12 reasons why Architects make good UX Designers

When the real estate industry crashed during the pandemic in 2020, I made a career switch from an Architect to a UX Designer. This fragment of writing is a recollection of more than a dozen job interviews spent convincing hiring managers of the relevance of my borrowed skillset from Architectural Design to UX Design. Let’s face it, no one lets you build a damned house on a waterfall straight out of college. Tech is the way forward.

This structured cheat sheet is intended to help young architects and fresh graduates with a Bachelor’s of Architecture or other design-related qualifications, substantiate the relevance of their knowledge of design in the field of user experience.

#1: Architects design environments and tame the ambiguous.

Architecture as a profession is about translating the needs and emotions of a user into material based on the context. Architects are competent in understanding and responding to the context. They design not just a building but an environment to dwell within. The indispensable skill of conjuring spaces and journeys out of nothing comes in handy for them while working as UX Designers. It helps them tap the functional and emotional needs of a user and create an experience through a system design solution that adds value for a user in a given context. The key for taming the context is to understand that it changes with the problem statement every time. If the context changes from physical to digital, why should the solution methodologies fail?

#2: Architects can live User Journeys in time and space.

Architects are by far the most proficient design professionals in visualizing a walk-through of their solutions. This unique skill helps them identify and solve the pain points at the interface of people and their physical environment through mental, physical, and digital visualization techniques. When these designers start crafting experiences for technology, they prove to be naturals at stepping into the shoes of a user and walking through their piece of work in time and space. The added capacity of objectively observing a user’s behavior in the third person helps them develop an attitude towards affordances and gives them an edge over any other pedigree of designers.

#3: Architects know how to make their drawings speak and think out loud.

Architects are trained visualizers. They understand and use technical drawing as a medium of expression and their second language. This skill becomes useful when they start working as UX Designers in Agile teams. They can keep talking about their thought process and simultaneously show the stakeholders what they mean through readable sketches on a whiteboard or a digital drawing tool. It aids the observer’s understanding of the verbal communication of thoughts by adding a layer of visuals that helps keep an agile product team aligned to a vision during the design phase. These sketches also facilitate non-visual thinkers to pitch in ideas and feedback and become a starting point for cross-team product understanding and collaboration.

#4: Architects know how to use documentation and presentation to narrate a story.

An architect’s work process is about conceptualizing an idea and translating it to the material. The artifacts of their presentation include storyboarding, concept sketches, iterations, material & space exploration, construction & presentation drawings, rendered 3D visualizations, and a physical/digital scale model of the design solution. An average graduate in five years at Architecture school has experience of 5–7 revisions of their design portfolio and 20–25 design presentations with a live audience. The practice of documenting the extensive list of artifacts in a portfolio and delivering at least three presentations on the design project every semester at school lays down a strong foundation of documentation and presentation techniques to be leveraged for their benefit to narrate a story and convey an idea.

#5: Architects understand the importance of accessibility in the First principles.

A hospital entrance without a ramp is as non-sensical as an e-commerce website without a ‘Buy Now’ Call to Action button. Just as the upper floor of a house is pointless without a staircase, anything built in the digital space is useless and non-scalable if all the users cannot access the relevant pieces. Architects provide for both the abled and the specially-abled alike in the physical world. Hence, understand the gravity of accessibility and its impact on the usability of design solutions in the digital space.

#6: Architects know how to NOT fall in love with their work and avoid sunk cost fallacy.

Having spent at least half a decade getting their work scrapped and ridiculed by jurors & professors at school and bosses & clients at work takes architectural designers to a meta-level of iterative work. The status quo of presenting at least 2–3 design options per project to clients and keeping the designs elastic enough to accommodate last-minute changes, subject to site conditions or whims of the client, translates to 66% — 75% of the work getting scrapped every time. This necessary evil gives Architects a practical and progressive approach to empathize outside their comfort zones. It brings them closer to the truth that there is ALWAYS scope for improvement and makes them believe in the importance of the testing and the power of iterations.

#7: Architects are privy to an assortment of complex design tools and have a knack for them.

Architects envision and convey ideas to people before they exist. The process makes them pros at several design tools for Building Information Modeling (BIM), 3D modeling & rendering, 2D drawing, post-processing, and photo/video editing. They know the Adobe and the Autodesk suits like the back of their right hand. A big part of everyday work for a UX Designer is about learning and using multiple research and design tools to make the processes more efficient and optimized. Here the aptitude of learning and using complex design tools comes to their aid.

#8: Architects have an OCD for clean layouts, perfect corners, and simple solutions.

Five years of architecture school comes with numerous modules of visual design theory and application. Also, the tireless nights spent creating detailed construction drawings and peck-less monochrome scale models of their creations instills in architects an obsession over clean details and visually appealing outcomes. Architects have spent a lot of time trying to appreciate and create beautiful pieces of work. Hence understand the application of laws of composition and color theory to their benefit and develop the aesthetic skills needed for UI design.

#9: Architects have lived years on quick and dirty and subconsciously function on agile ways of working.

The conventional waterfall framework is relevant in the construction industry. But that’s not how architecture studios go about developing design solutions. Having worked in five architectural design studios in the past, I can validate that architects unconsciously follow an agile mindset throughout the design development stage. Multiple rounds of discussions and iterations happen with contractors, fabricators, vendors, and clients on concept designs, which evolve to the final design subject to feasibility, availability, selections, and budget constraints. It is parallel to the testing and iteration stages of today’s industry-standard UX Design frameworks. The experience of working in studio environments lays a foundation for agile ways of working in these designers and facilitates adaptation to contemporary work methodologies in the technology sector.

#10: Architects think in Layers and Colours.

The primary trade of an Architect is producing technical good-for-construction (GFC) drawings. They understand how information can be layered and color-coded in design deliverables to convey information. Years of marking drawings and developing visuals generate a style of using color and composition to create focal points and identity statements. These skills make them good product designers as well.

#11: Architects can both give and take feedback. And positively respond to it.

Reviews and brainstorming are essential aspects of an Architects job. ‘Feedback’ and the ‘Response’ are indispensable parts of these reviews and brainstorming sessions. First with peers, professors, and jurors at school and then with clients, colleagues, contractors, and vendors at work. Architects have the skill of active listening and can give, take and positively respond to feedback. The understanding of ‘What input to acknowledge’ and ‘What to politely omit’ helps them when working as UX Designers.

#12: Architects understand and appreciate the power of constraints and work in a design system.

Every site has its challenges and limitations of materials and machinery availability, labor skill, and project budgets. Feasibility is a function of variables like location, designer’s experience, team bandwidth, and execution skillset available. Imagination is limitless but what is executable is a small subset of it with the applied constraints. And what gets implemented is a smaller subset subject to the resources and skill set available at a given point in time. The designer who understands and starts thinking in the domain of this smallest subset of his imagination is the one who can develop and deliver in a consistent design language, the design system. The better a designer understands and responds to these constraints, the quicker he can deliver homogenous work. It conveys the style of an architect’s studio and the brand identity in terms of product designers.