Choosing a niche in a (maybe??) saturated market.

Back in 2005 it happened, like so many things in our careers, without really meaning to. A financial institution client of ours, really a conglomerate of Midwest-based banks, needed a UX Designer… did we have one? We did. Same with Microsoft’s Grand Rapids office a couple of years later. Back then, there weren’t any cool specialized tools to buid things like sitemaps, wireframes, even user personas. We built those artifacts with programs like Microsoft Visio and Adobe Illustrator, exported things here and imported them there. We did what web developers did a decade before: we made the tools that existed work for what we needed.

From non-made-to-order solutions to beautiful, beautiful dedicate UX solutions. The market has changed much in the last decade.

Back in the early 2000’s, Cascading Style Sheets were still coming into their own, at that time we used them to colorize default blue hyperlinks, and add hover colors. The web didn’t always allow that. We formatted our designs in tables (yes, like database tables) and we might use centralized style sheets, but there were certainly no dedicated web builders who built and optimized that kind of style stuff for us, that was YEARS down the road. And we were Web Designers, almost to a person. This was way, way before we had ultra-specialized seats in our agencies like UI/UX designers, Product Designers, Full-Stack Developers, and the like. 

The Specialization Happens (Slowly)

So at some point I’m a web designer at a small-ish midwest Accounting Firm/Consulting Firm in Grand Rapids, then suddenly we’re getting calls for user experience design (that’s UX, just like blogs are weblogs, remember??) I was filling that space for banks, Microsoft itself, Amway, e-commerce startups, they all were starting to see the appeal of this new User Centered Design, but how, why? That’s where we needed to come in.

I was still known on my old accounting firm business cards as a UI/UX Designer. At a certain point, everyone at least pretended to know what that meant. At around this point, InVision app came on the scene with an amazing UX Design/Prototyping application by the same name that changed the game completely. Adobe XD, Figma, and to a lesser extent the Mac Only design program Sketch all jumped into the deep end to capture some of the market share these programs didn’t even know was there a few years prior: User Centered Design in one great tool.

So at a certain point, I started describing myself as a UI/UX Designer on job boards like Monster and Indeed, and I started getting noticed. At some point schools like Full Sail University in Florida started designing courses specifically for UX Design. And as I’ve written about before, there came to be a certain nomenclature to the artifacts that we produced as UX Designers, and soon Product Designers, brought to the table. We started producing things like:

• User Personas
• Flow Diagrams
• Site Maps
• Wireframes
• Feature and Benefit Documents
• Prototypes
• High-res Prototypes
• Digital Style Guides
• Style sites
• Design systems

…and more very User Centered documents, often flagged under the category “Discovery”, in the new UX or User Centered Design workflow.

Initial Reticence in Some Circles

Although there was some reticence to adoption of ALL of these methodologies, particularly during the switch in Application Development circles to Agile Methodology, many teams are now singing the praises of both work methods and many articles (some of them here) have spoken at length about how they really do go hand in hand in design centered application development.

Indeed, many industry standard task tracking softwares like Asana, Jira, and Basecamp have adopted “official” design workflows that take into consideration both agile methodology and UX design.

Image Credit: Asana

Summing it Up

So the answer, after all that? I’m definitely a UX designer. You can see it in dark gray and white in my newest business card mockup up there, that means it’s an important part of what I do. And when I quote web design discovery and delivery these days, you’ll see a good portion of UX-related discovery right there at the beginning. Though time has already told this is an important way to effectively design and deliver on the Internet in this current era, the results show too in websites that are attractive, performant, accessible and easy to find.