Financial Education: The Trigger for My Transition from UX Designer to User Researcher in Brazil
From Bauhaus to User Researcher
The lack of choice of Fashion Colleges took me to the Industrial Design course with emphasis on Visual Programming. The college was located in Ipanema, a time of glory in Rio de Janeiro. It was 4 years of a lot of bauhaus and CMYK, where I had the chance to work in advertising agencies and government institutions. Glamor was only in the name, since the profession was not valued at all. Near the end of graduation, the internet took off and grew dizzyingly, which made me believe that an HTML course would be ace in the role to advance my career.
No sooner said than done. From there I migrated from Graphic Designer to Webdesigner. No longer having the responsibility of finalizing the magazine’s archive to send to the press and being able to update information in real time was highly liberating. However, the flawless web layouts always came back with adjustments, and the defenses were completely permeated by “ego” (“Paint the background yellow because it’s my favorite color”) and so on… It was in the newspaper’s writing (ODIA) that also I also began to realize that the content displayed on the screen did not follow a logically organized structure. I turned to the web gurus and found that in other countries the “wireframe” was already used. Where, from my boss’s point of view, was enigmatic, neither he nor the rest of the newspaper understood the reason for those little gray boxes and thought they were wasting their time.
At that time a job came up in Rome, not a transformative, just to flash banner and update a movie school website, but in fact, living in Italy could be a fabulous experience, and it was. After 6 months of the contract, I returned to Brazil deeply discouraged with my condition as webdesigner. I began to consider migrating to other areas of art, such as cinema or working with 3D. Until I came across PUC’s Graduate Ergodesign and Information Architecture, which offered a one-year full-time user experience design program.
It was were a bricks-and-mortar school offering a one-year, full-time program in user experience design. From then on, I never saw human interaction with software and services in the same way.
Not yet complete the post was already working as User Experience Designer in the largest E-Commerce Multinational in Latin America. In the early stages of a career it is crucial to be in a mature company with an established team of professionals and a broader user-centered evidence-based decision-making culture. My academic knowledge was applied in the daily life of the company, this combination was extremely enriching.
Four years later, in 2015, I moved from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo to work at Santander. In my role in user research, I began to see, through a lens of enhanced empathy, how much Brazilians suffer from a lack of financial education, poor transparency, and inadequate banking services. This realization coincided with a period of self-reflection, sparking a deeper interest in understanding people and the human mind, which led me to transition into the role of User Researcher.
As I became more aware of how financial systems often exploit vulnerabilities, I understood the importance of creating experiences that not only address user needs but also promote fairness, accessibility, and transparency. I recognized the responsibility to ensure the products we design contribute positively to society.
By combining cognition and empathy, we can connect with users’ minds, understand their pains, pleasures, and needs, and advocate for them. Our goal should not only be to make products more useful but also to ensure they are ethical and contribute to the well-being of those who use them.
