Five tips for junior UX designers
What are the strengths of the designer? In what direction you can develop your skills? Let’s discuss this.
Introduction
If you are a junior designer and do not know where to start learning UX / UI design, I have prepared 5 tips that I always tell friends, acquaintances, students on courses. These tips will be useful if you want to invest your energy and inspiration in the right thing, developing your design skills and getting more complex and interesting tasks on the project or finding your first job. I have been inspired to write this article because I want to help those who want to become a designer and reach their goals. Since I am a mentor of several people in design:
- I have the opportunity to observe a very difficult period that almost every designer faces
- I got confused in theory, I know a lot, but I’m not sure what is enough for the first job; a difficult threshold of entry
- I failed 20 interviews (and wasted my time on test-tasks for each of them).
To make your path a little easier, I wrote 5 recommendations for junior designers.
1. Read every day.
Design is developing quite quickly and if you want to work in this field, you need to read articles (preferably in English) and watch videos about design (for example Youtube). I want to emphasize that there is too much information and it is absolutely impossible to read everything. To make learning easier and much faster, I suggest you arrange thematic weeks. This means that for the next week, your goal is to read articles about typography. After spending a whole week with this topic, you will form a more accurate understanding of working with fonts on a layout than just reading a random article about typography every 3 weeks.
2. Develop Soft Skills and focus on communication.
A designer is a person who must always communicate with a large number of people — customers, developers, managers, business analysts, testers, other designers, and, of course, the target audience. Soft Skills play an important role when a designer is progressing towards intermediate and advanced levels; to reach these levels, you must possess good Soft Skills and you must always keep working on them.
3. A lot of practice.
By focusing on theory and not practice, you are unlikely to have quick and high-quality results. You can learn all the rules, but it’s important to be able to put them into practice. It often happens that the same rule must be used and combined with others, depending on the nature of the problem, and only through practice, you would get this invaluable experience.
How do you find a project if you are still a beginner?
- You can create a project by yourself and work on it.
- Study Case. For example, you have learned all kinds of buttons and fields. Try to create a registration form on a website or app. As you work on it, you will be faced with different tasks, questions, and problems, but you will eventually learn how to create a registration process.
- Volunteer. You can volunteer for a project and offer your help as a UX / UI designer. As a result, your design is used by developers and released to the world, and you, in turn, learn how to work with different types of tasks and add this design to your portfolio.
- Invite your acquaintances, relatives, and friends, and create a design for their business — a cafe, beauty salon, photographer services, etc. There’s no guarantee that your design then will be put into production (maybe your friend is not ready to spend time or money at the moment on a programmer), but on the other hand, you will practice and learn how to work with clients.
4. Follow other designers.
Many designers have achieved a lot of success in UX / UI design. Some of them speak at conferences, webinars, teach courses, write articles, or publish posts on social networks. You can learn a lot from these people, they share their experience, talk about successful projects and failures at work. For example, on Youtube, you can find many videos of another designer creating a page or website design. Observing someone else’s work, you can find a lot of useful information for yourself, and when faced with a difficult task in the future, you can recall the experience of another designer and apply it in your work.
5. Find a mentor.
In some countries, mentoring is not common. Don’t be discouraged, try to find a designer among your friends, or write to a designer you don’t know and ask him to be your mentor. Also, you can try attending courses on the topic and have your teacher be your mentor during the training. What is a mentor for? When you spend a lot of time on all of the above 4 points, you may lose your excitement in learning, this can manifest itself in several ways, but the main ones are: you spent a lot of time on the design and corrected a lot, but now your vision is blurred and you understand that the work is not perfect, but you cannot understand what exactly is wrong; you have studied a lot of theory, but in practice, you are unable to cope with the task; you have created a portfolio, but for some reason, several recruiters turn it down; you are confused in training and do not know in which direction to develop after. A mentor can help you with all these problems.
Of course, you should not expect a person to sit with you for hours, but you can try to agree to communicate every 2 weeks and discuss issues that interest you.
Besides
I want to emphasize that mentors are not only needed for junior designers. No matter which level you are at, but mentors are also always needed. I would like to wish everyone, who has read the article, success in the field of design. This is just my opinion, which consists of 5 main points. This is what I myself have applied and recommended to others. I also want to add that each person is unique and maybe some points will be easier for you to fulfill, and some more difficult. This is the designer’s development path, our profession requires being constantly ready to study more, and learn each day, to stay updated. Try to stay consistent with the topics you are interested in, do not jump from topic to topic, devote as much time as possible to practice, listen to other designers, develop soft skills, and, if possible, find a mentor. Even if you don’t find a mentor, ask your colleague to take a look at your work or portfolio, don’t be afraid of criticism. Constructive criticism will positively affect your design. Feel free to ask me anything about the UX/UI design or review your portfolio in the comments.
Additional Materials:
Links to useful resources to read:
- https://www.nngroup.com/
- https://www.uxbooth.com/
- https://uxplanet.org/
- https://uxdesign.cc/
- https://telegraf.design/ (only Ukrainian language)
- https://infogra.ru/ (only Russian language)
Links to useful Youtube channels:
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeB_OpLspKJGiKv1CYkWFFw
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClYfiU4L1Ry7R6sgpZ_F9PQ
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCndfHdRdEiGOyCOgxQ4W9YQ
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWUGGwfTfJ0-2jUS3dZqOJA
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ILyoCw2Rl-mf6hykI-UzQ
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvBGFeXbBrq3W9_0oNLJREQ
Examples of video tutorials on Youtube:
