technology steadily evolve, companies must shift focus accordingly to maintain a successful business. Follow this scenario to get a clearer picture of UX design in action:

Stacey, a young office manager, has moved into a new apartment with a larger-than-average custom-built kitchen island. She wants to furnish her dining area as soon as possible, so she Googles "shop barstools online" and finds an online furniture retailer with a healthy inventory of barstools in various colors, heights, seat depths, and other features. Unfortunately, she can't filter search results on the retailer's website. She isn't interested in the dozens of product listings of standard-height barstools, but instead just wants to browse those with seat heights above 24 inches tall.

This is just one problem that UX designers can address within their daily responsibilities in a given role. If Stacey can't easily find the barstools she needs on the retailer's website, she'll move on to the next search result for "shop barstools online" to shop for new seating with ease—which makes her "lost business" to the original website she landed on. Stacey decided to take her online spending to another business that offered a better user experience. This doesn't just apply to websites, but also products, events, and other offerings from businesses on and off the internet. SoPA's UX/UI design track offers courses that help students build their fundamental digital design knowledge, build expertise with crucial design software tools, and curate attractive portfolios.

Enhancing the User Experience Day-to-Day

User experience issues aren't tackled the same way they're created. To mitigate oversight, UX designers follow defined processes and workflows to address these user roadblocks, which may require approaches that follow timelines that span days, weeks, or longer. A single project can require rounds of competitive research, customer profiling, prototyping, testing and iteration, and analysis. Though the approach may be layered, lengthy, and sometimes elaborate, the goal is simple: make the product accessible, usable, and enjoyable.

Begin Your UX Design Journey

Whether you're changing course or delving deeper, Tulane School of Professional Advancement will help you connect users, products, and key business stakeholders by equipping you with the skills needed for competitive UX designer careers. Students enrolled in our Digital Design program can choose from education tracks in Interactive UX/UI and graphic design, in addition to options to obtain minors in either discipline. Start your application today to take the first step to a cutting-edge education.