Roadmap to becoming a UX Designer / Product Designer in a Startup
Whether you call it UX Design, UX/UI Design, Product Design, or something else, designing products in today’s fast-paced tech startup requires a blend of a variety of skills.
I get asked all the time how to become a UX Designer. Many many articles have been written on all the skills encompassed under that umbrella, so I’m not gonna go there. Let’s keep this short and sweet.
To be a great UX Designer, you need an understanding of design, research, and psychology.
Graphic Design
Without basic graphic design skills, you’re not going to get far as a designer. You can be a UX researcher, or a product manager, or a number of other related positions working on products at startups, but designers need to know the fundamentals of visual communication.
Things like color theory, composition, grid-based design, typography, information hierarchy, and affordance are covered in standard 4-year design programs at universities and art schools across the globe.
Can you shortcut this process? Rarely. If you already work in a visual communications field, like illustration, photography, or perhaps architecture, I’ve seen people cross over, so it’s not impossible, but the most difficult part is those who need to develop their eye for quality, professional-looking visual design. This takes time and practice under a skilled mentor to develop.
For those who have no formal design training who still really passionately want to become UX Designers, I have a few experimental ideas for you:
- You could become a UX-focused Product Manager. You’ll still be involved in making user-focused product decisions, working alongside a team of developers and designers, and your enthusiasm for research will be highly appreciated.
- You could become a UX Designer for one of the newer types of products we’re seeing today without interfaces. Things like chatbots (Facebook, Slack), voice-activated products (Siri, Alexa), and other non-visual experiences. Being able to think through an experience will require the other two skills I mention below to be very strong when no visual interface is present, and I have a feeling there will be a lot of positions for this opening up in the near future!
Read Product Design for the Web by Randy J. Hunt to get a nice primer for the kind of design skills startups need.
Human-Centered Design (or User-Centered Design) and Research
Without a user-centric philosophy, you’re not a UX designer.
This means every design must begin with a thorough understanding of your target user, employing skills like empathy mapping, persona creation, ethnographic research, user interviews, and user journey mapping.
Design decisions should be validated through prototype testing and usability testing with real world people in your product’s target market.
Read Just Enough Research by Erika Hall to learn how to do these research techniques.
The good news is highly motivated people can learn a lot of these skills quickly, even while building your own business or a side project, so you can build this skill while building your portfolio.
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) or Interaction Design (IxD)
There are certain things that are important to understand when translating design skills to a digital screen that a person can interact with.
Understanding cognitive psychology, how people make and use mental models, best practices for usability, and how to evaluate a user interface, for example, can help a UX designer quickly design intuitive interfaces and products.
Formal HCI programs do exist, so if you already have graphic design training and want to level up, this may be a good place to go next.
Interaction Design also grapples with the concept of designing for users with different characteristics or different states in time, for example: Being able to conceptualize how a design works when a user is brand new, vs when they’re coming back to a product for the 18th time and picking up where they left off, and how to document and communicate those concepts to your team so the experience can be built how you’ve imagined it.
I know plenty of designers who are self-taught in this area, myself included, augmented by tons of experience observing users and studying cognitive behaviors (or perhaps having high skills in consumer marketing). So I’d put this one third on the list in order of priority. I think it’s a skill that can be learned and perfected on the job, over time.
It’s a young industry that keeps reinventing itself
The UX Design industry is still inventing its best practices and standards, and technology is changing constantly — both the technology we design for and the technology we design with — for example, the proliferation and ease of use of prototyping tools now has made complicated wireframes almost obsolete in the modern UX Designer’s toolkit.
With a solid understanding of the principles of Graphic Design, an ability to perform a variety of user research methods, and an understanding of human behavior around interacting with interfaces, you can become a great UX Designer in today’s exciting tech startups.
Sarah Harrison is a design strategist with The Determined and an instructor with Whitespace. She also teaches yoga & meditation.
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