My UX identity crisis
Reflections from a journey transitioning into a strange new culture, and the search for belonging
Two years ago, I wrote an article about finding a voice as a non-traditional UX Researcher at Google. In it, I talked about my experiences transitioning from the world of architectural design and theory into Silicon Valley. Since then, I’ve heard from many aspiring UX practitioners through attending career events, mentoring interns, and reading comments on my writing.
In particular, talking to students has reflected back my own fears, uncertainties, and questions. It has resurfaced the parts of my experience that still need unpacking, things I’d tucked away for later and slowly let fade. All of this (and this article) has nothing to do with the nuts and bolts of becoming a UX practitioner. It’s not about nailing an interview or building a killer portfolio or running a flawless usability study.
This is about the anxiety of change, the confused loneliness of an evolving identity, and that ever-present doubt of if and where I fit in. A strange kind of impostor syndrome that’s less about competence, and more about belonging.
I think this is something that many of us in UX feel, but few of us talk or write about openly. I’ve wondered if somehow the emphasis on craft and method (and nailing an interview and building a killer portfolio, etc.) has drowned out this other, very real, side of transitioning into a melting-pot career.
I think we should normalize talking about these messy and unresolved edges. Not because there’s some magical advice out there (at least, I don’t have any), but because these stories can cut through the isolation that might cripple us when pursuing a new career. And ultimately, they can help us all feel a little less alone.
So this is my story of coming into a UX identity — three phases of discovery and the lessons I’m still learning.
I. Culture Crisis
I graduated from college at UC Berkeley, where I studied architecture, knowing I wanted to be anything but an architect. I was neither excited by nor very good at design, I was depleted, and I was much more interested in learning about humans than dropping them in as scale figures in my renderings.
This decision — an agonizing year in the making— was liberating and cathartic for exactly five seconds. Almost immediately, I felt like I was mourning a part of me that had suddenly died. Architecture was more than something I studied — it was a lifestyle that I lived and breathed. It had a secret language, a bond forged over sleepless nights, a shared set of aspirations, a ruthless and exacting delivery of criticism, and a characteristic way of seeing the world.
Whether or not I agreed with it (and I mostly didn’t) architectural culture was deeply embedded within me, and I within it. It had set the rhythm to my days and weeks — finding my cold metal stool in the studio each morning, hearing the drone of the plotters as the sun set, anticipating the familiar cadence of desk crits and pinups and reviews. I was going to be an architect, I had thought, and there was a sense of permanence and pride about it.
Once that was gone, I was left to grapple with the question: who was I outside of the studio? I didn’t have the vocabulary to define myself or what I was going to do next, no connections or role models, no clear path forward. For someone whose life had been so defined by striving for the next milestone, I felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore.
At the time, I pushed away these thoughts in favor of more productive things (like unhinged, late-night resume-dropping sprees). But I wish I had recognized that my feelings were valid. I wish I’d had given myself permission and space to process, to ponder, to take stock. I now understand that, just like evolving any other deeply rooted part of an identity, there was a grieving process for what was left behind.
It’s funny that we use terms like “career change” and “re-skilling” and “pivot” to describe this process, things that feel more like they happen to products than to people. They describe the right actions, but don’t nearly capture the depth of transformation that happens when someone leaves a field they so strongly identify with.
For me, this wasn’t a career change. It was a laborious rebirth.
II. Professional Purgatory
There was no clean break.
My rebirth into “something non-architectural” meant that I was in my infancy again, clinging onto the familiar while peeling myself away to independence.
I discovered UX Research when I happened to take an “experience researcher” role while I applied for grad school, consulting for a workplace furniture company out of a four-person firm in Berkeley. I didn’t know what experience research was — I’d taken the job because it was the only positive response I had gotten out of all the emails I’d sent out.
But working with the furniture company was eye-opening. I’d never seen so many people with different degrees all have the same job title. I didn’t even know that was possible. I remember the tingly giddiness of realizing that this was precisely the job I’d been describing to all my professors for years, only to be told that research only happened in academia.
It might seem that, after such a discovery, I’d jump onboard the UX train. But instead, I went to the Yale School of Architecture, an institution even more buttoned up than the one I’d left. My Masters degree was the first timid step away from architectural design to architectural research, the only step I felt I was qualified to take.
In grad school, I entered a new stage of my identity crisis, a kind of professional purgatory. I now knew that the job I wanted existed, but had no idea how to actually get there. And there were so many theres — a design agency, a research arm of an architecture firm, a management consultancy, a startup. Notably, I never thought a big tech company was a possibility.
