Before we dive into why you should become a UX designer, let’s look at what UX design is. Here’s a quick overview:

1. Make an Impact

As a UX designer, you get to solve real-world problems, as well as the tiny, day-to-day, seemingly insignificant problems (that actually add up to a lot!). It’s all in the name, User Experience design—the user and their needs are at the forefront of the design process, whether it’s an app, a website, financial services, or the layout of a shop. When we hear “UX design”, we tend to think of customers, designing and selling products. But in reality, a user can be a patient at a hospital, a pedestrian, your grandmother, or you in many, many contexts. The world is filled with good and bad design, but imagine that good design reigned—imagine how much better our experiences and lives would be. There would be greater inclusivity and accessibility, two important aspects of UX design. 

Don Norman is the grandfather of UX design and author of The Design of Everyday Things, essentially the book of user-friendly design. After 60 years in the field, he is appalled by the absence of consideration for elderly people. In a Fast Company article, the IxDF Board Member and former Apple Vice President argues that the world seems to be designed against the elderly. People are living longer, with average life expectancies increasing worldwide. While elderly people may have diminished senses and physical abilities, many are still healthy and active. From tiny text on important labels and instruction manuals to regular household objects that need a knife or set of pliers to be opened, life is harder to navigate when you get older. Even when products are designed specifically for older people, they tend to be ugly and demeaning. In 2017 the London’s Royal College of Art put on an exhibition at London’s Design Museum called “New Old”, which was later described as “Why you should be designing for your 73-year-old self” in another Fast Company article that Don Norman references. The exhibition explored how good design has the potential to enhance the experience of our later lives. It included The Scooter for Life, designed by PriestmanGoode which has three wheels for stability and a stylish pouch at the front for storing groceries—a far cry from the bulky and clumsy “mobility scooters” you see around.

The same principles apply to digital design too. When designing an app or website for seniors, there are a few factors to consider; the font should be on the larger size, the navigation should be clear and uncomplicated, and the user should be able to understand its purpose immediately. Get to the point—your grandmother doesn’t want to spend hours fiddling around.

Ageist, a lifestyle website aimed at people over the age of 50, regularly updates their website to improve user experience. They use bright colors, have a simple navigation with menu items clearly displayed at the top of the homepage, and have a large search icon. Also, it only takes a couple of scrolls to reach the “end” of the site. 

UX Design is deeply rewarding—you will discover infinite opportunities to improve and reinvent products that will enhance millions of lives.

2. It’s Creative and Logical

One of the most appealing and unique aspects of the UX design field is the synergy between creativity and logic. Let’s say you’re an enthusiastic DIY-er (upcycling and crafts) and even have your own DIY blog (you enjoy writing too!). You’re naturally creative but don’t have technical expertise; just the term “coding” frightens you—no problem! You don’t need to be technical to get into UX design. Similarly, if your strengths lie in mathematics or coding, UX design gives you the opportunity to use those abilities, while harnessing your innate creativity (yes, you too are creative!). In your UX design career, you will use your logical side to create practical solutions for users’ needs. Practicality is not enough, however; the solutions also have to be creative and not just in terms of aesthetics, but in terms of functionality and usability also. Think of your smartphone; it serves many practical purposes, chiefly communication. But that alone can’t make a successful product. How does it make a user feel? Is it pleasing to look at? What makes it special enough for someone to choose it over another smartphone? Think about the Apple iPhone. It expertly balances aesthetics with functionality. While some smartphones have unintuitive start-ups, where you find yourself paging frantically through an instruction manual, the iPhone works straight out of the box, pleasantly guiding you through the set-up process. The solutions you create shouldn’t compromise usability over aesthetics and vice versa—it’s all about balance.

3. Become an In-Demand Professional in a Growing, Multidisciplinary Industry with Low Barriers to Entry

In 2020 there was a 289% increase in employers’ interest in UX design in the United Kingdom. The report by Hired.com, Mind The Gap, also found that UX design was one of the skills with the biggest gap in supply and demand. LinkedIn listed UX design as number 5 on their list of 15 skills that will get you hired in 2020. In CNN Money’s Best Jobs in America 2015 report, they estimated that UX design will grow by 18% between 2015 and 2025. You will find thousands of job listings on Indeed and LinkedIn, particularly in the US, UK and Canada with countless remote options too. As more organizations embrace the importance of UX design, job opportunities and job security is set to grow even more in 2022.

We know that UX design is both creative and analytical, but it stretches even further than that. The field encompasses numerous other disciplines, such as psychology, technology, visual design and sociology. In fact, it is the definition of multidisciplinary. This makes the nature of the work more exciting, rewarding, and challenging, but also lowers the barriers to entry. Whether you’re a psychologist in training or have practiced for many years, you can apply your expertise to UX design. You already have a big head start when it comes to understanding users’ behavior. Even if the field you’re currently in isn’t directly related to UX design or the disciplines mentioned above, the skills and abilities you already possess will benefit your UX career journey. 

