Since I started going along with product design industry, I’ve worked through a number of projects. There are 4 common types of previous position that an UX designer took before they come to UX. I've meet them all, each background is total different and this is make the diversity of viewpoints for the team. If you plan to move your career into next page, take a look on what you will take advantage of and what can you improve if you change your career to UX area
Front End Developer: is responsible for delivering product which match designed UI to end-user, they work with: Html, Css, Javascript and other programing language related to interface development. The UX designer transforms from front end developer is good at understanding how team develops a product, what is possible and how long it takes to finish a component. So their solution will be optimized for development.
What a UX-front-end-designer can learn more is a sense of design and creativeness that lets them easier to communicate with other design specially UI Designer.
Graphic Designer: mainly works on visual side, they tend to create visual element, create visual attraction to audiences. Their design skills allow them to present well, make design component and layout. Almost time they will play a role of an UI Designer in the team, working with color, typography, scale, contrast, visual hierarchy.
To be an UI designer, a graphic design should know fundamental of software development and coding to make sure their design is feasible to development team, the UX-front-end-designer with UI designer will be perfect match when they work together
Business Analyst: Their job on the daily basis is a part of UX, they work with customer and stakeholder to understand problems, gather requirement turn it into document for development team, so the UX designer with BA experiences has very strong skills on problem solving, they even could move to be a Product Owner or Product Manager as well.
Marketer: It is a general title, but there are some work that a marketer do relative to UX such as: tracking user behavior, working with UX metrics and KPIs, visualizing data then working with team to enhance the performance, some of content creator works with UX writing for the apps and webs. Base on their duties in marketing department, when company grow up they will be specialized skills to do a certain job such as: data analyst, UX research, content strategy, information architecture.
Beside that, I truly recommend to take below online courses and read some books to have solid understand UX in basic.
Intro to Design of Everyday Things from UC-San Diego’s Don Norman: This is very basic course to provide you common user experience terms and Concept, you are not required to have software development or design background to understand this, recommend for everyone working in product development area.
Introduction to User Experience Design from Georgia Tech’s Rosa Arriaga (on Coursera): Another beginning level for your UX knowledge. This course introduces UX process from require gathering, analyst to present design to stakeholders and evaluate design. You might find out UX terms here to deeply discover through other courses
Product Design from Coursera: This course allows you to see the whole picture of product design. Materializing your game-changing idea and transform it into a product that you can build a business around. Blending theory and practice to teach you product validation, UI/UX practices, Google’s Design Sprint and the process for setting and tracking actionable metrics.
Other courses you might learn are:
Interaction Design Specialization from UC-San Diego’s Scott Klemmer, Elizabeth Gerber, and Jason Wobbrock (on Coursera)
UX Design for Mobile Developers, Rapid Prototyping, and Product Design from Google (on Udacity)
The Interaction Design Foundation, home to dozens of classes on interaction design
Nielsen Norman Group World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience group.
Finish those 3 recommended courses you can choose to dive in any phase or model of UX to learn more, you could also find some books that was called “bedside book” for UX designer such as:
The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman
Designing with the Mind in Mind by Jeff Johnson
Don’t make me think by Steve Krug
Human-Computer Interaction by Alan Dix, Janet Finlay, Gregory Abowd, and Russell Beale
Remember to hit more books as much as you can!!!
You will probably learn and read those books for a year or more, then the most important part is to let your knowledge comes into play on the real project, solve real problem. It is when you start doing user research, usability testing, data analyst and so on.
The number of university starting teach UX is significantly increasing, those training is mixed between 2 or more faculties, Some combinations between computing and design faculty, or marketing and design faculty, or psychology plus software engineer. The online courses are also focus on special skills so before start you may take a step back to see what you had and what will you need. Self-teaching is not a bad idea as long as you keep the key features of good UX in your product, help people to solve their problems.
