Interestingly I caught myself doing something which I was not even aware of. It was not straightforward for me to pursue UX design, that too after spending more than a decade in software development. To make it easier for readers I have two versions of this story: Long Story and Short Story.

Short Story

My journey to UX design has been an accidental discovery. I was interested in building products from scratch, I tried creating products but I was never successful in that. Even though I failed in creating a product I learned that there are ways to validate your product idea before you launch it. Not only validate how can you create products that customer would use again and again.

While working on my product ideas I used to interview customers document them and create prototypes. When I came out of my last job and looked back I realized that designing software is something I was always doing in the background and I was excited in doing that. If it was happening as 2nd priority in my life than why can’t be it the priority number one?

Long Story

My decision to take up UX design was an accidental discovery which I found out during Introspection of my past.
Let me share my story, to make it easy I like to divide my life into two lives.

First life was doing everything which I was told to, looking around and seeing what others are doing and designing my life around out that. I wasn’t the smartest kid neither in school or college. Most of the decisions I took were a safe decision and following the path of others. Took a safe path and pursued engineering and landed up with a job in a software company. After completing my engineering I didn’t want to work in software, because I never liked programming in my engineering curriculum. The reason I didn’t like programming is that I didn’t see the creative side of it. During engineering it was always about writing programs for palindromes, reverse a string etc. Due to which I didn’t get excited about it. My first job after completing engineering was as a customer care executive. There were some great lesson learnt there and till this date I value experiences gained from there. After working in customer care my parents pushed me towards pursuing software engineering. Although I was not convinced to do that the decision to work in software didn’t turn out to be bad at all. This is where I met a geek inside myself.

During my first job, my assignment was to create a web application which will be used by HR employees. The fear of programming was always there. When I saw that by writing a few lines of code we can see working web page. This really gave me an adrenaline rush. Yes - for geeks it’s exciting. The process of creating something which will be useful excited me so much that I realized programming is just a means to achieve an end goal. I worked hard on that project but my first project failed because as a team we missed all the deadlines. I was excited about software development but my project failed. This was a tough situation to be in but I keep showing up. I keep pressing managers, directors of my company that I want to be part of software development. I was pushed into a maintenance project which was down looked by others. There also I did my best and contributed to existing source code. It was fun too.

As my excitement grew about software development I learned by looking around that one must keep growing and work in popular companies. So I started hopping job to find great work and workplace. One project after another and I was lucky to work in so many development projects during my job. There was a joy in creating software which someone will use.

My first job in software development was at Pyramid IT Consulting followed by working at Tata Consultancy Services and later I joined Microsoft as a full-time employee in the development support team. Although my job at Microsoft was not into software development however I learned how to troubleshoot problems, help a developer who is stuck in his code. The job was not easy and the experience was worth it.

While the geek inside was not satisfied I continued looking for other jobs. I will also share a sad part of the story. Most of the places I quit working was because of the environment around me. I was always dealing with tough managers who were always after the deadline, working in tight supervision and never gaining my individuality and freedom.

While I was searching for a great place to work I realized that my idea of working in large size organization is not working out great. This is where I got a job offer from Neudesic for Senior Consultant. I was excited because I was joining as the second employee for the Bangalore office. They already had an office in Hyderabad.

Although the start at Neudesic was not great because I was used to luxury in a bigger organization but I kept my patience. This is where I met Mr Ashish Agarwal who is the founder of Neudesic India. We have had long discussions and I got to understand the vision of the company that he wanted to create. The purpose was to create a Consultant focused company in India. When I heard his vision I realized this is what I always wanted. All the companies I worked in past except Microsoft I never got a chance to work independently. Most of the companies I worked in had a management layer. I never liked the culture of organizations I worked in past. I followed escalation processes to get things fixed but I learnt things are not flexible. When I looked at my frustrations of work culture and kind of company that Neudesic is going to be I decided to stick there and contribute to it.

The reason why Neudesic was great because they knew how software has to be made. Neudesic knew that bringing management hierarchies in creating software is not required. I saw a Consultant focused company built in front of my eyes. There were hurdles in growing the company but we kept going and I saw it becoming 120 people company in 8 years.

So what was I doing all those years? At work I was learning at a rapid pace, I learnt agile software development, mobile application development using both native and hybrid approaches. I invested in learning REST Api’s, Microservices, Domain-Driven Design and got a chance to use all these in projects too.