4. It’s Relatively Easy to Switch to a Career in UX Design 

It’s never too late to change careers. As society evolves, new exciting professions come up. In fact, it wasn’t until 1995 that Don Norman coined the term user experience (UX) and it wasn’t until the early 2000s that UX designer became a real job. There are many reasons why becoming a UX designer is an exciting prospect, and there are many paths you can follow to become one. Therefore, don’t let your background hold you back in your journey towards becoming a UX designer, instead use it to stand out and learn what you need to take the first step. Many of the skills a UX designer needs to succeed are, in fact, transferable from other professions. Your previous experience will always be an asset.

Let’s look at specific examples of how you can change your career to UX design:

• If you’re a graphic designer you’re in luck since your skills in emotional design, creative thinking and prototyping will serve you well. You will need to focus on building a user-centric mindset and learn how to work with iterative processes and multidisciplinary teams. Find out more about how to change your career from graphic design to UX design here.    
• If you’re a marketing professional and you would like to become a UX designer you can harness your research and customer—user—psychology skills. Your previous experience in how to make a product desirable and appealing for your customer will benefit you. You will need to change your conversion-focus mindset to a user experience one, also you will need to learn about individual behaviors. If you’re thinking about taking your first steps towards UX design, find out for information here.
• If you’re a web designer you’re already used to working in multi-disciplinary teams and you’ll fit right in. In addition, you have a lot of experience solving different types of problems and this is a skill that will transfer smoothly. You will need to shift your focus from technology to user experience. You’ll need to pay attention to how the user feels when using a product besides focusing on whether the technology works well or not. If becoming a UX designer sounds like an enticing prospect for you, find out more practical information here.
• If you’re a business manager you can definitely take advantage of your “big picture thinking”, and this will help you make better judgment calls for your users. You’ll have to learn how to build a user-centric mindset and familiarise yourself with the design processes. Find out more about how to switch from a business management career to UX design here.
• If you’re a software developer you’re already experienced in creative problem solving and testing, and you have a constant-learning mindset. These skills will help you become an outstanding UX designer. You’ll have to shift your focus from the technology itself to how your users feel when using it. If you can build a user-centric mindset you will be able to have a successful career as a UX designer. If you’d like to know more about this particular career change, read this piece. 

If you want to change your career and become a UX designer, but your background doesn’t match any of the previous examples don’t worry. Think about what your current career has in common with UX design and use that as a starting point. Once you’re more familiar with UX design you’ll be able to bring your unique point of view and stand out to build a successful career. There are plenty of options to gain the knowledge you need that are compatible with your current career and schedule. Be assured that you can make the first step towards becoming a UX designer in a smooth and smart way.           

5. You Don’t Have to Master Tools 

Believe it or not, UX tools are less important than you might think. While they’re loved by professionals in the field, with new ones released every year, it can be difficult to stay on top of them. UX tools (like Sketch, InVision and Adobe XD) are constantly evolving (with monthly or more frequent updates), so keeping up with them can be overwhelming and pull focus from your actual work. Happily, though, what you do, your knowledge, skills and how you apply them are far more significant. Tools come and go, but UX principles and processes remain. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that the tools you’re currently using, or will use in a future role, will be the same in your next job or company. Lastly, there are many principal UX techniques that don’t require tools, such as usability testing, user interviews and card sorting. 

One of the most common misconceptions amongst newcomers is that UX designers should know how to code. While it is helpful for designers to understand how the underlying technology works to be able to design for it, this is not essential. The extent to and you can pick up the additional skills. Here’s an in-depth look at the role of code in a UX designer’s skill set.

6. Opportunities for Career Growth, Skills Development and Specialization

UX design embraces both soft and hard skills. Here are some of the skills you can expect to develop in your UX design career, both through a UX certification and on-the-job learning (this is not an exhaustive list; there are many more UX-related skills to learn!):

• Empathy
• Critical thinking
• Research 
• Visual communication
• Writing
• Coding and development

Just as your skillset can be applied to a career in UX design, the skills that you learn in a UX design career are things you can transfer to a specialization or a different field altogether! 

The range of different UX roles and specializations within the field include these: 

• UX designer
• Product designer
• Information architect 
• Visual designer
• Customer experience designer
• UX researcher
• Content strategist
• Service designer

UX design is a broad, innovative field that presents endless possibilities for learning, growth and development.

7. Accessible and Affordable UX Certifications

There’s more good news; you don’t have to go to university or get a degree to get into UX design. You can start to teach yourself with the help of online resources. Begin with a browse through the IxDF’s library of open-source, open-access UX literature. 

