My baby steps into the world of Product Design!
By: Siddhant Saran
Tags: Design Thinking, Begineers, Product Design, Interaction Design, Careers

Hey everyone! Siddhant here. I hope all of you are safe and doing well. Its hard time out there but there is always a brighter side to the story… We certainly have got time for self-care & personal development(Well! for most of us). This is my first post on Medium. I have always been a creative thinker in my head but could not express my thoughts with proper words.

But here I am today writing this article only because I found people who trusted me. The most ironic thing about it is that I have never met them! Yes, sounds funny right? I am talking about the people from Interaction Design Foundation. It’s an educational organization that produces open content and Open Access educational materials online with the stated goal of “democratizing education by making world-class educational materials free for anyone, anywhere.” The Interaction Design Foundation is the biggest online design school globally and has over 80,000 graduates. It has been 2 years since I have been a part of this awesome learning community and it has done wonders to my design career, providing me a plethora of knowledge in the field of design and taught me how human centered design has changed the history of the world just by thinking from the perspective of you know who…our users!

I got introduced to IDF when I looking for career options during the second year of my college. I was attracted to user experience design only after reading IDF’s post on What is User Experience Design. Although I have always been a lazy bum doing meaningful things has always given me the drive to get up and work. User experience design gave me that drive where I could have the potential to improve the quality of life of billions of people.

I am a Fashion Communication Graduate from National Institute of Fashion Technology. Yes! Fashion… you must be thinking “But how come from a fashion background to UX Design?” That was in my mind too initially but after going through IDF’s website, they gave me a ray of hope that no matter from which field you are, until and unless you have the zeal to learn from human behaviors and an unbreakable will to make a change in the society you can be a User Experience Designer too! Then slowly the magic happened when I started studying the basics of user experience and interface design. When we had to go for Summer internship in June 2019, I successfully got selected in a Design and Development Design Studio in Gurgaon as a UI/UX Intern. That was a turning point in my journey as a designer which could not have been possible without Interaction Design Foundation as whatever little I could talk about User Experience Design in my cover letter and in the interview was because of IDF. My perspective towards design changed and I apply the principles of user experience design in everyday life too. I learned that every interaction you have with the stuff around you is governed by UX Principles. A very interesting book The Design of Everyday Things by the father of User Experience Design, Donald Arthur Norman which also helped me think about user experience design in everyday life.

But the learning didn’t stop there. I continued to expand work on my knowledge in UX Design and earned certificates on Become a UX Designer from Scratch and Design Thinking: The Beginner’s Guide and grabbed the distinction of Top 10% in class around the world!