The Day Confusion Birthed Desire

…My UX Journey

“Where’s my road layer?” I muttered under cursed breath. I couldn’t even find the shapefiles I added and now my cursor has disappeared… “just kill me” I swore. If you’re familiar with GIS tools, you would understand the frustration of losing your shapefile layers, especially when the environment is new to you. This was my situation a few months back when I decided to go back to GIS and mapping after drifting away from the system for close to 5 years due to circular work. How did I end up considering UI/UX? Grab a seat and let me take you through the ride, I promise I won’t bore you.

It was a sunny day in Lagos, Nigeria and I was to start my first class in spatial data studio. We had take-home assignments on simple map production and trust me, it was a very easy task … or maybe not. I fired my laptop, ready to show this teacher I was a veteran in mapping … for where? My first glance at the GIS interface took me aback, everything has changed. Well, I didn’t expect technology to wait for me, but they could have slowed down a bit … lol. I began my work, adding my layers, georeferencing, styling, you know all those kinds of stuff you do to make your map look beautiful, and then I exported the finished map.

Viola! A blank sheet came out. “What? Where are my layers? What really happened?”, I lamented. The icing on the cake was when my cursor left with the layers … leaving me with just piles of tools on my dashboard.

I had to bring those layers back but what tool would I use? The ones I was familiar with have been modified, everything looked different even the basic tools now looked like they just graduated from Harvard with shiny degree certs … lol. Nah, I am not the only one who had faced this. There must be a way to make modifications to an application while retaining basic designs so that users will always find their way around it, I thought.

A new dawn was birthed and the desire to carve a niche for myself in UI/UX emerged. Having gone through the frustrations of using an application, I understand better how users feel when they use certain products without satisfaction.

I am still budding, and I know I’ll flourish soon in the world of design.