A UX certification can aid greatly in your quest to become a UX designer. A comprehensive portfolio and practical expertise are essential to secure your dream UX job. IxDF courses and Bootcamps offer portfolio exercises and practical project experience so that you can build your portfolio while you learn. 

Choosing the right UX certification can be challenging. There’s a lot of choices out there, and conflicting reviews and information don’t help matters. Ultimately it is crucial to do your research and ask questions to ensure that your specific goals and requirements are met. 

Since launching early in 2021, the Google UX Design Professional Certificate presented by Coursera has seen over 300,000 enrollments. Have you considered it as an option? It provides a firm foundation in UX design, so it’s a great starting point if you’re new to the field. However, if you’re looking for something more hands-on with constructive feedback, Google’s peer-reviewed approach may not be for you. Discover its benefits and how it compares with IxDF in this article. 

CareerFoundry’s UX designer Bootcamps offer 1:1 mentoring and a job guarantee, so it’s another great option to consider. However, the Bootcamps are only available if you’re located in the USA, UK, Canada, the EU, Australia and New Zealand.

Udemy has a wealth of courses in countless disciplines, including UX, and you pay per course so it’s worth investigating if you want to dip your toes in. But what they make up for in sheer course volume they lose in quality as courses are managed by separate entities and not audited by Udemy. 

The Nielsen Norman Group is a leading consultancy in UX design and offers a great range of classroom-based training for aspiring UX professionals. Their courses are offered on an international basis, so you will likely have to wait a while before there’s one in your area.

Ready to start your UX career journey right now? Check out the IxDF’s range of self-paced, industry-recognized courses, Master Classes and mentor-led Bootcamps. Take advantage of the IxDF end-of-year special and get 25% off an annual membership and $200 off on Bootcamps!

With the IxDF, you can choose from a range of educational materials, structured in different ways to suit your learning style. With their industry-recognized courses that cover the entire spectrum of UX design, you can dive deep into each concept at your own pace and get an industry-recognized certificate. If time is a constraint, IxDF’s Master Classes, at an average length of 1 hour, are a great way to dip your feet in the UX waters with a low time commitment.  

If you’re interested in participating in a live cohort and do not have the capacity to join an intensive Bootcamp, then the part-time, remote offering from the Interaction Design Foundation (IxDF) might be in your comfort zone. With personalized mentor sessions and a peer-based global cohort, IxDF Bootcamps cater to different specializations: choose from the introductory UX Fundamentals to the more specialized User Research and User Interface and the 100% practical UX Portfolio and Careers.

8. Join a Thriving Community 

The UX design community is expanding. You will be able to connect with like-minded people around the world, find inspiration, offer support and discover new opportunities. The Interaction Design Foundation has Local Groups so you can meet people in your area, form friendships or even meet your future employer (there are over 400 groups in 99 countries!). And you don’t need to be a UX designer to join—the only requirement is that you want to learn!  

IxDF Bootcamps are also cohort-based, so you will learn together with other students from across the planet, interact with them and strengthen your network.

9. Work Remotely

The COVID-19 pandemic forced so many of us into the remote working lifestyle. Economic ramifications of the pandemic and the absolute necessity to work remotely have encouraged countless organizations to reduce overheads and save precious time and resources by fully embracing the world of virtual working. Often going so far as to get rid of their physical offices entirely. Sites and applications like Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Teams and more have made remote work more straightforward and sophisticated than ever. There is no need for UX design work to be physically bound, essentially you just need a computer, internet connection, pen, paper and an internet connection to design, communicate with colleagues and or clients and perform any other related task. While it is not guaranteed that your future UX employer will work remotely, the reality is that in 2022 it’s more likely than ever. And if you freelance, well, the way you work is completely up to you! 

10. Salary Satisfaction

Meaningful work is one—if not the main—factor in job satisfaction. However, salary satisfaction is also important. If you feel your hard work isn’t being adequately rewarded, even though you enjoy it, you may start to seek out other opportunities. As UX designers are in high demand, but skills are in short supply, the average UX designer salary continues to rise. Naturally, salaries will vary depending on the country, company, experience level and other factors, but the average annual UX designer salary according to Glassdoor is 105,122 USD in the United States, 48,755 GBP in the United Kingdom, 77,090 CAD in Canada and 1,389,256 INR in India. In each case, and in other countries across the world, the average UX designer salary is well over the national average salary. As demand for UX designers increases globally in 2022, so will UX designer salaries. 

Like most other industries, the UX industry recognizes experience with higher pay; so, as you advance in your career, you can expect your salary to grow along with the rest of your career.

The Take Away

A UX design career is filled with possibilities, meaning and growth, and it’s all within arm’s reach. With a global UX skills shortage, high salaries and low barriers to entry, and the freedom to work anywhere, there is no better time than 2022 to explore this career path. Don’t worry if you don’t have a design background or a degree in information systems; you can find free resources online and industry-recognized courses and Bootcamps to kick-start your UX career today. What’s more, with a legion of modern problems to address—and likely many more new ones coming up ahead—this is a trade tailor-made for the 21st century, and far beyond. Choose 2022 as your year to make a difference with UX design. 

