To Be a Better UX Designer, Grow Your Self-Learning Skills
“The people who thrive, the ones I don’t worry about, learn how to teach themselves by doing.”
— Jessica Wildfire, In The Age of the Autodidact
When I was in grade school, I was a great student. I followed directions, completed my assignments, and studied for my exams. I earned mostly A’s and graduated with honors when I finished high school and college.
Then, when I started my first job in the field as a front-end developer, things changed.
Like UX design, front-end development evolves quickly. I had to learn new things constantly. No one was there to tell me how to acquire the latest coding techniques. No one said, “Go read this book, read these two articles, and take this test to learn what you need to learn.”
I had to figure out front-end development on my own. And that was hard because I was used to being told how to learn.
Fast forward to today. I’m a UX designer and a UX educator. I’ve built the skill of self-learning, which helped me shift my career from front-end development to UX design years ago. It also helped me gain proficiency in many UX skills. I no longer rely on structured classroom settings to increase my knowledge.
For example, I recently taught myself techniques for conducting inclusive user research studies. I read articles and listened to podcasts on inclusive user research. I used tools like Trello and Evernote to capture notes from these resources so I could retrieve the information later. (Trello and Evernote are part of a self-learning system I’ve established that works well for me.)
By teaching myself, I learned how to recruit people from diverse backgrounds, including people with disabilities, people in the LGBTQ community, and people of color. We had a diverse pool of participants for our research study as a result.
As you can see, my self-learning skills have helped me tremendously as a design professional. These skills can help you, too.
The Benefits of Self-Learning
There are many benefits to building the skill of self-learning for your UX career. Here are a few.
You Can Keep Up with Industry Changes On Your Own
When you know how to teach yourself new skills, you can learn new things without relying on structured learning. While some UX skills require more formal training like a class or a workshop, there are many UX skills you can teach yourself.
For example, if you don’t know how to use customer journey maps, you can search for information on how to create them and when to use them. There are numerous articles, videos, and podcasts available on this topic.
If you need to create a journey map for a project, and you’ve never done it before, the ability to research how to do it and teach yourself quickly will help you be successful at your job.
Hiring Managers Will Be More Eager to Hire You
Good UX hiring managers look for designers who can teach themselves design skills. If you can demonstrate the ability to teach yourself in a short amount of time on the job, you’ll be very appealing as a UX candidate.
Chances are, you’ll come across a tool or technique that’s new — or new to you — on the job. The ability to learn this tool quickly will help you produce quality work without missing project deadlines. You’ll be happy, your boss will be happy, and your organization will benefit from your results. Everyone wins.
You Can Apply to More UX Jobs
I recently heard Tamara Adlin on the UX Cake podcast. She has a rule of “two weeks and two books.” If a job ad requires a UX-related skill she doesn’t have, she asks herself, “Could I learn this in two weeks by reading two books?”
If the answer is yes, she applies.
I love this approach. She’s built up the ability — and the confidence — to teach herself new skills. Like Tamara, when you know you can teach yourself new skills, you feel more empowered to apply for UX jobs you may not otherwise apply for.
You’ll Adjust to a New Job Quickly
Whenever you start a new job, you’ll need to learn new things for that role. Even if you leave one job to go to a similar position, you’ll likely need to learn new software and new processes because every organization is different.
You’ll probably also need to learn a new domain. Let’s say you worked for an email marketing company, where you learned all about email marketing. That knowledge made it possible for you to do your job. Now, you’re working for a health insurance company. You’ll need to learn how health insurance works so you can do your job effectively.
If you work at a startup, you’ll have to learn about the product, the competitors, and the customer. If you work in client services, such as at a design agency, you’ll have to learn how each client’s business operates to design solutions for their business.
For one project at Center Centre, the UX school where I’m a faculty member, my students had to learn about software engineering to design a documentation site for back-end web developers.
As you can see, learning on the job is a constant thing.
Senior Designers Will Be Thrilled to Work With You
I’ve written before about joining a team with senior designers if you are a junior designer. One significant benefit of working with senior, experienced people is that they can mentor you. They can help you sharpen your UX skills much faster than you would sharpen them working alone.
If you’re a junior designer who’s a driven self-learner, you’ll make it easy for senior designers to work with you. When doing something for the first time, you’ll do most of the legwork of learning the new technique on your own. You’ll read articles, listen to podcasts, or watch tutorials to learn the basics. Then, the senior people can show you how to implement what you’ve learned on a project.
This is much more effective than requiring the senior designer to teach you everything, including the basics. The more you can learn on your own, the less time senior designers need to take away from their work to help you. Again, everyone in this scenario wins.
Focus on Learning, Not What You Should Learn
A few years ago, Chris Risdon, a well-known UX designer, taught a prototyping workshop for one of my company’s conferences. During the workshop, someone asked Chris what prototyping tool they should learn right now.
Chris responded with this:
We’ll be covering many of the available tools in the workshop. But my biggest takeaway is that we have to be adept now at our ability to pick up tools fairly quickly. It’s the wild-west right now as far as tools — like nothing we’ve seen in the past 15 years. Which is pretty awesome.
Getting too locked in a single tool now is hard because there are so many — you may be using one now, but will need to pick up another if you get a job with a different employer who requires a different tool for collaboration purposes. The trick is to really focus on picking up the core functionality of a tool pretty fast.
Chris is right. It’s better to focus on learning prototyping tools quickly and effectively instead of focusing on what tool to learn. Prototyping tools come and go. If you have a favorite tool now, you’ll likely have to learn a new one in the near future.
Chris’ guidance applies to more than just prototyping tools. It applies to just about everything you do as a UX designer. Once you get comfortable using journey maps, for instance, you’ll likely run into a situation where journey maps are no longer the right tool. Then, you’ll have to learn something else.
Build a Habit of Learning
Learning is a skill you can grow. Just like you can practice becoming better at running, cooking, or painting, you can get better at self-learning by doing it often.
The good news is that you probably won’t have to make much more time to learn. We learn things every day. It’s part of life. But most of us don’t intentionally focus on how we learn.
Since you’re already learning, all you need to do is pay attention to how you learn. The more conscious you are of your learning habits, the more you can refine them, and the better you get at learning. You can even reflect on how you learn, which is something we do regularly at Center Centre, the UX school where I’m a faculty member.
Remember my system where I use Evernote and Trello? That’s a system I’ve honed and developed over time. I experimented with learning, reflected on my progress, and iterated on my learning approach.
That system helps me learn very quickly, even when I’m in a rush to learn, because I’ve invested in building a solid learning habit.
You don’t necessarily need to use Evernote or Trello — can use whatever tools or methods help you learn best. The point is to make learning a conscious habit so you can do it more easily.
Go Forth and Learn
Throughout my career, I have come across hundreds of different design tools — everything from prototyping tools to user research techniques to facilitation activities. The list is seemingly endless.
There is still plenty for me to learn on this list. Thanks to the learning habit I’ve built, I can teach myself most of what I need to know.
You can teach yourself numerous skills, too, without relying on formal education methods. Start building the habit of self-learning today. You’ll be glad you did the next time you need to gain a new UX skill — especially when you need to gain it quickly.
Thanks to Jenny Sun for her input on this article.
