BA Geography, UCL
User Experience Designer, Accenture Interactive
I’m currently a user experience (UX) designer at Accenture Interactive, the digital agency branch of Accenture, a technology consulting company. My job involves helping companies to create better experiences on digital products such as websites and apps that can either be external (customer) facing or internal-facing (targeted at their employees).
I work in project teams with other colleagues and usually start with conducting user research, which involves speaking to people who use these digital products, to understand what their frustrations or pain points are. We then synthesise the insights gathered from user research and present these to our clients, then jointly come up with ideas for tackling these challenges. A big part of my job involves prototyping, where I come up with models or screens of what these new features or processes could look like in the digital product we’re working on – this is a quick and easy way to mock up our ideas and test them with people to make sure we’re on the right track. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve seen my design skills improve steadily over time!
Not many people know this, but I studied geography in university. This may come across as surprising to some – on the surface, the work that I do day-to-day doesn’t appear to be directly related to my degree. I picked geography at the outset because I was drawn to the broad nature of geography as a subject, spanning everything from explaining weather patterns to helping us critically think about our consumption habits and understand our attitudes towards societal issues have been shaped. At UCL, I was particularly interested in human geography topics and enjoyed learning about the history of geography as a discipline, as well as how it has evolved owing to different schools of thought.
Geography has in fact equipped me with transferable skills that have really helped me in my career so far – particularly in writing and qualitative data analysis. Apart from design skills, a lot of being a UX designer is about clear and focussed communication to the people you work with, whether they’re in your team or are your clients, to make sure you get buy-in of your ideas. Writing essays on a regular basis at university has helped me to develop my ability to formulate cogent arguments, while learning about different methods of data collection and how to theme and analyse these findings has been incredibly important for user research. Above all, studying geography has instilled in me a love of learning through reading widely, and given me the confidence to seek out different materials and tools for understanding best practices in UX design – as this is an ever-changing space.