FAQ About My Career in UX / Product Design (Part One)

👋 Hello. So you are considering joining an UX bootcamp, or wandering into the beautiful abyss that is a career in Product Design! I know there is no shortage of posts about this across the internet, which is why I have never personally blogged about this before, but after receiving a couple of inquiries about me in particular I’ve decided to post some of my responses in a series of posts to kick off a new year of more writing.

How did you get into UX design? Did you have much design experience?

It’s a complex answer because, technically, I started working life as a self-taught graphic designer having never studied anything design-related. It took me a long time for me to evolve my career toward UX, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it would for you. Here’s what happened, along with some lessons I learned along the way:

UX Life Lesson #1: Don’t be afraid to ask for help, especially if you’re learning on your own

Growing up, design was “my thing” for a long time, along with aspiring to write and make movies. Because I was painfully shy and anxious, I had a lot of time and opportunities in high school and college to learn design tools and minor coding.

Also because I was painfully shy and anxious, I convinced myself I could learn everything on my own (thus saving me the embarrassment of showing anyone my work unless absolutely necessary), and so I had a sad dearth of mentorship during my formative years of messing with palettes and layers. This meant career-blossoming happened much slower for me than it would have if I went to school with a community to help me get better at my craft and inspire me to take risks.

UX Life Lesson #2: Being humble =/= being excessively self-deprecating

I have improved more in the past 5 years than I did in 10 years of fearing rejection and feedback, because this time I am tapping into people I admire without judgment of myself or others, and I am admitting that I know nothing.

That’s not to say that “knowing nothing” means you don’t have anything to offer. For me it meant truly understanding my strengths rather than beating myself up for the gaps between my current skillset and where I want to be. For example: when I first learned about UX, I realized that unlike straight-up graphic design, it was way more than just stunning visuals. UX is also understanding humans. I didn’t know at the time that my Psychology major would also help set me up perfectly for UX. And as the job market woke up, my background became a strength of mine, rather than a regret (just kidding, I never regretted Psychology) — especially as recruiters stopped looking at whether or not designers went to art school or studied HCI.

UX Life Lesson #3: Develop a unique point of view by making moves that feel good for your soul. Like Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

It’s totally true. This quote gave me hope when I was young and swimming against the current of uncertainty, and now that many years have passed since I first heard these words spoken…I am a firm believer in whatever.

When I chose my major — which should never be a life or death decision, might I add — I made a bet that “understanding the way I think” and “understanding the way humans think” would be a foundational skill for life and work in general, if only because humans are everywhere, and also because I wanted to make sure I could manage my own mental chaos. This bet of mine, along with me continuing to mess around on Photoshop (then Sketch, then Figma), turned out to be a pretty good move.

TL;DR

So yes, I was self-taught for ~20 years and have some design experience, but paths to UX look very different for everyone.

You can work hard and learn the tools, but perspective is everything. You may wander into research, or are drawn to a specific industry or field. The great thing is, whatever you bring to the table in terms of life experience is a foundation for being a designer because it’s important to design with a unique point of view.

Everyone has one of those, and yours matters.