Your journey to becoming a UX designer doesn’t have to be overwhelming
I recently saw a lot of people online saying how hard it is to start a career in UX. When I was starting off, I had great support to help me learn, but even with that, I remember how overwhelming it was. I was hungry for knowledge but wasn’t sure what I need to know and where to start. I am a strong believer that everything is possible if you put your mind to it. I also believe in giving back — that’s why I decided to create this post.
Over the years, I accumulated a lot of resources and articles that were shared with me or I found on that journey that I now want to share with you. I believe those are a great starting point to understanding what you want to learn more about. So strap in and get ready to learn 💪
Design Process
Design Thinking Process is the groundwork for setting up for success. You’ll be able to understand the high level steps that you should follow to solve the problem.
Even with that, I know people can struggle to understand the design process and the order of what should be done when. I highly recommend reading the Design Sprint book (more about it below) or the Lean UX book. Those two books are absolutely fantastic and all designers should read them.
While you’re learning all about methodology and the process, I’d recommend having a look at the laws of UX. Those will teach you all about best practices that will make your designs 🔥.
Design Strategy
Asking the right questions at the beginning of the process will set you up for success. We usually run a discovery session or workshop with the stakeholders which helps us to answer all the important questions
As designers we need to prioritize people over business goals. This can be hard as at the end of the day, it’s the business that is paying us to design. Learning how to align business and customer goals will help to save many heartbreaks and frustrations.
Design Methods
If I was going to go through each and every method in more depth, we will be here all day.
The first article actually contains list of UX design methodologies and links to other resources which will be a huge help.
Here are some more awesome articles that I think are worth reading about methods you can use.
User Research
Shane shared this cool template we use for usability testing that you can use too!
Accessibility
Accessibility is one of those topics that I think everyone should know at least a little bit about. After all, we want to be able to create experiences for everyone.
Pablo Stanley wrote this great, short article on how you can make sure whatever you create always meets basic accessibility criteria, this article is a great starting point.
FutureLearn has this great short course that will help you put yourself into the shoes of people with visual impairments and how they use the virtual world. It really helped me to understand and empathize with people who might have disabilities.
Know that you know the basics, you can dive deeper into the accessibility guidelines. WCAG documents go through the all the principles as well as rules that you should follow to make your products accessible.
And to top it all of, something to empower you and your users — building accessible experiences.
Workshopping and facilitating
I used to hate public speaking. The thought of having to speak up in front of a large group of people scared me. Now I absolutely love facilitating! Getting a group of people together and coming out with a tonne of work after just a couple of hours is one of the best feelings.
Design Sprints are absolutely fantastic if you have the right problem to solve. Getting familiar with how they are run can also give you a good insight of what exercises you can take away from them and use in smaller, quicker workshops.
AJ&Smart have so many fantastic videos on their youtube channel about workshopping and design sprints. This one is giving you a full summary of the design sprint but have a look through their channel — I promise you that you will learn A LOT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08IPOsrytz
Running remote workshops during pandemic times became such a norm for designers, but if you haven’t done it before it can be a bit intimidating. Before COVID closed down our office, we ran a “test” remote workshop and I wrote an article to share my learnings from it.
We start all of our workshops with a design challenge. It used to take me a lot of time to figure out how to write the “perfect” design challenge until I found this article. Life saver!
Visual Design
In this post I was hoping to focus more on the research and problem solving side of being a designer, but I wanted to throw in some resources you might find helpful to learn about some basics.
- Know your onions. Both Web and Graphic Design editions. If you know absolutely nothing about visual design and it’s rules, both of the books are great at explaining the fundamentals. Grids, Colours, Typography. It has it all!
- Establishing a visual hierarchy is an important part of design. If anything, you need to be able to make sure people focus on the right things and aren’t overwhelmed.
- Most of all, remember that visual design isn’t everything about being a designer. I loved this article about how visual design is only the tip of the iceberg. Designing is way more than just pretty images.
Soft Skills
Being a designer is not all designing. There is a lot of soft skills that you might already have, or will need to develop.
You’ll have to prove the value and importance of user experience at some point in your career — probably sooner than you think. Bets way to prove it is to talk about the return on investment.
Shane wrote this great article about how you can prove the value of UX. This example really shows how much money your clients or stakeholders can save by spending a bit more time on problem solving and testing.
This is another great example. It talks about how a simple button made a business $300 Million.
It’s not all about the money though — this is a very sad case of how poor design causes someone to lose their life.
Confidence is important as a designer, and you need to know your worth. You’ll meet people along the way that will not understand what your job really is. And that’s okay — your job is also to help people understand user experience and the importance of it. You don’t just make pretty images, you solve problems.
Saying that, your ego is not your amigo. Remember to put your ego aside. Be collaborative, empathetic and learn to listen. Listening is one of the biggest part of this job.
You will also deal with stakeholders and clients. Knowing how to talk to them is really important. At the end of the day, they are trusting you with their “baby” and want to make sure it will work. Gain their trust and help them feel more at ease.
One other soft skills I’d love to share is time management. And I don’t mean meeting deadlines, but learning how to plan your time. Plan your day so that you can be the most productive. Of course there will be days where you’ll have to “break” the rules, but having a clear plan of when you do what will help you complete your work faster.
And last but not least — learn how to work smarter, not harder. This will come with time, but sometimes you won’t aways need to follow the whole design process. Not everything needs a fully fleshed out wireframe, sometimes a quick sketch is enough.
There is way more to design than just this but I hope those resources will help you get on the right track.
One thing I’d like to add is that it’s okay to take time to learn. No one truly mastered design — it’s a skill that you can always improve on. There are areas that you’ll be better at, and areas you might struggle with — or just not enjoy. Afterall, becoming a better designer is all about continuous improvement.
