I have a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. I didn't go to design school. After school I taught myself HTML and CSS and built websites freelance, then broke into the corporate world through customer support at a SaaS company and worked my way into UX from there. The painting degree has given me a few skills that have been surprisingly useful in product work.
What an art critique is judging
In an art critique there's no usefulness score. Nobody asks whether the piece converted anyone or whether people found what they came for. Outside of technical skill, like if you're going for photorealism or developing your own film, the feedback is mostly about your ideas: how people understood the work, what they took from it, and how well you got it across in the medium you picked. So when a crit goes badly it can feel personal, at least it does for a lot of first-year art students. You're being judged on decisions you made in a vacuum, without much data on why you made them. There's no framework for judging a painting like there is for a user flow.
If you're trying to communicate something, you also have to think hard about how the viewer will take it. You're kind of designing for someone's psyche, but you never get to interview them, so you're going off empathy and a lot of assumptions. And you're working with symbols and references instead of established user patterns.
How product work differs
A website or an app I build for someone isn't my art. Nobody's taking a picture of it and putting it on the fridge (well, maybe my mom).
When I freelanced as a web designer, onboarding started with the same questions every time. Why do you want a website? When people land on it, what do you want them to take away about you or your business? And most importantly, what do you want them to do next? What's the call to action?
An artist taking a commission would probably start by getting to know the client, the space the piece will live in, and what they like about the artist's work. With web design I was trying to figure out what the client was trying to solve, what their users were trying to solve, and what assumptions were baked into the idea that a website would fix it.
This happened a lot. Someone with a small business or a business idea would tell me they needed a website, and I'd ask what for. Is it a digital business card? That's a totally valid reason to have one. Is it a fancy form, a funnel to bring in leads? Do you want people emailing you from it? Once they could tell me how the site was supposed to help their business, I could design it to do that.
So if a client didn't like a design, I didn't take it personally. My job was making sure it solved something real for them, and the aesthetics were probably the smallest part of that. If a client had a strong visual point of view, they usually already had a brand I could plug into the site. That's why design critique has always been easy for me. Nothing I've made in that space feels personal. If someone told me a website I built sucks, that's their opinion and they're entitled to it, it's just a website.
When the research says no
As a researcher I've watched the opposite happen. A designer falls for an idea, it goes in front of users, it doesn't test well, and the designer takes it as a verdict on them. Then come the excuses. Maybe those were the wrong users. Maybe users just need to be taught how to do it.
I get why. If you've put yourself into the work like you would a painting, findings that go against it feel like a bad crit. But the design is for the person using it, and for the business, and what matters is whether people can get done what they came to do.
I have creative outlets I put myself into emotionally. I don't do that with designs or products, because that's an easy way to get pulled into workplace drama and ego, where people push their own design over what might be a better one because they want credit for solving it and want it in their portfolio.
Where UX meets the money
At one place I worked, I watched a product team spend its time on features nobody had asked for: two product people, three designers, me, and about four dedicated engineers. By my rough math on salaries, that's well over a million dollars a year. Very little of what we were building came out of research, and nobody had projections for what impact it would have on the business. I kept asking myself, and I asked the team too, why are we doing this? What's the strategy? Nobody had a real answer, other than that someone paid above us had decided it was the right thing to do, gotten attached to the idea, and done very little exploratory research to find out whether it would move the needle on the balance sheet. Everywhere else I'd worked, that data was easy to get and the strategy was clear, so it was a weird place to be.
That's where I think UX research meets business goals. Is the thing we're paying a lot of money for going to solve a problem a user actually has? Is it going to solve a problem the business actually has? You can't answer that with taste, or with how attached anyone is to an idea. You have to talk to users, understand what they need, and measure that against the business strategy. Good UX research uncovers the user side of that. Great UX research connects it to the business goals and looks for something that works for both.
So when someone asks what a painting degree has to do with UX research, this is my answer. I'm comfortable separating myself from my ideas, so critique stays focused on why we're building what we're building. In product work, I'm there to make sure the money goes toward something that helps the users and the business.