Q/A Session: Intern Curious about UX
I received these questions from an engineering intern about what she should do in order to pursue a career in UX Design. Below are my answers to her questions. Hope this can help anyone else making the same transition.
Original email sent to me
Hi Tom, Thanks for getting back to me! Here are some questions I have:
What was your journey into UX?
What does a day at work look like?
Have you worked with people who started out in a non-design field and transitioned over to UX/product design? What do you believe made them successful/stand out?
What are some aspects of design/UX that are often overlooked by beginners, especially when starting a portfolio?
Do you know of any good resources for learning more about UX/UI or for getting connected with others in the field?
Looking forward to your response, it’ll undoubtedly be very valuable to me!
Thanks.
My Response
Firstly, the fact that you're asking questions like this and are interested enough to listen to the answers means you're gonna do just fine.
Q: What was your journey into UX?
A: I started my career in Graphic Design and not UX design. I interned for a small agency in London, England who also had a comic book studio. We did the packaging and advertising for video games and films. I fell in love with Design as a career and a lifestyle and went to work for that company full time once I graduated. I may have had to beg a little.
I later went on to be an art director for a luxury goods retail chain. But I got my first taste of UX design when I took a job for a company that did Architecture/Interior Design and Branding. We did a lot of digital campaigns for the spaces we built like digital wayfinding systems, websites, and digital kiosks. Nobody else on the team liked to work on digital products so I became the go-to person for that kind of work.
When the economy tanked in 2008, I was laid off, but everyone I worked with who also got laid off began coming to me for all their digital needs so suddenly I found myself in business. I freelanced and opened a company with a partner for about 8 years and we managed an assortment of the company's digital products, marketing and were basically their outsourced design department. As my partnership started to fade and I was more on my own. I began taking on larger UX projects for Enterprise types of clients. Companies with large software ecosystems needed strategy, guidance, etc...
All of these projects stemmed from the work I did at that Architecture studio funny enough and I was able to take on the projects because of the relationships I had built there. They trusted me with their brand design work, so they trusted me with their UX work even though I may not have had a ton of experience in UX at that point.
In order to advance my UX skills. I took an online course from the University of San Diego to learn the basics because at that point I was pretty much self-taught. They offer their course which is a carbon copy of the Stanford D-School course through Coursera.com. I highly recommend this class though I have seen great people come out of General Assembly and Springboard as well.
Q: What does a day at work look like?
A: Well, a day at work can vary greatly depending on the team you are working on and what your role on that team is. So I'll just talk about what happens for me currently.
I am currently the lead on a team where I am the sole contributor to design. Meaning I am the only designer. We work as an "Agile" pod. This means our development process follows the Agile process. Which is a process meant to streamline the delivery of digital products and focus on iteratively releasing software on a 2-week, 1-week, or another periodic schedule. We are on a 1-week schedule so it's a bit intense.
Our day starts off with a stand-up meeting. Where we all go through what we're working on, what we did yesterday, and if anything is blocking us. Each week, we decide what we are going to build, and then build it together. As the designer, I need to be very connected to the roadmap of what will be built in the coming months. So then I can break down my work into three categories. Strategy, UX, and UI.
So for features that are far off especially when we begin a project I work in what I call the Strategy phase. I help conduct research about our users, help the product team develop and shape requirements, create high-level flows of the intended experience and help to put the team in the shoes of our customers while aligning on how we can best serve them.
Next, I'm in the UX phase. Really focusing on the experience side of things informed by the strategy. This is where I collaboratively hold workshops with the team to sketch solutions for new features that will be coming in a few weeks. We align on concepts in the form of sketches and wireframes which will turn into low-fidelity prototypes that we can test with real or potential users. In which case I'll develop a testing plan, create the test and conduct the test. Once we have the result, I'll help the team analyze the results and decide on the next steps.
When a design has been thoroughly tested and is ready, then I work on the UI portion which is the high-fidelity prototype of the User Interface. This, I'll use to hand off to the development team for them to create the final product. It's only ready to hand to the development team because they were involved in the earlier processes of ideating, wire-framing and have agreed to what they are going to build. We still do some user testing at this point just to make sure the prototype really hits with users.
