Stories on career shifts often commence with the phase of regretful choices. Mine’s no different. Like every clueless Science student in India I had this dying urge to hop onto the Engineering bandwagon. Four unhappy years later, I landed a job at an analytics firm. Here, I worked primarily for a Fortune 50 retail client, using descriptive and predictive analytics to enable the business to take decisions related to financial planning. (If this sounds confusing, you could instead assume I was a secret midnight ninja. )

In addition to the analytical learnings, I learnt to be much more articulate and concise while ideating and summarising my findings (Lessons from a two-line PowerPoint talking header), functioning in a team, paranoia towards errors, organisational behaviour and about the relevance of a beginner within a scaled organisation, to name a few.

Sarcasm aside, I have my first job to thank for helping me figure out what it was I wanted to do for a living. Although Harvard Business Review said Data science was “The sexiest job of the 21st century”, I was in search of a job I actually loved. Analytics is often advertised as problem solving using big data, but the stake analytics has in the solution although essential, is limited. Data often served as a trigger for identifying problems and measuring results, but it felt like analytical vendors often had to take a back-seat in this discreet phase between the problem identification and result measurements. I found myself often pondering over this missing bit. The decisions that were taken in this mysterious phase were data-driven I’m sure, but equally took into account qualitative details that data analysts weren’t trained to pay attention to.

The design bug:

Half-way through my stint, I heard the big fad word large organisations often use to distinguish themselves to clients. No, not ‘agile’, ‘lean’, ‘disruptive’ or ‘growth hacks’. (I heard those words much sooner.) The entire organisation was abuzz with the term: Design thinking. The idea/ belief/ process of designing for people’s needs. But, wasn’t that obvious? We were all designing dashboards for our client’s needs, proactively adding metrics they’d love to look at. Or metrics we thought they’d love to look at. Design thinking meant deliberate knowledge of the end-user’s needs, not assumptions of it. The more I read about design, the more I felt it align with problem solving. Design, in my head was no longer merely about aesthetics, but included functionality as well. While analytics was a key ingredient in problem solving, it was not the dish itself.

I’ve always loved analogies (even mediocre ones like the above sentence), satire, humour and telling stories. The confluence of these interests with my new muse- design resulted in my first wireframe of the lowest fidelity imaginable. A satirical take on the fleeting nature of Social media empathy.

On the fleeting nature of Social media empathy, right after the Paris attacks in 2015

I quit my job after a two year stint and worked on a project on senior citizen’s safety, before deeming myself fit for a design job. Fast-forwarding the phases of self-doubt, anxiety pangs and an uncorrelated vacation, I landed a job as a designer at NFN Labs. Over the course of my last 6 months here, I’ve learnt a great deal about UX and UI (including the now obvious difference between the two terms), got rid of my phobia for visual design ( do check out our minimalist wallpapers here) and most importantly, realised how much more there is to learn. Analytics still plays a role in my day-to-day work in the selection and measurement of metrics to evaluate website and mobile app performance. I have greater clarity on my end-goals and I’m no longer greeted with confused reactions when I articulate them.

I envision myself designing products that help solve pressing problems.

Over the upcoming weeks, I hope to document more details about my life as a designer. Primarily in an effort to push myself to generate content worth writing about.