How an industrial designer built a UX career in Canada

When Antonio García moved to Montreal over a decade ago, he had already built a career developing products as an industrial designer in Mexico.

He joined his sister, who was already living in the city, and the two co-founded CoCréa Studio, an interdisciplinary design studio based in Montreal that helped Canadian and international clients in areas including strategy and product development. After six years of co-leading the studio and starting a family, García was yearning for a new professional challenge.  

“At CoCréa, I’d already spent years applying user-centered design thinking in my interdisciplinary industrial design projects," he notes. “UX felt like a discipline I could transition to naturally.”

García set his sights on a UX design role but knew he’d first need accredited local experience. In 2023, he enrolled in Concordia Continuing Education’s UX Certificate program.

Bridging experience to opportunity

García came in confident. Between his industrial design background and years of interdisciplinary work at CoCréa Studio, he already understood how to move a product from prototype to market, how business goals and production constraints intersect, and — most importantly — how to connect decisions to what users actually need.

“It wasn’t so much that I needed to learn technical UX skills,” he says. “I already had a strong understanding. What I needed was to contextualize and translate my product design experience in a UX context within the Canadian tech sector.”

As an emerging field with strong growth potential, UX draws people with different levels of experience, but the industry has no standard playbook. For García, the right credential from the right institution would let him build on the experiece he acquired at CoCréa and create a clear opportunity.

“For immigrants, having experience in the domain that’s recognized locally can be the biggest obstacle,” García notes.

Learning to put people before process

In CCE’s expert-led setting, built around team projects with tight deadlines and real deliverables, García experienced the pace of a UX work environment while still having room to test ideas and learn from mistakes. 

Collaborating with peers from different backgrounds, learning to influence and be receptive to feedback and gaining insider insight from UX professionals into how designers present value to employers, García acquired the practical experience he signed up for. Beyond the technical side, he also refined teamwork skills the industry relies on. He says the classroom experience provided students with conditions that closely mirror the workplace, giving them comfort with how UX teams actually operate.

“It was like a safe practice environment that emulated the working environment,” he says.

One assignment asked him to design a pizza delivery app that allowed users to customize their pie in under three minutes, which became a significant learning milestone.

Working from paper, García sketched screens and mapped how the order would unfold from one step to the next, which allowed him to focus on the experience rather than the tool.

“You don’t need a fancy tool to create a UX flow,” he says. “What you need to learn is the process.”

García interviewed friends, family members, and other designers, researching what they wanted in a delivery app.

The answer surprised him: people don’t want to build custom pizzas. Users want clear options to order quickly without extra decisions. A good UX designer tests assumptions to avoid getting locked into their own idea. With that insight, his design became simpler.

A payoff that also pays forward

Outside class, García invested in building connections in the UX community and found a mentor along the way. When the opportunity to interview at SAP came up, he was ready.

The interview included a one-hour design challenge. He spent most of it walking through his approach and how the product worked as a system. Only in the final ten minutes did he show screens.

By then, the hiring committee understood not just what he could design but how he thought.

“And that’s what eventually got me the position,” he says.

Now a Senior User Experience Design Specialist at SAP, he takes time to pay his experience forward, mentoring designers from underrepresented backgrounds trying to break into the field. 

Because while professional progress, growth, and opportunities to innovate are motivating to García, breaking into UX design was always — above all — about human connection.

“UX brings together human behaviour, psychology, emotion, and technology,” García says. “It’s about human-technology interaction, which is what user experience really means. If you understand people, you’re a better UX designer.”