Starting a career in UX: personal advise

You can start your career in UX in so many different ways. But there are so many types of content, courses, and podcasts about UX that it is hard to know what is good or where to begin.

With that amount of content, I’ve had many friends that contacted me to advise them on where to start their studies in UX. As I helped them, I decided to share these bits of advice here too.

A person studying design at a working desk. Image of Firmbee by Pixabay

Before we start, a primary thing you need to know about

The first thing you need to know about the studies in UX is that you will always start with a basic theory and the rest is experience. Take it easy with learning UX because it takes practice to be good at it.

And why is that? UX is not exact knowledge. Each project has its own users/public/customers need besides the product’s particularities. Every project will be different from the other, and that is why you will only really know about UX by working with practical cases.

First of all: Books or Courses?

Gif of a woman putting many books in a bag.

Books to start with:
“Lean UX, Designing Great Products with Agile Teams” By Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
“Refactoring UI” By Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger

Internacional courses to start with:
Google UX course
Tip: Search for local courses that have a partnership with companies

Of course, you can start to learn about UX in a book, but honestly, the technology area changes and evolves so fast that I believe most books cannot keep up with these evolutions.

Besides, the best way to learn UX is by combining theory and practice. Therefore, courses are a great way to start learning.

Courses are essential for you to learn theory. With them will understand the professional language, the most used tools in each situation, and all the methodologies. You will have all the theory you need to start consuming more advanced content and practice UX.

Besides the knowledge and the certificate, there is also another super benefit about courses.

Some of them have a partnership with technology companies so that when you finish your studies, they can recommend you to job opportunities at those companies.

Second step: Best practices

Now that you know the basics, it is time to understand where and how to apply them. There are many ways to do this:

1. Ready Case-studies on Medium or other blogs

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Start with:
InVision blog
Bootcamp UX design medium
UX Collective medium

Now that you know the basics, it is time to understand where and how to apply them. There are many ways to do this:

Here at Medium, you can see how companies and other UX professionals work. You can start by looking for your favorite companies profile and see their content or even read random UX texts that are interesting to you.
This part is interesting because there are many case studies and other professional content that will contextualize the theory you just learned in courses. You can see how the methodologies are used in different projects, and learn the best ways to use them.

In blog content, there is also a lot of information about good and bad UX practices. For example, there are articles about heuristics or informational hierarchy in design components, best design systems practices, etcetera.

2. Listen to Podcasts

Gif of a woman talks to a man and says “You know what I just discovered? Podcasts”.

Start with:
InVision Design Better
UI Breackfast: UX/UI Design and Product Strategy by Jane Portman
UX podcast

I usually listen to Spotify Podcasts about UX and all the Technology areas. It happens the same way as the blogs: most of the content is interviews about how UX professionals work on a project.

Podcasts in their majority have a little bit more advanced content than blogs. That is because they talk fluently about processes and terminologies that, as a beginner, you may not so familiar with.

Ok, now how to start to practice?

Gif is a woman sitting on the floor with a violet wall behind her and saying “Practice makes progress”.

After you know the theory and how to use the methodologies, you can begin to apply these pieces of knowledge to your projects.

But what projects? I don’t have a job yet! Well, you do not need a job to start practicing.

My advice is to choose an app or website that you think would be interesting to redesign. It can be interesting because the experience is not great, or because de UI is a little weird, or for whatever reason, you think it would be interesting to work.

Take this app and start to apply all the methodologies that you learned.

Don’t know where to start? Search for case studies to be inspired by and apply their methodologies to your project.

You can start with interviews with some friends that use that app. Or to follow other user’s first experience with this app, and start analyzing the good and bad parts.

Study about the app’s company, their customer’s profile, and their good and bad reviews. After that, start to work on solutions, test them with your friends, and iterate.

Try to understand where every method fits best to what you need to know about the product. And the last part, don’t forget to document the whole process, because that will make your portfolio.

And do you have any tips for my portfolio? Yes, I do!

Animated yellow and black words saying “wow, check out our work” in darker yellow background.

Portfolio references:
Top 21 UX Designer Portfolio Websites in 2021

1. Since you don’t have any professional experience, you have to create one.

When you do so, make sure to show your analytic side and explain why you decided to use this or that methodology. It is important to document all the processes that lead to the final solution.

2. There are many platforms to display your portfolio, but a website portfolio is the most impressive way to do it.
Behance and Dribbble are the most popular platforms to showcase your projects. They are also good places to search for references, but you need to know that to display your projects on Dribbble you need to be invited by someone who already uses the platform.

If you have experience with creating websites, I would recommend you do your virtual portfolio. It’s not a must-have, bit gives a good impression on recruiters.

You don’t need to know about HTML/CSS/Javascript to create your website, there are many online editors to help you create it. There is Weebly, Wix, WordPress, SquareSpace, and many others.

Any final advice? Yes!

Gif of a woman sitting on a working desk happy and celebrating in a pink background.

It is important to emphasize… Take it easy with yourself while learning about UX.

Each learning phase will take you to the knowledge you need. UX is all about experiences and experimenting. Sometimes you will fail, but that is part of the process, is normal to be wrong about what the user wants. The more you try to understand the user’s need, the more you will know what he/she needs.

And that’s it, folks!

If you feel like you want more tips or information about UX, contact me here on my LinkedIn, and let’s talk!