Is UX Design Hard to Learn?

Learning UX design can often be challenging. How difficult you’ll find it to learn UX design, however, often depends on whether you’re transitioning into it from a design background or a development background, or whether you have no experience in either.

As someone with a background in design, you’ll likely find that your knack for elegant aesthetics—and mastery of typography, color, illustration, and imagery—will be highly valued within the UX sphere, but you may find the more technical aspects of UX design foreign. Adding research, testing, and even coding to your skill set may require you to stretch yourself in new directions.

As someone with a background in development, you’re more likely to find that, as you begin learning UX, you won’t have to stray too far from your comfort zone. In fact, the biggest benefit of learning UX might be how organically it extends your existing experience as a Developer. Although UX design spans many more platforms than the trusty browser, web design is, of course, still a massive part of the job; BrainStation’s Digital Skills Survey found that 74 percent of UX Designers who responded are designing for the web.

User experience spans every single interaction that users have with a product, so for someone coming from a programming background, learning how to think like a UX Designer means learning how to look at products with a broader scope. While many Web Developers are likely to have been involved with designing, prototyping, and testing their products, learning the more thorough iterative UX design process can be illuminating.

UX Designers have to juggle a huge number of considerations (visual design, user research, content strategy, usability and accessibility, information architecture, and overall business goals) while also knowing how to effectively steer a project and communicate findings to a broad array of stakeholders. Attaining a comfortable level of expertise may prove more challenging in some of these areas than in others, but rest assured that improvement in any one of them translates into improved performance in the others as well—any Web Developer would benefit from having a more holistic understanding of the products they’re creating and how users are interacting with them.