For years, I looked at websites through a very particular lens.

Something was broken.

Something was slow.

A button wasn’t working.

A plugin was causing trouble.

A customer couldn’t figure out how to do something.

My job was to find out why.

I spent more than a decade doing that.

And I didn’t realise it then, but troubleshooting was teaching me something much bigger than how websites work.

It was teaching me to notice.

First, I learned to look for what was wrong

When you troubleshoot a website, you rarely get the whole story.

Someone tells you:

“The website isn’t working.”

So you start looking.

You check the obvious things.

Then the less obvious ones.

You follow one clue to another.

Sometimes the problem is exactly where you expect it to be.

Sometimes it is hiding somewhere completely different.

And sometimes nothing is technically broken at all.

The person simply can’t figure out what to do next.

That last one stayed with me.

Because a website can work perfectly and still feel difficult.

Then I started noticing the person behind the problem

Support taught me that people don’t experience websites the way developers do.

They don’t see plugins, scripts, databases or browser consoles.

They see a page.

A button.

A message.

A photograph.

A form.

And they decide, often within seconds, whether they understand what is happening.

So I started looking at websites differently.

Not only:

Does this work?

But:

Can someone understand this?

Does this feel easy?

What is this asking the person to do?

What happens when they don’t know what to do?

Those questions slowly became more interesting to me than the technical problem itself.

Somewhere along the way, the question changed

I used to ask:

How do I fix this?

Now I find myself asking:

Why did this need fixing in the first place?

And then another question appears:

Could we have designed the experience differently?

That is where the shift began for me.

From troubleshooting websites to thinking about experiences.

I started paying attention to things I hadn’t consciously studied before.

Typography.

Spacing.

Images.

Colour.

The order in which something appears.

The feeling a page creates before you have even read it.

The tiny moment when you hesitate because you don’t know where to go next.

None of these things are accidents.

They are decisions.

And I became curious about making those decisions myself.

I am still learning

I don’t think of myself as someone who suddenly left technology behind and became a designer.

It feels more like I am carrying something forward.

The same curiosity that made me investigate a broken website now makes me investigate a confusing layout.

The same patience that helped me understand a frustrated customer helps me sit with a design that isn’t working yet.

The same habit of looking for patterns helps me understand why something feels off.

The problem has changed.

The way I think about problems hasn’t.

Maybe that is what this transition really is.

Not starting over.

Just looking at the same world through a different window.

I spent years learning how to make websites work.

Now I am learning how to make them feel.

And I think there is a lot more to discover there.