References and Where to Learn More

Find more information on User Experience Design, take the course:
https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/user-experience-the-beginner-s-guide

Explore poor user experience for the elderly as told by Don Norman:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me 

Read more about London’s Design Museum exhibition called “New Old”:
https://www.fastcompany.com/3067220/why-you-should-be-designing-for-your-73-year-old-self 

Take a deeper dive into various UX roles and specializations:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/the-ultimate-guide-to-understanding-ux-roles-and-which-one-you-should-go-for 

UX software tools aren’t quite as important as they might appear. Read why, here:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/ux-tools-matter-less-than-you-think 

Check out the demand for UX designers, what employers are looking for and UX designer salaries:
https://uxplanet.org/heres-what-hiring-managers-look-for-in-ux-design-candidates-90a144d21c2e 

Here’s Hired.com’s Mind the Gap report on the UK’s technology skills gap:
https://hired.com/whitepapers/skills-gap-report-download 

UX design is one of the most sought-after skills by employers. Read the report here:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/linkedin-online-elearning-skills-jobs-hiring/ 

This article was originally published on the Interaction Design Foundation, reproduced here with permission and minor edits

The post 10 Reasons To Become A UX Designer in 2022 appeared first on UX Mastery.

If you weren’t able to join the session then here’s your chance to catch up. Grab a coffee and take a break from your busy schedule to hear some thoughts on how we can help to be part of a movement towards positive change.

Session links:

• Design community advocates at Industryfish: https://industryfish.co
• UX Mastery’s Get Started in UX: https://uxmastery.com/get-started-in-ux
• UX Educators Slack channel (thanks Julia!): https://uxeducators.slack.com
• Mike Montiero’s Design is a Job and Dear Design Student
• Phil Cleaver’s What They Don’t Teach You at Design School
• Jon Kolko’s ‘How I Teach Design: https://www.howiteachdesign.com
• Jon Kolko’s free book about large scale social problems: wicked problems.com
• Library of free content fron AC4D: http://library.ac4d.com

Transcript:

Hawk: All right. Hello and welcome. This is the latest in our UX Mastery series of live panel events. I’m Hawk, and I’m joined today by Simon Pemberton. We’ll be discussing the future of design education and the part that we all have to play in it. We planned on sharing our discussion today with Marissa Mills, but unfortunately Marissa has been waylaid by some unexpected childcare admin. I also need to apologize for the weather here in Auckland, New Zealand, quite likely to see an amazing thunder and lightning display behind me very shortly. Fingers crossed!

Before we start, I’d like to apologise to those of you that tried to join us for our session a couple of weeks ago. Due to a technical difficulty we were unable to go live at that time. Sorry for anyone that had to reschedule, and thanks for your patience.
Quick housekeeping: please keep yourselves muted and ask questions at any time via the chat sidebar. You can open the chat sidebar by clicking the chat icon at the bottom of your screen and time permitting we may invite you to ask your question on video. This is obviously absolutely optional. Luke will hit you up via direct message to check in whether you’re comfortable doing that. If you’re not, I can ask on your behalf, but please shoot through questions as soon as you like via chat.

I’d love to start by formally introducing Simon and then I’m going to throw over to Simon to set the scene and give us a little bit of context around the subject of today’s session, before we throw it open to you for questions.

So let’s talk about Simon. Simon has over thirty years experience in both the design and advertising industries and has combined experience in the successful creation, development and implementation of brand identities and cultures. And his experience as the head of school at four leading design schools brings together a unique blend of creative and management skills within a successful educational environment. Simon is also a published author in a wide range of design magazines and recently published ‘On the Shoulders of Giants’, which is a book and video documentary featuring interviews with 13 of Australia’s leading designers. Simon’s joining me today as one-third of Industryfish, the collaborative effort of three individuals who are passionate about people, design, and learning. And their mission is to create an environment that’s committed to building a culture of strong dynamic and effective design education in Australia.

So Simon, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us today. I’d love to get a bit of an overview on your thoughts around design education and why it is that we are responsible, and what we can do.

