If you talk to 10 people about how they found themselves working in the user experience field, I guarantee that you’ll hear 10 different meandering pathways into the profession. Personally, it’s one of the reasons why I enjoy working in this field. I have the chance to collaborate with people who were trained or educated as philosophers, social scientists, computer programmers, architects, librarians, artists, bakers, psychologists, educators, and journalists, among others.

From my perspective, this is a feature, not a bug. These various backgrounds provide us with different lenses through which to view our work. When we take these perspectives into account, our work and its outputs become stronger as a result.

Take my unique background and pathway as an example. I hold a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in information science. Both degrees helped me to understand language as an advanced technology that can be applied to solve problems, clarify issues, and accomplish goals. When I began my career, I spent years applying my skills and education to the museum and archives field where I developed and designed exhibits around our museum’s artifact collection for visitors of all ages.

Now that I’m immersed in the UX field, I appreciate the fact that I was able to develop and refine my design skills within a physical space using 2- and 3-dimensional artifacts. Looking back, I can see how this experience prepared me for this next level in my career. Below, I identify 3 areas of my work as an exhibit designer that influences my UX practice today.

Practicing content-first design

In recent years, some UX professionals have begun advocating for a content-first design approach where digital product teams consider content early in the design process instead of leaving it to the last minute. In museum exhibit design, designers must incorporate content at the beginning of the project because the exhibit itself cannot stand on its own without it.

Imagine entering an exhibit gallery space where nothing is on display. No artifacts, no artwork – nothing except labels and text panels. I can’t imagine that visitors would linger for long.

For museums, content is king. And when I say content, I mean those artifacts that make up a museum’s collection. Those collections can number in the hundreds of thousands of artifacts (sometimes millions). When we design an exhibit, we start with an idea for a topic and then perform an audit on the collection to find artifacts related to that topic. Then, we identify a small group of artifacts that we think will support the overall narrative we’re trying to tell in the exhibit. Without those artifacts, our exhibits would be a lot less interesting and informative.

My experience in designing museum exhibits around a group of curated artifacts naturally led me to a content centered design philosophy. I used design to highlight the exhibit’s content, not the other way around. Extending this to my UX practice, I believe that the design of an experience should enhance and highlight the content that people seek. Content is the reason people use digital products and platforms in the first place.

Helping users achieve their goals

One of the main reasons people visit a museum is to see its current exhibits. Those exhibits are unique because they’re highly mediated experiences, as Jennifer Trant explained in her article “Emerging Convergence? Thoughts on museums, archives, libraries and professional training.”

“Unique artefacts are presented in an exhibition space, assembled according to a curatorial thesis and sequenced to support an argument or illustrate a theme. Within a gallery, didactic educational materials provide context and meaning for the works chosen, offering an interpretation and explanation for the visitor. Labels both identify artefacts or specimens and explain their relevance to a particular context within an exhibition. … Visitors are strongly guided through collections.”

Jennifer Trant

To achieve this, subject matter experts work with curators and exhibit designers to translate high-level, specialized material into an exhibit that anyone can visit and come away with a good understanding of that subject. People shouldn’t need an astrophysics degree to appreciate their visit to a planetarium. The ultimate goal for an exhibit designer, then, is to create something that will walk people through complex topics, ideas, and issues and allow them to learn something new along the way.

As a UX professional, I work to create something that will help a user achieve their goals, whether that’s to find a product or make a bill payment. Sometimes, the best way to achieve that is to create a mediated experience that will walk the user through the process of finding that product or making their payment. Little did I know that learning to design a mediated museum exhibit would train me to create a better onboarding experience for a new customer.

Asking the right questions

Every museum position I’ve held in my career gave me the opportunity to interact with our visitors daily – greeting them, answering their questions, and collecting as much feedback about our museum’s exhibits as I could gather. This proved to be excellent training for my later work in UX research.

I learned through trial and error that visitors would only give me helpful feedback when I learned to ask better questions. If I asked, “How can we make this exhibit better?,” the answers I would receive wouldn’t yield the helpful, applicable feedback I hoped to hear. Every time I spoke with our visitors, I had the chance to refine my questions to gather the feedback that my team could use in our next design.

On top of that, receiving immediate daily feedback helped me to develop a thick skin when it comes to design critiques. Sometimes, feedback can be sharply critical, but I’ve learned to accept it for what it is. After all, the feedback is not about me personally – it’s about the design.

This is not an exhaustive list. It only scratches the surface of how my experience prepared me to become the UX professional I am today. How did your early experiences influence your UX career?

Photo by Christian Fregnan on Unsplash