Most UX practitioners think they're presenting themselves well. The ones who aren't getting the roles they want usually have no idea why, this course changes that.
The UX industry has never agreed on what UX actually is. Job titles are copied from job boards, expectations are set by people who don't fully understand the discipline. Practitioners reshape their CVs to match whatever the market seems to want, and end up in roles that don't suit them, being measured against standards they were never set up to meet.
Most UX job descriptions are written by people without a strong background in the discipline. They search for a description, copy what they find, and post it. That's where "UX/UI Designer" came from, not from UX leaders, but from job boards, reproduced so many times it started to look official. The result is a market where both sides are confused. Practitioners apply for roles that don't match how they actually work. Hiring managers bring in the wrong profile and feel let down by UX when it was never set up to succeed.
I've been on the hiring side of this for over twenty years. I've reviewed thousands of CVs and conducted hundreds of interviews. The same pattern shows up again and again: talented practitioners who can't clearly articulate how they think, what they're genuinely best at, or why a particular role is the right fit for them. Not because they lack skill, but because they lack a framework for understanding themselves.
Most people hiring for UX roles don't have a strong enough background in the discipline to assess candidates well. They're working from job titles and keyword lists, not genuine understanding of what different UX orientations actually look like. That's not entirely their fault. The industry gave them no better model. But it does mean that candidates who can clearly articulate how they think, what they lead with, and where their edges are, stand out not just to the credible UX leaders in the room, but to everyone.
Clarity shows as confidence, self-awareness reads as seniority, both are rare enough to be noticed.
This course gives you that framework.
The Three Lenses of UX: Foundations is a grounding in the full framework. It is not a techniques course, it will not teach you how to run a usability test or build a design system. There are plenty of places for that.
What it will do is give you a deep, clear understanding of how the three lenses; Business, Science, and Creativity, operate in UX practice. Where they overlap, where they pull in different directions, how they show up in real project decisions. And how understanding your own orientation more honestly changes the way you work, the way you communicate, and the way you develop.
Every course module contains both a conceptual component and a practical takeaway.
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
Most practitioners can describe what they do. Very few can explain how they think. This course gives you the language to do both, clearly, and in a way that holds up under questioning.
Hiring managers remember candidates who can articulate their orientation honestly. Not what tools they use or what methods they know - how they approach problems, and why. That's what this course teaches you to do.
The work that drains you usually isn't bad work. It's work that pulls against your primary lens. Knowing your orientation helps you make smarter decisions about where you put your energy, and where you don't.
When you understand which lens you lead with, the decisions you've always made intuitively start to make sense. You're not guessing, you're operating from a genuine orientation - and you can explain it to anyone in the room.
Most practitioners develop skills based on what their current role demands. This course helps you make that choice deliberately, based on an honest picture of your lens profile, your blind spots, and where the gaps are most likely to cost you.
The course is made up of ten sections, covering the full arc of the framework from principles to self-understanding.
Why UX has a language problem, and why it matters to your career
A deep look at Creativity, Science, and Business as cognitive orientations, not job titles
What the four practitioner profiles look like in practice, and where the boundaries between them actually sit
How to read your own orientation honestly, including what a strong co-primary looks like and what a zero score means
How each orientation shows up in real life, across different types of work and different seniority levels
The specific risks that come with each lens orientation, and how awareness changes the decisions you make
How to represent your lens profile clearly, in job applications, in team conversations, and in your own career thinking
How to collaborate more effectively with practitioners whose orientation is different from yours
Why organisations with mismatched lens expectations underperform, and what that means for you
How to use the framework as an ongoing thinking tool, not a one-time result
I'm Oliver West. I've been working in UX and CX since 1999, starting as a web designer at Goldman Sachs, building an agency, and eventually leading teams of designers, researchers, and strategists across London and Dubai. I'm currently Regional Head of CX at VML, where I hire and develop UX practitioners across the Middle East.
Over more than twenty years of hiring, I've reviewed thousands of CVs and conducted hundreds of interviews. The pattern I keep seeing isn't a lack of skill or ambition. It's a lack of a shared language - practitioners who can't describe how they think, and hiring managers who can't describe what they need. Both sides are working from the same broken vocabulary.
The Three Lenses of UX is my attempt to fix that. This course is where that framework becomes something you can actually use.
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