Simon: Thank you. And thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. I’m looking forward to the conversation and in talking with the people who are joining us today. I think the main thing that I would like us all to talk about is —and I’ll probably use the word ‘community’ more than I should—but, what we can do as an industry, what we can do as a community, to support design education. It’s a truism, but I don’t think it’s given enough attention and there’s a lot of the detail around that because clearly students are our future, and clearly students want their future to be what we do. I think underpinning, some of the issues that I hope we talk about today is the fact that it even starts at high school — and I think we should include high school students, very definitely not just tertiary level or post secondary level, whatever, whichever way you like to refer to them— students in high school, because they’re beginning to think about their careers, but they are being taught by people who are, I’m sure, very talented, very committed, very smart, tick all the right boxes, of course, but who may not either have the time or who may not have the experience to understand the the design industries that students are thinking they might want to go into. I think as an industry there’s a lot we can do to support those teachers. And I think there’s a lot we should be doing. And to some extent the same happens at tertiary level. I’ve been heavily involved with tertiary level design education for a number of years now. All tertiary level design schools are required to have industry engagement as part of their accreditation and they all do, to be honest with varying degrees of success,varying degrees of depth, and also varying degrees of responding to any feedback they may get from industry.

Actually quite often not their fault because they have to have industry engagement to keep their accreditation, but they also have to follow very stringent educational guidelines, particularly degree-based programs, in terms of what they deliver to their students. And there’s often a conflict perhaps in terms of time as much as anything else between teaching students what they think they should know from the industry, but also to get them through their degree and pass all the academic stuff. It’s complex. So, given those two environments, the high schools and the tertiary level schools, I think there’s a lot we could —as an industry—we, could and should do to support the students in particular, the teachers as well, and that can relate to better quality graduates, which can only lead to a better quality industry. Seems to me to be a bit of a no brainer. And as far as I know, no one’s really doing this. Industryfish is very much hoping it can be part of the catalyst that helps this improve.

Hawk: You’re right. I was surprised that nobody seems to be doing this because it does seem like a prevalent problem, yeah.

Simon: As far as I know, no one is doing it anywhere in the world. It’s astonishing.

Hawk: You talked a little bit about not enough industry engagement, but what are some of the other issues with how people learn design and how it’s taught, maybe even some of the courses?

Simon: Um, well again, I think it’s by us as an industry being involved, but it’s going through the curriculum content. I think. I know there’s been various discussions about Phil Cleaver’s book “What they didn’t teach you in design school”, but you almost don’t need to take design, and this is a bit controversial, but if someone’s going to be a successful designer, or they already are, they already have an innate creative talent. Probably, or almost certainly. They also have the will to want to be a great design. Well they don’t have is all the other stuff – design as a business,  design and the people skills (and that’s a huge conversation right there), but in terms of UX and UI, all that stuff, at high school especially, and even still at tertiary level school, they don’t have the skills or the knowledge or the experience to understand that they aren’t designing only for them. They’re designing for a community, an audience, a client base. They’re designing to improve a business, ‘ROI’, the ‘bottom line’. There’s a whole world of stuff that they’re doing their work for, which is really not so much about ‘design’.

Hawk: One of the things that I notice from our community, especially, one of the most prevalent issues is that people coming into the community that want to get into design based roles, specifically UX design-based roles. Sorry – the thunder is quite outrageous! What I noticed is that they just really have no sense of direction. They’ve come from school, they’re excited about the idea of doing something, but they don’t really know what that something is, or what it involves. So it almost feels to me that there’s a bit of a disconnect between the teaching of topics or subjects themselves and directing people as to where they go as their next step. How do you think that we can maybe kind of confront that issue? It seems insurmountable in some ways.

Simon: Oh yes it is. I’m thinking on my feet here, so I reserve the right to change my mind, but I’m not sure that directing students is really something that we should focus on. This industry is changing so fast, and in so many ways that when we’re at the coalface we can kind of keep a handle on it, but for else it’s a bit harder. I think just giving them the skills to be able to know where they’re going, or to know the complexities of the environment that exists out there. I think probably a more important priority. So, support them if they have ideas about what they’re interested in, ambitions or areas of interest, we can certainly steer them in the right direction, to meet people, to find out more about what they’re going to do. But, can the education process — if it starts in high school and goes right through, we’re talking about quite a number of years — so this idea of directing, I mean, for example, who would have thought 10 years ago you could be a commercial drone pilot. It was a toy 10 years ago!

Hawk: Yeah.

Simon: So there are things we’re going to miss, if we try and be too prescriptive – I think is what I’m trying to say, so trying to keep open minded and inspirational, and the kids will find, the students will find, really, where they want to go. And where they want to go will find them too, actually.

Hawk: Yeah. I agree with you. One of the issues is, especially from a high school — if we’re talking about a high school as a starting point—then design is one aspect and then there’s obviously just so many other vocations. We’re focusing on design. How might this stuff specifically affect people that are designing digital products? Or a human-centred approach? How we different from some of these other areas or vocations?

Simon: If I’ve understood the question properly, Hawk, I think in terms of digital products, and the people listening will certainly understand this, this is all fundamental UX stuff, but really understanding who’s on the other side of the screen, that your work’s going to be on. It’s people skills. It’s being emotionally smart enough to understand how people are going to react. And of course it’s about the aesthetics, but aesthetics have to be driven by consumer responses, not via pure aesthetics alone. Um, you know, one person’s idea of cool is, is not necessarily somebody else’s. So, it’s really creating an education environment that’s all about helping people understand that it’s a big world out there full of complicated, complex people with their own aims and desires and how to make things work for them. And that applies to UX as much as it does to architecture, or really any aspect of design, I would have thought.

