People are ditching their careers to become UX designers. Here's why.

This week we meet Tamora Petitt, an Oklahoma native who has spent the past two decades building an impressive career in tech and design in Manhattan.

Who: Tamora Petitt, UX (User Experience) design veteran, researcher, strategist, and educator.

Resume: Modern dancer turned lead instructor at General Assembly, co-founder of Experience Design Partners and former Head of the User Experience Team at WebMD.

Why: UX design skills are up 22% year over year among New York City workers.

And because robots are unlikely to take UX design jobs: Voice control, AI, robotics and augmented reality technology could be a boon for the UX trade. “These new frontiers are going to need UX design,” Petitt says. “They’re new ways that humans are interacting with machines, so we’ll become even more essential. You need a core process of UX design to work with any technology, but with this new technology, learning how humans react to is going to be amazing.”

The best candidate for a UX design career swap: Somebody with a growth mindset and the soft skills of being able to communicate their design decisions and also to be a decent human being. “You have to be a nice person and also show people you have confidence in and logic behind the designs that you present to them.”

As a senior instructor, Petitt is at the forefront of helping usher in a new assemblage of UX design talent.

Anyway you look at it, it’s an enormous gamble.

First, you must quit your job. Then you will likely part with around $15,000 in fees and throw yourself into two and a half months of boot camp style classes demanding anywhere from 60 to 80 hours a week of your time and energy.

And at the end of all that, comes what is perhaps the hardest part: looking for work.

This is what confronts those seeking to shift their career trajectory and enroll in an immersive User Experience (UX) Design class. The move is not without risk, particularly for those lacking a support network. Yet for those who do succeed, the rewards can be significant.

More than 19,000 workers in the Greater New York area are skilled in UX design, according to data from LinkedIn Talent Insights, a figure that has grown 22% in the past year.

As demand for UX designers continues soaring in New York City, workers from a wide variety of backgrounds are betting an industry switch will help pave the way to building a more stable career arc and, eventually, a bump in salary.

As an industry veteran, Tamora Petitt says she is conscious of the risk and reward element of chasing a career in UX when she meets with those seeking to join the burgeoning field.

A Fine Arts graduate from the University of Oklahoma, Petitt (pictured below), arrived in New York City in the mid-1990s amid the formative years of what we now know as UX design.

Having initially sought a professional career in modern dance, a chance encounter instead steered her to an accomplished design career that climaxed in her co-founding a city design consultancy and landing a post as a lead instructor at the General Assembly vocational school in the Flatiron district.

UX designers focus on a project’s function and usability. They research the best possible solutions through user feedback, often conducted in one-on-one interview format, and then design and create a project’s full wireframe. They should be able to communicate their UX process throughout their organization.

At the core of this work is a requirement of empathy for human beings and an understanding of the psychology of how we learn and how we interact with technology.

For newcomers to UX design, Petitt says, it all begins with understanding the process of the research and how to use it to make design decisions before analyzing those decisions through usability testing.

UX designers must also often embrace the “growth mindset.” That means possessing the courage to experiment as well as being open to “failing forward” on the path to success.

Yes, of course newcomers will make mistakes, but having the wherewithal to keep on trying and learning from your mistakes are an important part of the mindset needed to succeed in UX design.

According to Petitt, companies are currently searching hard for candidates who can assess their products, do all of the research with their users and tell them how they can improve.

Industry neophytes should be prepared to use the left and right sides of their brain.

“You need to be interested in analyzing data while also embracing the creative aspect of design thinking and then being able to actively problem solve,” Petitt says.

Implementing design changes can also be a disruptive process, which is another reason UX designers must have empathy.

“At times you have to change somebody’s idea of what they think they should build, especially if that’s different to their user needs, so it can be a tough conversation to have," she says. "Change is hard and as a designer, you need soft skills to be able to communicate in a way that doesn’t make them feel as if you’re disagreeing or challenging them, particularly a person in your company who has a ‘C’ at the front of their title.”

Petitt has climbed the rungs herself in design and has worked across a handful of industries. She attended a Web Design class at The School of Visual Arts in 2000 and began teaching herself HTML on the weekends, eventually feeling equipped to transition into a web design and developer role at the Navagate software company. Within five years she had climbed into the role of head designer.

“I was enthralled by the idea of building products that make people’s lives easier,” she says.

Senior roles at the dutch financier Rabobank and the tech media company WebMD followed. Today, Petitt’s start-up consultancy Experience Design Partners is focused on the research element of UX design.

Petitt and her partners complete the user interviews early in the UX process, helping inform the users of the business strategy.

“That is what I have felt was missing from the UX process," she says. "There is still a misnomer that it takes too much time and costs too much money. So this is where I felt our niche would be and it has proved to be the case.”

At times user interviews can feel almost like therapist sessions, she says.

Care needs to be taken in how researchers ask questions: they can’t be leading, nor can they be agenda-driven.

“You need an open mind to understand what workers go through, how they solve their problems and how you can support the process and make it better.”

Petitt also brings a UX design mentality to her role as a lead instructor at General Assembly. That is, she regularly ponders how she can improve the experience of anxious students apprehensively entering an entirely new line of work.

Many of those switching careers to UX design today are designers in other fields.

There are graphic designers or User Interface (UI) designers involved in software interface design who have been told by prospective employers they should learn the UX process if they wish to expand their employment options.

Still, it's not only designers who are swarming to UX learning. Petitt recently encountered a pastry chef who she says had heard about UX from friends and believed it was something they could do.

Other prospective students have explored what UX design entails and found that it’s a process they already follow in their current job without realizing it.

Once they begin the journey, many novices to the field are surprised by UX’s ability to actually change the way they think.

“We talk about UXing your life,” she says. “It’s transformative, coming to this sense of worth and developing a personal growth mindset and upping your levels of empathy. That can trickle into your life in a great way. You should be ready to be open to learning and also failing.”

If you are contemplating trying your hand at UX design in the next year or so, Petitt recommends reading up on both user experience theory and also psychology.

“Read about human behavior and how we interact with machines,” she says. “Study design best practices and play around with sketch tools. Learn as much as you can about the design thinking process and the UX process. But mostly just be ready to have your mind changed.”

Have you considered switching careers and trying your hand at UX Design? What are some of the most interesting aspects of UX Design? UX designers, what do you think of the future prospects of the field? Have you found the job market strong for UX Designers? What skills did you wish you had when you started this career? Or what's one thing you wish you knew before you pursued a UX career?

Let us know in the comments below.