Attempting to find people like me, I trawled alumni networks and went on frenzied LinkedIn-browsing binges (abruptly curtailed when the website said I must upgrade to “recruiter account” to continue). It didn’t help. If anything, scrolling through lists of job titles and accomplishments, devoid of the stories behind them, made me feel more overwhelmed and lonely.
What did help me begin my transition in earnest was letting go of planning, releasing myself from the chains of job titles and skill sets to instead focus on what I could do right now. What were the available opportunities to study the things that interested me?
This new approach catalyzed a series of what felt like frustratingly small tiptoes in the dark. Yet it started paying dividends. I had started as a student researching shopping malls, then became a student researching shopping technology in malls, then a design researcher at the company that built those technologies for malls.
Still, in each of these places, I felt like a misfit — not an architect, not quite an academic, not yet an industry professional.
In my second year of grad school, I looked, for the first time, beyond architecture school. It was an intimidating move, tempered by the safety net of a university environment. It was at the business school that I found an unlikely community — a Design and Innovation Club, which partnered with organizations around New Haven on pro-bono innovation projects. Of everywhere I’d been, this place full of MBAs, perhaps the furthest yet from my own discipline, somehow felt the most welcoming.
Not only did this club give me the chance to apply my design research skills and build portfolio material, but it also helped me find belonging in a place I never thought I would. I learned that belongingness came much more from my lens on the world than from particular skills or disciplinary backgrounds, that the kind of work I wanted to do was not defined by a specific job title, that my opportunities weren’t confined to the single door at the end of a straight road. And I realized that my unconventional perspective could be an asset instead of a liability.
Ultimately, these baby steps led to my first role after grad school — a Research Assistant at an innovation factory of a big company. And finally, I converted to a full-time UX Researcher at the company proper.
III. Label Limbo
Entering the tech industry was a culture shock in many ways, something which I’ve previously written about. But one of the hardest parts was deciding how to describe my new identity.
Through graduate school, even as I decided I didn’t want to be an architect, my background had felt relevant: architecture school had always been my affiliation. Now, mentioning it seemed irrelevant and potentially disqualifying, not to mention misleading in an environment where “architecture” was associated with computers, not buildings.
Dubbed a UX Researcher, I felt like I had to practice answering to a strange new nickname. I tried to compromise with different versions of self-introductions, following any mentions of architecture with a note that I’d worked in a cognitive psychology lab in college. No matter my official title, I still felt like an architectural researcher.
Nearly 5 years later, I still retain my ambivalence about labels and my identification with architecture. I still perk up when I meet a fellow architect-turned-UX’er. I still don’t identify as a techie or with many aspects of the UX profession. But I’ve learned that a label doesn’t define everything. You become a UX practitioner the moment you start calling yourself one. But it doesn’t mean that your flavor of practice, or your perspective, or your background, has to be erased and homogenized.
I still bring to all my projects an environmental lens (How’s the technology situated in the room or the city? What’s the broader ecosystem?) My research methods, the fact that I work almost exclusively on future-facing innovation projects, and even my approaches to synthesizing and presenting insights are all deeply colored by my academic training. But where I once felt angst about this, I’m now learning to embrace it.
Belongingness is a journey
Through my transition into UX, anxieties about my identity were the first to hit, and they remain the last to linger. I still have second thoughts about my belongingness in tech, moments that I feel so different from everyone around me, internal debates about whether UX is the right long-term home, and fears that maybe I’ll never decide what I want to be when I grow up. I certainly haven’t figured it all out.
What I’ve learned, though, is that these anxieties (and how we evolve to navigate them) can coexist with a successful career. Starting to change careers felt crippling, not because there wasn’t enough advice out there, but because all the advice-givers seemingly had it all figured out. Even the people with meandering paths had narratives that beautifully connected the dots. What became of people like me, I had wondered, who didn’t know what they were doing?
It turns out that, in retrospect, it’s possible to thread a narrative through any journey — I’ve done that for my own. But that’s certainly not how it felt at the time. Of course, there’s a lot of skill-building and hard work that needs to happen to break into UX, but the first step — at least for me — was dismantling my internal barriers, and not feeling limited by where I came from.
That’s why this has decidedly not been a “UX career advice” article. There’s no actionable bullet list at the end here, no interview advice, no best practices. This has been a story for anyone who might be feeling lost, or questioning if they can make a career change without knowing who they are, or wondering if they’re a UX-shaped human.
You do belong, it is possible, and you are not alone.
