Why do good UX professionals pick the wrong companies?
My past UX career decisions and the lessons I learned
“Why do I always pick the wrong guy?” “Should I choose the man I love over the one who loves me?” — I realized that cheesy relationship tips you read in magazines like Seventeen or Cosmopolitan can apply to our career choices.
My life motto is “Give it a try before overthinking.” I’ve always found that experiencing things firsthand is the key to true understanding. This mindset led me to actively explore different companies to expand my horizons.
As a result, over the course of my 18-year career, I transitioned through a total of 7 companies, spanning large corporations, startups, and agencies.
I consider myself lucky to have found UX, as I genuinely love understanding people and creating meaning. However, finding a company where I can do what I want was not easy.
In this article, I share my career journey as a UX professional, recounting moments of choosing the wrong companies for the wrong reasons, and discussing the lessons I’ve learned from these experiences.
1. When I chose “The popular one”
Upon completing my education in Japan, I started off my career at a leading corporation, widely favored by Japanese students.
At that time, I harbored no doubts about this decision, as the company’s reputation among others held significant sway over my choices in my younger years.
Yet, it didn’t take me long to realize the substantial gap between a “favorable job in others’ eyes” and a “job where I can be happy.”
The reason this company was popular was that it is a large, established company that had shining success in the past. It had significant downsides.
Everyone in this company, graduating from top schools, believed that they are “the elites,” which means they think they know what they are doing and can create the best products without external inputs, fundamentally contradicting the wave of user-centric design.
When smartphones became widespread and the era of apps emerged, they felt the necessity of doing UX, but they didn’t have any idea what UX is. So they did what big corporations do — they simply launched a “UX department” and transferred some people into it, without a clear vision.
I remember conducting competitor research, comparing products and calculating the time it took to send files. It turned out that Apple products were faster, and I reported the results. The stakeholders were extremely unhappy with it. They asked me to change the settings and test it again so we could report favorable results to higher-ranking individuals.
I realized that the UX they wanted to do was simply about telling others that we were doing something cool. They were not genuinely interested in understanding customer needs; it was mostly internal politics.
Feeling the need to pursue a UX career in the right manner, I knew I had to leave that company. So, I did.
2. When I chose “The company in crisis”
This IT giant was facing challenges of losing market share because they were not well adapted to the era of mobile. They were actively hiring UX professionals in need of shifting the company to a user-centric culture.
During the job interview, they mentioned that they needed my help, and I thought I could bring meaningful change to this organization.
But alas, as the common relationship advice goes, “don’t try to be a martyr and save your man.” One person can’t save a company in crisis without C-level dedication and clear action plans.
After I joined this company, they placed me in the “UX department,” where everyone was studying UX theories and hosting seminars on Lean startup and design thinking.
I was eager to start the actual work, but they simply said, “Find a product team yourself.” I then had to go through another round of in-house hiring processes, only to be rejected with comments like, “We are looking for a designer who can create UI using Photoshop.”
They believed that hiring UX staff and establishing a UX department would magically solve all their problems. But they didn’t even know how to apply UX principles, and their product teams didn’t even need a UX designer.
It was a painful realization for me that my idea of saving a company in crisis and being a hero was quite naive.
3. When I chose “The say-yes-to-everything company”
This marketing agency had just won a huge-scale project that required revamping all of the client’s digital touchpoints, along with other significant clients’ work.
They were actively hiring UX practitioners from all around the APAC area. They kindly offered me a job and relocation to Hong Kong, which I have appreciated up to this day.
The first task assigned to me was an awareness campaign. I designed a microsite to encourage visitors to use a hashtag and share their stories. For me, it was the first time working on a campaign, which was refreshing and interesting.
However, I soon realized that working on campaigns was not something I wanted to continue doing. As a UX professional, I needed to represent the users, but creating marketing campaigns meant amplifying what corporations wanted to convey. I was not addressing users’ problems.
I even felt a bit guilty about creating digital content that would be short-lived, as campaigns typically don’t have a lasting impact. I desired to create enduring experiences that could bring meaningful and lasting effects to people’s lives.
Then my next mission was to build a food and beverage platform for a hotel chain. It was a large-scale project with a relatively high budget, so it seemed quite odd to me that no research had been conducted, and decisions were being made solely based on the client’s desires.
“Why do we need this platform?” and “Do people even want it?” These were my major concerns, but the client had specific visual requirements regarding the style of visuals, the grid layout, fonts, and spacing even before clarifying business needs.
I sensed something was not right. Shouldn’t we be discussing why we needed to build this platform, who the target users were, and what kind of success we aimed for? It seemed like we were saying yes to everything because, as an agency, there was no reason to turn down a large budget project.
Without an understanding of users, we were creating digital waste. That million-dollar platform has now been taken down and cannot be found.
I desired a workplace that values the importance of research and truly considers how to proceed correctly, rather than simply accepting any budget offered and moving forward without a solid foundation.
4. When I chose “The company with unrealistic expectations”
I was eager to delve into user research, and this luxury fashion company proposed that I join, mentioning a huge ethnographic research project was underway. I was thrilled.
However, after I joined, I was surprised at how things were managed in an old-fashioned manner, and they seemed to lack knowledge about running an online business.
Once, their server went down, and no one attempted to fix it for a week. Customers harshly complained on our social media platforms. In my past experiences, when a server goes down, people panic and fix it as soon as possible. Nobody took this seriously, and I was shocked.
When I visited stores to understand the staff’s needs, they all mentioned that the Wi-Fi frequently went out, leading them to ask customers to pay again — a challenging request, particularly when our products often cost thousands of dollars.
Upon redesigning a few pages and seeking estimates from developers, they claimed it would take 10 months to complete, which clearly defied common sense. They continuously made excuses for why they couldn’t proceed, resulting in none of my designs being implemented.
The ethnographic research project that I was promised involvement in was managed by an external agency, with internal stakeholders simply issuing commands to them. While the results were insightful, no one knew how to effectively apply them in real practice. We ended up spending a significant amount of the budget on creating fancy reports.
My boss consistently blamed me, saying, “You should do more,” implying that my salary was higher compared to local employees. He requested that I should fix their messy logistics process, a task I could assist with by identifying current issues, but it was not feasible to change the way of work without proper support and commitment from other parts of the company.
Once again, I realized I couldn’t save company single-handedly. Expecting UX designers to resolve not only digital product issues but also existing logistical and governance problems without any support, particularly when their IT maturity is significantly lacking, was unrealistic.
5. When I chose “The company where promotions were the top priority”
This e-commerce startup showed passion for truly understanding diverse needs in different markets, valued my expertise in user research, and multilingual capabilities.
At the start, design decisions were made based on analytics, user interviews, surveys, and testing results. I contributed to crafting the company’s product vision out of research findings, which led to business expansion. I was glad that I could fully utilize my capabilities.
However, we were then drawn into endless promotions. Our clients, mostly fashion companies, ran special sales 2–3 times a week, requiring us to create promotional banners and direct emails, and refresh the homepage each time.
We noticed that promotions drove significant sales and began investing less in user research. They asked me to conduct surveys, as it was considered the most cost-effective way to understand user needs.
I did my best to derive meaningful and actionable insights with a minimum budget. While my teammates seemed impressed by my findings, they did not act upon them, which was a frustrating experience for me.
One time, I presented the issue that most customers around the world struggle with comprehending sizes in inches provided by the US company. I strongly insisted that we needed to add sizes in centimeters, but this obvious item took 4 months to implement.
It was hard to understand why such a simple task like adding centimeter sizes was considered a major hassle and required 4 months to develop, especially when it is a critical factor for the purchasing experience.
Due to our primary focus on promotions, I ended up spending 90% of my time creating banners and direct emails. I was producing 100 banners daily for multiple clients in various markets. I started to question if this was how I should be spending my time as a UX designer, which ultimately led to the decision to leave.
This marks my UX journey of repeatedly falling for the wrong companies. Yet, I have no regrets! I am grateful for the valuable lessons I have gained from these firsthand experiences.
In short, my lessons learned:
- Keep exploring your options; make one change at a time.
- Pursue what you want, not what other people value.
- Some companies want to hire UX personnel just because it looks good; don’t fall for it.
- Don’t blindly trust everything that companies promise. Evaluate if their words match their actions.
- You can’t save a whole company by yourself. Check if you can get sufficient support.
- Always ask “why?” to yourself and your teammates.
I hope my story resonated with many readers in this field, and I would be pleased if you could take something away from it.
Feel free to share your experiences. Thank you for reading!
