From Graphic Designer to UX Designer: 10 Tips to Help You Pivot Your Career

By Jeremie Doiron, May 21, 2019

Once upon a time, there were jobs for standard-issue Graphic Designers. It was a legitimate career choice. Things have changed.

In the late ’90s, the music industry suffered a major economic crash. Record labels could see it coming and basically sat there while CD sales dropped day after day into the abyss of the peer-to-peer sharing boom of the early 2000s.

Something similar has happened to print media and the designers responsible for their creation and engineering. Like the major record labels, the post-secondary institutions responsible for educating future designers failed to change their curriculums to keep designers relevant in the upcoming, world-altering craze of mobile and internet life.

Design schools still haven’t caught up and it’s 20 years later. Industry has however stepped in since then. Companies like Google and Adobe have become the foremost educators of everything screen-related. Let's face it, what isn’t screen-related these days? Especially in terms of design.

Designers are led down a path of educational foraging. This can be a long and winding road in understanding the complex dependencies at the intersection of psychology, technology, and art. I know it was for me and although there are benefits of learning things the hard way, I believe there is a better way.

Here I present my ideas for a better user experience, on the road to becoming a User Experience Designer. Less foraging, more crushing.

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.” –Abigail Adams

Step 1: Learn Adobe XD

This once-an-underdog application has swaggered its way to the front of the line. The learning curve makes it very accessible for anyone who has mastered Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign–or not. It is vector-based and quite the opposite of bloated. It’s also free.

The reason you need XD is because it allows you to quickly (and ultimately cheaply) prototype and test ideas and solutions to problems quicker than you can “save to web” in photoshop. Quickly testing ideas is the backbone of the iterative process, which is the meat and potatoes of UX Design.

Step 2: Get REALLY Curious. Like, Tintin level curious about design problems.

This might not make so much sense to every designer out there. I worked as a Designer for quite a while and had no idea that what I was actually doing was solving problems. But UX design is more like an RPG than it is an art project. I’m not a Gamer, but I realize more and more than UX is to Graphic Design what Chess is to Checkers. You will need to develop the ability to treat simple design decisions like a Sherlock Holmes Murder Mystery Game. I usually start by squinting my eyes followed by going “hmmmm…” with a curious inflection and rubbing my chin. I call this Resting UX Face. The reality is that you will spend a lot of time-solving problems related to complex dependencies. This could become very boring if you haven’t cultivated a basic excitement about solving very niche problems. Example:

While following the style guide, we need to a) create a transition to the next screen while b) following platform guidelines on animation while c) taking into account where the user is in their current navigation in trying to accomplish a task and d) they might be holding a baby or e) only have 10 seconds to complete the task successfully while f) on their break on g) an oil rig with h) limited internet connectivity on a i) device they aren’t used to and j) you have to make all this work simply and K) beautifully.

This is Design, gamified.

Did you notice all the words like “and”, “while”, “or”, “with” and “on”? These are all words that describe dependencies. As a UXer, your world is becoming a master at harmonizing dependencies. Behavioral Psychology, technology, and Art&Design intersect to create a multitude of new and overlapping areas of study. (see header image).

Step 3: Study Behavioral Science

I am by no means a psychologist or an expert in human behavior. I am, however, very interested in it. Passions begin with interest and many proficiencies are fuelled by passion. You see where I am going with this. There are too many resources available online for me to start listing them. Go out and find them. Read entire studies. Get in there a read about the complex dependencies that exist between humans, our environments and how we react to them. It’s super interesting and you need to have a basic interest in this field to really thrive in the research side of things. Don’t forget you will now be pivoting towards data-driven design.

Step 4: Research more, Design less

A big part of the change you will face migrating from classic graphic design to User Experience Design is that you are now dealing with data-driven design. This means that you must make design decisions based on things like statistics, Psychological theorem, user interview interpretations, polls, and surveys. All the while understanding and utilizing the iterative process. You to care about data and how it is collected (and maybe enjoy collecting).

Step 5: Start learning Practical UX methodologies

Spend some time googling things like card sorting, user story mapping, statistic analysis 101, user interview techniques, double-blinded user testing, heuristic evaluation, creating surveys best practices to name a few.

Step 6: Download the “UX Companion” app to your mobile device

Trust me, this will put so many things into perspective for you on your journey to UX. UX Companion is a super handy app that is basically a portal to extremely relevant definitions, examples, articles, and resources that every UX Designer should be aware of. It is produced by a UK based firm called Cyber-Duck. I love these guys! They do absolutely phenomenal work and their little UX app is a testament of their expertise in the field.

Step 7: Spend lots of time on the Nielsen/Norman Group website, and follow it down the rabbit hole

https://www.nngroup.com/ is like your wise uncle in UX who will never let you down. Go there, get some snacks and a blanket, and read. Notice who the contributors are, follow them and their resources. These are the people that basically invented UX, usability, human-centered design and the like. Make this your UX happy place. It will pay off, trust me.

Step 8: Dribbble, Dribbble, Dribbble

You know how they say “if you want to get good at something then surround yourself with experts in that field” or “you always want to be the worst player on the court cause then you have nowhere to go but up”? Well, Dribbble.com is the sobering, “holy crap I suck” slap in the face you need to inspire yourself to reach higher than you thought you could. At first, you might hate it. It might depress you to drown your eyes in the seemingly unattainable show-and-tell of the world’s best Designers. You will, however, become painfully aware of the current world standard of visual UX Design. It gets less painful as you get better. Just get used to it. But most of all LEARN FROM IT!

Step 9: After learning XD, go to a startupweekend and prototype someone's app idea.

I did this and it may be the single most important thing that I have done to throw myself into my current career. You might be the only designer there and you will see first-hand how valuable your new skill set is when people have ideas they need to iterate on.

Startupweekends are events that take place all over the world. They are a facet of the Accelerator giant Techstars. These two-day super intensive events throw a bunch of strangers together and force them to make hard decisions about mostly fictional business ventures. You ideate, prototype and present your project to the group at the end and best-of-show gets prizes and stuff. It costs next-to-nothing to participate and they feed you and educate you the whole time. It’s truly an amazing experience and a paradise for someone wanting to put their new UX skills to the test.

Step 10: Join the Interaction Design Foundation

From IDFs website:

We are an independent nonprofit initiative with an objective that sounds like a paradox:

“Raise global design education to an Ivy League standard, while at the same time reduce costs to as low as possible.”

In other words, we democratize learning by providing top-quality, online design courses at a fraction of the cost of traditional education.

As Forbes Magazine put it:

“Ivy League level education in UX, Product Design or Human-Computer Interaction”.

This is no joke. Their Professional subscription gives you unlimited courses and certificates and is–wait for it–10$ USD/month. It’s less than your Netflix subscription. I think it’s time you tried UX and Chill. Good luck.