Hawk: I’ve got another question here. Given the state of the industry, what’s the potential that we should be growing in design students? What’s does a design student at the pinnacle of success look like for us? In what state do we want these people to be coming to us?

Simon: I think it’s the same state that we have always wanted—we always recognize it, but we don’t always see it—which is clearly having some talent, and that has to be the first thing. The second thing is being really hungry to learn. You know, all the radars are turned on. They’re listening hard, they’re watching hard. And there’s an energy that comes with that. You know, the top 2-3% of students that graduate from any course, you can just feel it in them. They’re itching to go. You can really feel that. And the other one, of course, is the ability to get your head down nd your bum up and just work hard when it’s needed. Thankfully it’s not all the time. You do have to do that as you do in any commercial environment these days. So I think those three qualities.

Hawk: Right? So sort of an energy and work ethic.

Simon: Yeah. Energy mixed with equal amounts of curiosity. And be really quite open and, not aggressive, but enthusiastic with that. Don’t piss people off with it, but inspire them with your hunger.

Hawk: So we have established this problem exists, hence your mission to change it, but is there a more helpful way that we could reframe the problem? And the complicating issues that you know, how to get it noticed, to try and get this message out and a bit more widespread?

Simon: I think it’s by, and here’s this word again, community. I’m getting a bit stuck!

Hawk: We love that word here at UX Mastery.

Simon: I think what we should do is very much—as an industry again—is to build a community which includes and focusses actually, to some extent, on our creative educators. People say, ‘what are the problems with learning about design?’ I think the question is kind of slightly wrong. It should be ‘what are the problems or the issues that we can help resolve about teaching design?’ If you look at it from that perspective you’ve got more chance of success. That has to be managed carefully of course, because we didn’t want to offend or upset those that are teachers, the bulk of whom do a good job, and whom are committed. So we have to be circumspect and supportive about that. But I, the teachers I know (and I know quite a lot of them), I know that if we as an industry go to them in the right way, offering them support, they’d welcome it. They’d absolutely love it. “Come to us”. Brilliant.

Hawk: This issue starts at a high school level, or at a school level. Are you seeining it coming through at a tertiary education as well? I ask because lots of tertiary education providers are specifically providing design education, and it’s a bit of a scary thought if they’re not doing that one thing very well. Do you think it is a high school issue? Or is it much, much wider than that?

Simon: I think it probably is an issue of high school. Part of the problem, part of the challenge that we face, is for students who think at high school, who think they’re interested, or even know know they’re interested in design, is to help them understand what they think design is. Or for us to understand what they think design is, so we can really support them. The way to do that—and Industryfish is about to embark on exactly this journey—is to go and talk to the high school students, and you ask them questions about where are they getting that knowledge from? What sort of levels of support are they getting from parents? Are mum and dad creative? Someone in the family? And then add whatever the learnings are from that research to the knowledge and experience the teachers have.

My knowledge of high school teachers in the design space is more limited. In fact, probably fairly limited to be honest. I know quite a lot, but I don’t know hundreds. And many of the ones I do know have a fine arts background. They get kind of corralled into doing the creative arts, if you like. But it’s not their fault that they may not have the skills or the knowledge or the experience to know how to help students. And if the student wants to build a website or do something in the digital environment or in any of these other spaces, they may struggle, you know, to really help them in a good way. Because we all know if we struggle in subjects at high school, we’re often put off them and focus on other areas. So it’d be a shame if we’re losing potential talent just through that.

Hawk: Yeah, absolutely. So who are some people doing good things in this space, what’s being done by the various sides. I’ve got a couple of examples but I’m interested to hear your thoughts.

Simon:  When you say people, do you mean institutions or…

Hawk: The examples I’ve got down here are Mike Montiero in the States with his “Design is  job” and “Dear design student”. Phil Cleaver from Pentagram “Things they don’t teach you in design school”. Julia Debari from our own community (I used that word!) has shared a link as well too a a slack channel that’s currently challenging these ideas. I wondered if you had some other examples of people that are doing good things, or examples that we could follow.

Simon: No, is the short answer. I mean, Mike Monteiro, yeah genius of course. Really interesting. And lovely that he commits his time and energy is to create an all the videos that he does, and the other stuff that he puts out. Thought provoking. A lot of it to be honest, we probably know about and probably instinctively understand, but as is often the case in these instances good to be reminded and to hear someone articulating what we’re thinking. And same with Phil Cleaver’s book. That was published a few years ago, and again, just reminding us. So the reason I’m saying no, which was my short answer, is that as we said at the beginning, none of these people, as far as I’m aware, and if there’s someone listening or watching now, it’d be a thrilled to, to learn more about it. That is actually doing stuff that’s helping support the teachers. There are a lot of people talking about issues, and what’s missing, what’s not missing, strengths and weaknesses, but it’s the ‘doing’ part that I’m now interested in — in this idea of building a community base, coming from us, as an industry you’re in. And I think that’s the missing part. So, as I said when we started, I don’t actually know anybody who is doing that ‘doing’.

