UX design is making the world a better place - it humanizes technology. And I guess that’s the core of why I think that being a designer is such a blessing. Here’s how I came to be one.

It might sound cheesy and naive (and it surely is), but as a former boy scout, doing good deeds was a big deal for me. And leaving the world as a better place than it was before was a goal I always strived for. Our local scout organization was named after Martin Luther King, and so we heard a lot about what a single person can achieve to better the life of many. So, I dedicated quite some energy to giving back the good experiences I had with the scouts and in Judo by becoming a honorary leader and trainer in these fields.

In addition to the scout values, I inherited some graphic design talent from my father who was a retoucher (it’s someone who does all the things that Photoshop can do with real hand tools, from a time before pixel editing was a thing), and I figured that putting these graphic design and illustration skills to use for the betterment of mankind and the well being of myself would be a perfect win-win situation.

So while I studied communication design, computers became more and more a normal part of our work. But special software for designers was pretty hard to use sometimes, and that always bugged me a lot. So, applications and web pages at that time had been hand-crafted by people that specialized in coding stuff, oftentimes without any knowledge about usability or appealing design.

I saw this vast, rotten land of uglyness and found that it could use the purifying light of design knowlegde, and so I specialized myself in UI design - it was an interesting new field that seemed to have infinite possibilities, and it affected hundreds of thousands of users every day. Perfect for doing good deeds all day! ;)