I’ll admit, it wasn’t until years into my UX design career that I realized this, but eventually it hit me: UX is a lot like writing.

When you write something, you need to do your initial research, especially if you don’t know much about the subject. The most important thing you must do (if the thing you’re writing is going to be any good) is consider your target audience. You must have something to say, but you must also understanding who is going to hear it. And you must incessantly cater your message to your audience in every step of the writing process. You brainstorm ideas. Then, you compose an outline. You decide what makes it in the outline and what will be left on the cutting room floor. You toss ideas around and massage the outline. Next, you compose a rough draft, which is inevitably garbage. Then comes a 2nd draft, and a 3rd. If you’re doing it right, your work gets markedly better with each draft. Then, there’s the process of editing. You take what you’ve put on the page and you apply a critical eye. You trim the fat and ask yourself, “What in the world was I thinking?” Mostly the good parts survive. Once you decide you’ve said what needs to be said, you arrive at a mature “final draft”. (Although it doesn’t feel final, because the work is never done. You have to declare it finished nevertheless.)

This is what the process of writing looks like.

The process of UX design is quite similar.

In UX, like in writing, you start with research. You must understand what needs to be done, for who, and why. You must understand your target audience if you’re going to be successful. (Although, we don’t call it a “target audience”; we call them “user personas”.) UX designers also brainstorm. Our low-fidelity wireframes are essentially outlines, as they serve the same purpose: moving things around and figuring out what goes where before sinking time into fleshing out the details. We also have “drafts”, although they go by another name: “iterations”. Then, there’s the process of editing. In UX design, most of the edits come from two places: first, from follow-up research with users where they reveal that something’s not making sense to them. (This is analogous to having someone else read your writing and give you feedback.) Second, you make edits when you do feasibility checks with the engineers. They must be able to actually build what you’ve designed. Perhaps this is analogous to a publisher reading your work and telling you what must change.

In reflecting on this, I’ve also made another realization: that a software user interface is a medium of communication in itself. When you write something, your medium is purely words. When you design a user experience, your medium is the interface: the incorporation of all the buttons, switches, pages, labels, links, and beeps.

And finally, another parallel: while you can make explicit the “steps” of writing (research, outline, rough draft…) and the “steps” of the UX process (empathize, define, ideate, prototype…), it’s very difficult to actually teach the process directly. Creative skills like these are sort of like life. As Kierkegaard put it, “life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” In hindsight, I’d have to agree that the five steps of Design Thinking do in fact resemble the steps you take in UX design. I see that now, looking back on it. But as a beginner, you can’t just formulaically go through the steps and come to a good result. It doesn’t work like that. There’s much more of an art to it, which requires in-the-moment judgment calls that can’t be formulaically prescribed.

The most effective way to learn UX, I think, is to continually practice the art of doing it, while in parallel continually refining your design judgement as you encounter examples of good design and bad design. Always take the time to think about what made a good design good and what made a bad design bad. Over time, you acquire the intuition necessary to make the on-the-spot judgements that you must infuse into every “step” of the design process.