Want To Break Into UX? Here’s What You Need To Know
With the advancement of new technology comes the need for great design. There has been a lot of buzz about this relatively new field (UIUX you may have heard been thrown around), and I myself stumbled upon it several years ago in college. I was studying biomedical engineering and decided to take a course on medical device design. This path led me all over the place, from prototyping a medical device to designing event flyers for health orgs, to finally landing a job as a UX consultant in the Bay area.
The path was not easy, and for those of you who are mesmerized by the “magic” and visual aesthetics of interface design, there is actually a method to the madness. If you are planning on entering this field, here’s what you need to know before deciding if design is right for you.
1. User experience is 90% problem-solving and 10% visual design.
If I were to break down my day by tasks, I probably spend only two hours (or less) actually creating visual elements and pushing pixels. The rest of my time is spent trying to understand the real problem. This may include gathering qualitative data from interviews, testing the product with users, or whiteboarding possible issues and solutions. The reason I do this is help clarify what is important to design and what is not. Once that is figured out, then I can start thinking about the visual aesthetics of the solution.
2. Read these.
Design of Everyday Things — Donald Norman
Don’t Make Me Think — Steve Krug
Dieter Ram’s Ten Commandments of Good Design
Good design is as little design as possible.
In order to become a UX designer, you need to start thinking like one. I’ve had several mentors over the years, and each one has mentioned these books as essentials. I use these books as reference everyday, and I always go back to them when I get stuck. No matter how experienced you are in the field, these books will always be your guide, whether you are just starting out or have been designing for 10+ years. Buy hardcopies. And maybe several of them, since you’ll most likely be lending them out to others.
Practice, practice, practice
3. Study case studies.
It’s a no-brainer that you must be fluent in the design process. You might get the gist of it through studying it in your classes, but it’s much more complicated in a real-world environment. You run through limitations such as budget, opposing stakeholder requests, legal issues, or dealing with legacy systems. Case studies of current products are much better representations of what you will face on the job than simulating ideal design procedures in a controlled environment. You can search up case studies of your favorite products and start to see why designers made the decisions they made. Here are some example case studies:
4. Redesign an existing product.
It’s important that while you read through the case studies, you are also putting your knowledge to good use. Take an existing product, whether it be your favorite app or a poorly-designed one, and go through the basic steps of the design process. Write down your thoughts, questions, and decisions while you go through the process. This will help internalize the steps in your mind so that it will come more naturally to you the more you practice. Check out https://dribbble.com/ for inspiration shots and see how other people are redesigning popular apps.
5. Prepare for rejection.
There’s a popular quote for writers that is also true for designers.
Don’t fall in love with your first idea.
Because if you do, you will never be able to design anything better than that. If you throw in the fact that 90% of the time your first iteration will be rejected, then you will end up questioning why you are even in this field.
Moral of the story- don’t take it personally. Your designs will always be critiqued heavily, and it will never be perfect. This is why the iteration process is so important- you learn from failure and you continue to make your designs better a little bit at a time. If I received a dollar for every time someone said “I don’t like this” or “You need to consider that,” I could probably afford a Tesla Model S by now. What you need to do instead is to be open to criticism (constructively) and be willing to improve your work, and that’s probably the hardest thing you will learn to do. Usually you will be the harshest critic, so go over your work first before you show anyone else. Rethink about the decisions that drove this design, and see where things can be improved. Once you have critiqued yourself, you can present your ideas to others. But remember to leave your ego behind.
Deliverables
6. Know what to deliver to your audience.
When you are preparing for any presentation, you must know your audience. As a designer, you might have to present your work to developers, engineers, managers, and stakeholders, all of whom care about different things. You don’t explain why you changed the color of a button to your manager, you will just be wasting his time. From my experience, I found that developers care about the details in your UI, engineers care about how your design will affect the back end logistics, managers will care about the value and innovation you bring, and stakeholders care that you delivered their requests.
Once you understand how you fit into the puzzle, you can start delivering valuable work to your team. Generally, developers and engineers will focus more on the visual details and interactivity. Sketch, Marvel, Invision, Pixate, Zeplin, are all prototyping tools I learned to help the developers understand the functionality. Stakeholders and manager will probably be more familiar with Powerpoint presentations or example screens. They will want to know the high-level decisions that impacted your design. Therefore, I usually focus less on the ‘How” and more on the “Why,” in order to spark deeper conversations about the entire user experience.
7. Always show multiple versions.
From my experience, having more options is better. If you’ve ever taken a design class in school, you will know that anything under 10 different ideas is unacceptable. I took a course in industrial design that required me to sketch up more than 20 pages of ideas per week, 5 ideas per page. Now that might be overkill if you’re cramped on time, but it definitely help you think more critically and creatively if you practice this in your free time.
I decided to experiment the outcome of delivering only one version, compared to delivering several versions to my team for review. It turns out that if you only show one version, there is no comparison to base the designs off of when your team critiques. They might not like your design, but they also don’t know why. This would make it harder for you to determine what path is best to take going forward.
If you have multiple versions, your team can then determine which factors are important to consider in future iterations. It’ll give you a good baseline on what to improve, because you’ll know the reasons why one design is better than the other. This is called A/B testing, and it is very powerful method to use not only with your team and but also with your end users.
GOOTB
Stands for ‘Get out of the building’. This can mean two things — go talk to your users, and go meet people in the industry who are doing what you want to do. I’m not going to waste time with the former (this is a given), so I’ll explain the latter.
Whenever you are considering a career switch, be prepared to understand what people really do when they say they are designers. You can get very different perspectives by just asking a few of them, but the important takeaway here is that you get out of your comfort zone and do it. Many of us can say we are interested in certain fields, but those who are truthful about it will go out and meet the people they want to become.
This is especially important in design because you will inevitably receive a vast difference in responses, depending on what kind of designer you talk to. It has become a popular career choice only recently, so my advice to you is to get as much perspective on this field as possible. Ask what designers do on a daily basis, what kinds of problems they are asked to solve, what methodologies they follow, and where they find inspiration and trends. You can start by checking out local meetups, startups, IxDA, IDSA, or other smaller organizations in your area. I actually first heard about UIUX when I was still doing graphic design. I attended a local meetup at General Assembly, where they teach UIUX, web design, and other professional education courses. So wherever you may be, there are definitely opportunities to get involved in the design community. You just have to make the decision to GOOTB.
If you enjoyed reading this, please share! For fellow designers, what advice do you have for those who want break into this field? Comment below!