Hawk: Right. And that’s what you’re doing at Industryfish?

Simon: That’s absolutely our intention, yes. And we have started, albeit gently so far, and slowly, but we’ve certainly started. And the conversations that we’ve had with our industry connections, I mean completely unsurprising from our perspective, but they’ve all been saying “Yes, great idea. Of course”, and being very supportive.

Hawk: It would be interesting to hear some of your business strategies because I imagine that there are people listening now, and people that will listen to this recording in the future, that just go “Hell, you know, I one-hundred percent agree with Simon, this is an issue. But you know, what can we do? What can I do? What does an initiative look like?” Because there’ll be people— and obviously our audience is not just Australian based, I’m not Australian myself—so, what kinds of things can other people do?

Simon: Well, I think the things that we’re talking about now. Work out how big a chunk people are prepared to bite off, and then go for it. So for example, if you have a local art school or a local high school or your students are going into high school and if you’re a practicing creative/UX/graphic designer/it doesn’t really matter. Engage with the teachers certainly and just offer support and just find out what keeps them awake at night. That’s a cliche question, if there’s anything. But also if they can, try and talk to the students. The way that I’ve approached doing that. I mean, when I was Head of School it was easy, I would just pull my weight around and talk to the students. But now, you have to go through the teachers of course. But it’s to say to the teachers that you would love to talk to the students about what their hopes and fears ar, what their expectations are, get a good understanding of how they’re thinking and feeling about what they’re doing, and that whatever comes out of that, you’re comfortable sharing with the teachers, so that they can kind of improve what the school or college is trying to do. So that hopefully then becomes non-threatening for the teacher.

Hawk: Right, yeah. That would be an important approach as well because people would come out reasonably defensive if you went in with the strategy of “Hey, you guys are creating this issue for us”. Yeah.

Simon: It’s not always going to be an easy path to tread. But driving us forward is the fact that we want better graduate outcomes. So this is a completely non-political, and if we can talk to the teacher enough for them to understand that this is absolutely apolitical, then hopefully they’ll relax and become part of that same community.

Hawk: Yeah.

Simon: And we as an industry can ask the questions to the students that the teacher frankly can’t, because the students… if a teacher asked students questions, the students—as we all would when we were students too— will want to tell the teachers to a large extent what they think the teachers want to hear, not what they’re actually really thinking. So we have to do it. The teachers can’t possibly do it to the same degree of success or integrity of depth that we can as an industry.

Hawk: Yeah. Good, I’ve got a great question again from Julia Debari (Julia is a member of our UX Mastery community, as I also mentioned, and she has a lot of experience with, with all the different design options that are out there,especially around online learning, and we’re talking about after high school) and she’s asking because of the wide range of options, what are your thoughts on licensing designers on some kind of regulation or some kind of, well, yeah, licencing is the right word really.

Simon: Hi Julia, first of all. Licensing in the context of this? I’m not sure I’ve understood the question.

Hawk: I’m assuming, Julia correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m assuming that she’s talking about creating some kind of overarching qualification indicator, is that right?

Julia: Correct. Just like architecture or something like that.

Simon: Okay. So getting into the area of things like accreditation and stuff, Julia?

Julia: Yeah. Or just a licensed or body, like you have for architecture and you have to take continuing education credits to keep your license, things like that.

Simon: It’s a contentious issue, Julia. I have been the national president for the Australian Graphic Design Association – it was a little while ago, but I was two and a half years, and the state president for New South Wales, and it used to come up quite often at that level, too within AGDA. The DIA (Design Institute of Austraia) I know I do something as well, which is sort of similar to what the architects are doing. I personally think it’s a good idea, because, if nothing else, it speaks to the idea of currency in practice, but there are a lot of people who worry about it. It’s absolutely essential in architecture because if a building falls down people are going to die. It’s unlikely we’re going to kill anybody, although not impossible I suppose. It’s a complex issue, but in principle I think it’s a great idea. But if it were to move forward,I think education (and supporting education, as you would have understood by now because that’s my agenda) must be part of it. So I don’t want to use the expression of “giving back”, but it’s that principle of being involved in where we’ve come from to help shape where we’re going to I think is really important one.

Hawk: Great. Does that answer that for you Julia?

Julia: Yeah, I just wanted an opinion. I know it’s a very divisive topic.

