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Learning a new language could help you become a better UX professional
Lessons learned from my personal experience with language learning and working as a UX researcher
I enjoy learning languages. I think it’s part of an inherent curiosity I have that is pretty crucial for people who work in UX research. During certain periods of my life I had to learn languages as part of my mandatory schooling growing up in Israel (specifically English and Arabic that I had to learn on top of my mother tongue which is Hebrew). In other times later in life, it was completely by choice when I decided to learn Spanish, Italian, and French using different methods that were available during these periods (e.g. university courses, private classes online, books, apps, and some international travel). Realizing the power of languages as means of communication I even decided to run two language exchange programs in the universities where I studied for my undergrad and my master’s degrees in order to experiment with this revolutionary way of teaching and learning languages and watch how other people do it.
Nowadays, working in the field of UX in a bilingual city where English and French live side by side (Montreal, Canada) I came to the realization that learning a language can give you some great advantages if you are a UX professional of any kind (e.g. researcher, writer, or designer). Do you ask yourself why? Simply because it could help you get into the right mindset of thinking from another person’s point of view. Here are the main reasons why.
It makes you learn about another culture — As a UX professional, your role is to research and understand your users, and eventually design a product for them (which can sometimes be very different from your initial idea). A language is an expression of a culture and it is an indispensable part of it. That’s why when I took an Italian course in the University of Verona back in 2009 it was called “Corso di lingua e cultura Italiana” (Italian language and culture course) since you really cannot separate one from the other. During the course we spent quite a few hours learning…
