I just tell people I'm a designer. If they're interested, I explain that it entails research, testing, understanding how people use products, working with engineers and business people.

Personally I don't think there's much point trying to expain 'user experience' - everything in UX is a design discipline, and people usually at least have a vague sense of what designers do.

Yeah, that makes sense. My designs have become a lot simpler / more systematic since I started moving into product ownership and delivery. Suddenly started to understand how much technical debt I was creating every time I introduced something complex.

I'm curious if you found your designs changing once you moved into launching your own products.

how is the auto-trace different from Illustrator / Adobe Capture's Live Trace?

omnigraffle for life

That's true, but at the same time, it'd be rare historically to think of a situation where you'd spend 5 years designing the same product. Even if you're working in the same problem space, you'd be working on different products or product lines - whether that's designing houses, software or hardware.

Also, as a field I think design really benefits from having practitioners who work across multiple industries and problem spaces. A common issue I've seen arise in banking is the that you can get a lot of designers who've only ever designed banking products - they can end up with a very constrained approach. Similar for health and other enterprises.

You can get the opposite issue with designers working in consumer areas - they don't necessarily get the experience of designing within heavy constraints.

Of course, working only on short term projects isn't great either, you can end up without an understanding of the reality of shipping product.

Going to interviews will give you more interview experience and put you in front of people, this is good experience and since you are early, you have the luxury of time since there is no urgency to get the job.

I want to second this. Interviewing well is a skill in and of itself. Get out there now, start getting used to interviews and ensure you apply to a variety of places - don't put all your hopes on a single job.

I love this idea. I used to do something similar with the mappable buttons on my Wacom.

Yeah, these are great art pieces but fundamentally unusable. Familiarity and respect for user behaviour is pretty key in doing design.

It's a totally fair question.

There is an enormous amount of software product design that doesn't cross into Silicon Valley / tech startup world. I've spent years designing video streaming and entertainment systems, farm management tools, cooking apps, tools for health diagnosis, workflow management and cinema booking apps. There is a lot of great, well-paid work outside of Silicon Valley that you can feel proud of.