While all this was going on at job there was a life running in the background also. I started reading books, about entrepreneurship and philosophy. The founder always motivated employees to create a new product or build great things. This is where I started thinking about creating new ideas and building a product. I used to pitch ideas to the founder of my company but most of those got rejected. I realized that my ideas are inspired by a geek inside me and it doesn’t have a place in the market. I kept trying putting my ideas in a presentation but none of them impressed anyone. After failing so many times in coming up with an idea or product I started looking into what’s happening in the startup world. One of my college friends: Shreekant Pawar was building a startup focussed on diabetes. I was inspired by his story.

I was in a difficult spot because I knew how to build software but I had no idea about the business side.

Neudesic was a place where we used to discuss cool ideas. Me and one of my close friends from Neudesic came up with an idea: Mobile app for yoga instructors. By using this app people can find yoga instructors around. Using my development tools I came up with a prototype.

Behance Link.

Although my friends were impressed by the idea I had no idea how to make it a reality. After failing to kick off with my idea, I realized that doing all this I am losing the trust of my friends and family. This is where I started working on the education part i.e. how to make ideas real?

I started learning about Lean startup, buying books in Lean UX. I started with Customer development processes and started meeting owners of small business. My idea was to create a mobile app using which anyone can find: Yoga Instructors Fitness Instructors Beautician around Apart from Customer development, I started interviewing people and recording data and observations. I loved the idea of interviewing people to gain insights. I felt that knowing users is a superpower.

While I was excited about interviewing, customer development and creating prototypes I failed to make it as a product. I can give reasons for it but I know I couldn’t make it work.

After failing several times to create a product, I didn’t give up. I continued my focus on idea validation. I still remember around 2015 there were a bunch of startups for home chefs. I also came with a product idea similar to it. I created a landing page to test the idea and run facebook ads to market it. Although the landing page looked good it didn’t get any traction. Luckily this time I didn’t waste too much of time i.e. only creating a landing page.

Apart from focussing on building a product idea I was also pursuing philosophy. Every one of us has the desire to be happy but our minds make us suffer. The desire to be happy and a quest to know the meaning of life led me to study and read a lot of books. I started reading the biography of Steve Jobs, I even read some of the books he read one of them was a spiritual rollercoaster: Be here Now. Those books influenced me on a spiritual journey. I read about Zen Buddhism, the story of Buddha, Meditations. Books from Indian spiritual master: Osho and finally when I read books from Jiddu Krishnamurti my spiritual shopping came to an end. Books from Jiddu Krishnamurti made me look deep inside myself. I like the way he asks question making the reader go deep inside themselves and find answers.

After reading books from JK I realized that knowing oneself is a never-ending journey. If we are interested in knowing ourselves than we can understand others too. The reason behind is everyone has the same mind. The suffering of fear, anger, hate everyone goes through the same emotions.

Neudesic was a great place to work because I had friends with a similar mindset. Apart from discussions about work I had friends with whom I used to have philosophical discussions. I liked going to work every day and felt excited.

There were two dominant themes in my life:

1. Learning Philosophy
2. How to create a product.

I am not an expert in User Experience, I know that psychology is deeply rooted in UX design however I think if we know ourselves then that’s the first step to psychology. The desire to know myself and parallels in understanding users is one of my reasons to pursue UX. I like to know about others, how people behave in a certain situation, whats are their motivations.

My second life started when I came out of my job. I could have found another job in software development but I paused myself. This is where I decided to begin a new life i.e. Second life hence this blog.

One of the discoveries that happened after coming out of a job was when one of my friends called me to participate in a design thinking exercise. He wanted to create a new product from scratch. I used the opportunity to the best and I contributed by interviewing users and helping in creating a prototype. All this was done in one week. When I saw the potential that if we can achieve a lot in one week it further strengthened my belief to pursue UX design.

I knew about UX design but when I started reading more and more about it, I realized that I was unaware and a lot of the things I was doing in the background belonged to UX design.

I started learning Design Thinking and taking up courses in UX. While I continue to establish myself as a UX Consultant writing this story helped me in understanding myself and gaining clarity on my decision making.

What’s Next

The Story doesnt end here, I keep working and I will continue sharing the logs of my journey to UX.