[thinnerlizzy]

And note that many, many companies still do not understand UX. There's a good chance your interviewer/manager will have little to no understanding of UX. They will favor the visual beauty of your work over any of the aforementioned qualities that make a great UX designer.

[Grangar]

Ugh. That's my workplace right now.

I want to switch from doing front-end development to UX research, but to my boss that comes down to high-fidelity graphic design in photoshop.

[thinnerlizzy]

Yep, I have a Masters degree in interaction design with a healthy curriculum in true UX, and I'm a far better interaction designer than programmer. Part of why I got into it was because you have the capacity to have a major impact on how applications work, and I was relieved that I didn't need to worry about fidelity down to the graphic design layer. Come to find out that almost all UX designers I've ever met - outside of my alma mater - are graphic designers, and I've just never been able to convince anyone to hire me for design.

Despite that, I've lucked into temporary design roles on some major projects end to end, have all the wireframes, the design thinking, the compromises and so on, and that helped not one bit.

edit: grammar

[Grangar]

I actually discussed it with my boss today, having just graduated from a Bachelor in information engineering I felt I'm not using my talents at best. So now I'm going to try my hand at information engineering. Problem is - our customers probably don't even know it, and use marketing firms for advice in that regard.

Let's hope this works out, if you have any advice I'd love to hear it.