What it takes to get a job as a UX designer
I got a job as a junior designer/front-end developer straight out of university. I had always wanted to be a designer so I jumped at the chance. Full of passion, I tried to learn everything but I didn’t realise how much went into each discipline.
The developer side of the job wasn’t for me but I learned a lot about it. I worked with developers, marketing and sales. I even got involved in event planning and email marketing.
Over time the workload grew but my coding skills didn’t grow enough. I wasn’t interested in development. I wanted to work as the sole UX designer but it was a small company and they needed people to do more than one job. It was time to move on.
Get focused with your CV
My most recent CV listed all the skills and experiences that I had gained over the last three years. There were a lot of skills and experiences in many different areas. I wrote about design but front-end development took up most of it.
No jobs were getting back to me with that CV. A recruiter told me that some CV’s go through automated screeners that scan for keywords. My CV was only ever meeting the criteria for developer roles.
I decided to focus my writing around design. If it didn’t tell a story about my design, I removed it. Any references to development got scrapped unless it told a story about how I worked with others. I took the keywords from different job ads and made sure I used them.
Tell a story with your portfolio
My portfolio was next. I went through every project I had been a part of and dissected it. I wrote an introduction, a middle and an end to each one and then went into more detail as needed.
Writing became the best way to think about what it was I had done on each project. It made me think clearer and I learned a lot from it. Once I had a few good stories with a few images to go with it, I started applying for jobs.
Shortly after applying to a few jobs, I got a response from a UX role. They asked if I could attend an interview and complete a short design challenge on arrival.
Talk about your process
When I arrived at the interview the head of UX took me to a room with two other designers. My CV and Portfolio acted as the main talking point for the interview questions.
The interview was more like a conversation, the only difference being that they asked me why a lot. This was because they were trying to get to the root of my answers which lead to more questions.
They didn’t want to know much about the visuals in my portfolio but they wanted to know how I got to the final visuals. They wanted to know about the process, results, research and UX methods used on each project.
If I hadn’t written a story about what I remembered doing on each project then I would never have found my process. The methods I used to create my designs were always a means to an end.
Document your work as you do it
It would have been much easier to tell the story of my work if I had documented everything as I worked. I had no images for the beginning, some for the middle and lots for the end of each project. I valued the end visuals too much so I neglected everything else.
This led to me having to explain my process in each of these areas. It was much harder to explain myself when I had no images to fall back on. The only proof I had to show for it was the words I had written and the things I was saying.
This is why it is important to document as you go so when it comes to creating a portfolio, it is already done. I managed to explain each stage of the process well. I talked about the pro’s and con’s of my process and we talked about how to improve it.
Summarise the problem
The interview went well and it was time to complete a design challenge. They gave me a brief which had a description of the task and a hypothesis of why they thought it would work.
The design brief was short and clear but I highlighted the key areas so I could be sure about what I had to do. I summarised the outcome in my own words and used that as a base, to begin with.
I realised I didn’t know which device I was designing for so I asked the question. They told me which device to focus on so I carried on and started to sketch a solution for my design problem.
Once I had a few rough sketches that I liked, I sketched a much neater version and annotated it. I stuck it on the whiteboard and wrote notes near each section so it would help me when presenting it.
When presenting my solution, they asked why I summarised the brief. My reply was because it helps me understand the problem better. It helped me stay clear on what it was I was designing for.
How I got the job
A week or so after the interview I got a phone call with the good news. I got the job! A couple of weeks after that, I started as a UX designer. It was in my first week that I learnt about what I had done right in my interview/design challenge.
I had demonstrated the ability to define outcomes and summarise problems. I was the only person to ask a question about devices in the design challenge. I told stories about how I got to the endpoints of all my projects.
Thank you for reading my story. I hope you got something out of it. If you would like to reach out and chat then follow me on Twitter @kieronjkevan.