From a tools perspective. I use Sketch to create the designs and InVision to create clickable prototypes. We can conduct usability tests in person or through software like UserTesting.com.
So in any given sprint, my time is stretched between Strategizing on future features, creating the user experience design for upcoming features, or creating the user interface details for features currently being worked on by the development team. This all involves working closely with the development and business team to troubleshoot any issues that come up as they are building.
It's good to break up this process regularly by connecting with teams outside of our project so we can connect our work with the company at large. Occasionally, I will conduct workshops or design sprints to help the team get out of a decision rut or to help us jumpstart a new idea or feature.
So days can vary wildly. But it's important to align and strategize with your business partners as much as it is to deliver design in Sketch or any other software.
Q: Have you worked with people who started out in a non-design field and transitioned over to UX/product design? What do you believe made them successful/stand out?
A: I have worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds who did not begin their careers in UX design or any other design practice. I've worked with folks from Psychology, Biomedical, Business, Graphic Design, Architecture, and more.
The people that succeed are those who never stop learning. Those who are curious and keep striving to be better. You're not ever going to have all the answers. The key is to be curious and courageous enough to continuously search for the answers while asking new questions.
Most of these folks are not afraid to give their opinion and speak up regularly. Those who sit in the background and don't voice their opinion or get comfortable leading the conversation will struggle to be an effective designer as a big majority of UX/product design is based on communication and trust.
I firmly believe that communication and trust are two of the most important skills for any job, but especially for a UX designer. The products you build need to be trusted to be successful. In order to gain that trust, you need to communicate authentically with your user and solve their problems ethically. In order to build a product like that, you need to foster trust amongst your team. In order to do that, you need to be a great communicator to explain your ideas and work with your team to arrive at the best solutions.
Q: What are some aspects of design/UX that are often overlooked by beginners, especially when starting a portfolio?
A: Personality. I have to look through lots of portfolios for potential hires and they are all starting to look the same. Infuse some of your own personality into your portfolio. Start with the final result of the project and then walk the user through the story of how you got to that result. Include pictures, detail the process you took, highlight what your role was and how successful the outcome was.
Hit upon the problems you encountered and how you overcame them. It's okay to show ideas that never made it into the final design. Show everything from the initial sketches to ideation sessions that didn't go anywhere, but also be conscious of the fact that someone needs to be able to breeze through a portfolio project in a matter of minutes. Keep the text short and sweet and edit the project down to only further tell the story you're trying to get across. In other words. Remove the fluff.
If you don't have any work to show in your portfolio, it's fine to do projects like redesigning a big product your use every day. Document the whole process and create a great new design. Take on projects for a family friend to redesign their website, create your own app, or whatever else you can do to improve and then prove your skills. Those things are fine. Just start designing.
Q: Do you know of any good resources for learning more about UX/UI or for getting connected with others in the field?
A: Neilson/Norman group has great articles, videos, and content on UX Design. Don Norman wrote a book called "The Design of Everyday Things" and it is a must-read for a UX designer.
There are tons of Facebook groups to join. These for example
There are lots of great designers on Instragram who talk about UX, how to get into it, and give mini-lessons all the time in the form of IGTV and carousel posts.
Also a ton of podcasts out there like the Experience Design Podcast (now called Lift Off) and many more.
This is a great website with fantastic articles and courses. https://www.uie.com/
Attend meet-ups (which are hard to do right now of course). Conferences are fantastic, but also hard to do right now. UX boot camps are a good way to meet people at the same starting point as you though they can be a little on the expensive and time-intensive side.
There are slack channels, Reddit groups, and other groups that you can join. I've never personally done that but I know some people who do and get a lot out of it.
Medium is a great platform with a lot of great writers talking about UX design. Also, there are a number of great LinkedIn groups to join.
Also, keep doing what you're doing by asking people in the field. Good luck and if you ever need to. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
Thanks,
TM
