In 2016, I had my first contact with UX Design through an event called UX Now.
At the time, I still didn’t understand the impact that field would have on my life. I saw design as something purely visual — creating a beautiful website seemed like enough.
Years later, I would realize that UX Design goes far beyond appearance. And today I can say clearly: UX design changed my life in ways I never could have imagined at that event.
When Projects Started Going Wrong
In 2023, I started working on an e-commerce project that quickly became one of the biggest challenges of my career.
At that point, I didn’t have a solid foundation in user experience, information architecture, or validation processes. I knew how to build websites, create layouts, and solve technical problems. But there was an invisible problem that no technical skill could fix:
I didn’t know how to justify my decisions.
The project fell into an endless cycle of changes. The client constantly wanted to modify things — more text, more information, more buttons, more options. And since I was still working on gut feeling, without clear criteria, I couldn’t technically defend what actually worked.
This created insecurity for both me and the client. The further the project progressed, the more anxiety I felt. That’s when I started to realize the problem wasn’t just technical. There was something much bigger missing from my process.
The Moment I Had to Choose
There came a point where I had to make a decision:
Either I walked away from the project, or I faced everything I had been avoiding studying for years.
It was during this period that I dove deep into PHP, JavaScript, databases, project organization, documentation, user experience, and psychology applied to design.
And that’s exactly when UX Design truly entered my life.
How UX Design Transformed My Career
Studying UX, I began to understand something that completely changed the way I work:
Projects don’t break just because of a lack of technical skill. Many break due to a lack of clarity, process, and structure.
Before that, I already had some habits I thought were excessive: I documented processes, took notes, organized folders, wrote technical warnings, commented on code. But I always wondered if I was overdoing it.
UX Design showed me I wasn’t.
Documentation isn’t overkill. Process isn’t a waste of time. Organization isn’t an obsession. All of it is part of the experience — including the experience of whoever develops, maintains, or evolves a project in the future.
From that point on, I built much more solid processes. Today, when I make a design decision, it doesn’t come from personal taste. It comes from context, user behavior, best practices, usability, clarity, and intent.
That completely changed the way I run meetings, how I justify strategic decisions, and how I anticipate mistakes before they happen. It also changed the way clients perceive my work.
The Personal Side: When UX Design Changed My Worldview
There’s a part of this story that goes far beyond work.
Since I was a child, I’ve always been extremely observant. I analyzed objects, interfaces, games, menus, tools, and systems trying to understand how everything worked. But for a long time, I thought the problem was me.
When I couldn’t figure something out, my first reaction was to think: “Maybe I’m incapable. Maybe I didn’t understand. Maybe I’m just bad at this.”
Studying UX Design, I started to realize something that seems obvious now, but was transformative back then:
Many systems are simply poorly designed.
I learned concepts like friction, cognitive load, affordance, visual feedback, and information architecture. And I gradually understood that not every difficulty is the user’s fault — sometimes the problem is in the system itself.
This understanding had a huge impact on my mental health. I started to stop blaming myself for problems that were often caused by poorly built experiences. I realized that many of my frustrations didn’t come from incapacity, but from an absence of clarity, structure, and direction.
What Changed After That
Today, I see projects in a completely different way.
I don’t just think about aesthetics. I think about intent, behavior, clarity, process, predictability, and scalability. Before, I built interfaces trying to guess what would work. Now, I make decisions with much more deliberate criteria.
And that brought me something I never had before: confidence.
Not confidence based on ego. Confidence based on knowledge, structure, and logic.
Maybe the Problem Isn’t Your Ability
If you work with websites, design, marketing, or technology and feel like everything is chaotic, maybe the problem isn’t a lack of ability.
Maybe what’s missing is process. Maybe what’s missing is clarity. Maybe what’s missing is structure.
That’s exactly what happened to me.
And that’s exactly why, without exaggeration, I can say today: UX design changed my life.