Simon: Well, my opinion, Julia, is absolutely. But it has to be done thoughtfully and it has to be done for actually the right reasons. But yes, I personally do. As I’ve said there’ll be a lot of people wouldn’t agree with me.

Hawk: I do, for the record!

Simon:  The other one that I always have difficulty with is this whole notion of work experience. We’re getting off topic a bit perhaps.

Hawk: Let’s do it. It’s important, yeah.

Simon: I’m so not a fan of students having to do work experience. And again, a lot of people don’t agree with me, including a lot of students and, interestingly, a lot of their parents. I understand the notion that going into the studio for two weeks or two months or anything in between, might give you some insights into what’s going on in the industry and for those students are really heading out to do it, then fair enough, try and organize it. But as far as I know, 98% of the time it’s unpaid. That’s controversial. But also I think equally 98% of the time it’s probably a complete waste of time because you’re never going to become a long term member of that environment you’re in. The people in that environment and know that, so they’re never going to take all that seriously. They’re going to like you if you’re a nice person, they’re going to enjoy having you there. They’re going to love the coffees you go and get for them. But the actual learnings, I think, are probably fairly marginal. And if you do work on any projects which hopefully along the students would, these are not projects they’re going to really be necessarily very helpful for you as a portfolio piece because when you finally get a job somewhere else, these are not projects they are going to want you to work on. So I think it comes with some very mixed blessings from the professional point of view. And a lot of downsides in terms of your time. So if you’re gonna spend two weeks or two months, I think there’s an awful lot that a student can do that would be more productive, more valuable and more educational more inspiring than just sitting in someone’s studio and not getting paid for it.

Hawk: I’d love to hear to hear what some of those things might be. I’m curious. Speaking to the work experience, I agree with you. especially around the unpaid aspect. But I also think that there is a big part, uh, to work experience, which is kind of taking away the, the pipe dream. I’m going to be an architect, I’m going to be a designer, I’m going to be this or that and hey, this is what it actually looks like to do a week in the life of this job. You’re not going to change the world next week. You’re going to do a lot of little shitty things. And so I think that that aesthetic of it can add some value, but I’m more interested in hearing your ideas around what would be a better way to utilize that time for our students.

Simon: Well, first off, there’s something thats a bit glib. Use that time to be a better student. Work harder, work on your student projects in more depth with more integrity, with more vigor,  rework (if you have the time) projects that you’re working on, just focus on the quality. Just be the best you can be. You’re never going to be a student again. You never going to have these opportunities again, so absolutely max them out. But probably more usefully in the context of what you’re asking about, Hawk, is for schools to think about—and I mean high school and tertiary schools—to think about a better way of insisting that their students (if that’s what they want to do) have a work experience environment. So that might be, organizing a period. It could be a month, that could be two or three months. Once the students have graduated, it could either be free or a small bolt-on program that students can then do on their way into the industry once they finished the period. I think thought through properly that has a lot of merits, because the students can stop then thinking about being a student and start focusing on their future. But within the learning environment, within a two or three or four or five years context in high school, I’m really not convinced it has a great deal of value. I’m really not. I mean, go on trips to see studios, listen to all the industry people who are coming in and listen to their stories. But do you need to go into an expensivly fitted out, open-plan office and see rows of computers to really know whether you want to be a designer or not? I need some convincing.

Hawk: That’s fair. That’s very fair. It segways nicely into another question I’ve got here actually. That goes back to just speaking to my point before about there being a very big difference between being a school kid with, with a perception of, of what a career and design looks like. and the reality. So how can we teach design graduates and understanding of the more holistic side of “design as a business”? I guess is the best way to put it.

Simon:  That obviously has to start within tertiary level education. It absolutely has to. A big challenge I understand for a lot of curriculum content writers because they’ve got all this other academic stuff that they just have to get over the line to keep their accreditation. And of course in the university space, accreditation means spending. So this is politically and strategically and financially fraught, but that’s what we have to do. So do we have to go to the, accrediting authorities? Probably. And talk to them as well? That would apply to every country in the world, I would think. So yeah, bringing much more focus on all the aspects of design that we have already talked about a little bit this morning, about design being a business, absolutely being a business, and that it’s not really that we create lovely things (or hopefully lovely thing all the way through), but it’s commercial enterprise and to understand what that means and the responsibilities that brings both in terms of running a business, but in terms of what you’re designing for your audience, it’s imperative. And most design schools tend not to focus on that nearly enough. And I think a lot of those would argue that, you know, that something that students will need to learn once they graduate and that they’re trying to teach students to be the best designers they can be. But that’s a slightly shallow promise because being one of the best designers means having a bit of an understanding about business, about the commercial pragmatics of being in a business. The one we all know about the student who joins the studio but then spends way, way, way too long trying to do something. Because they’ve had 12 weeks experience at university and college to do that logo. No one’s ever told them we’re going to do it in two days. And then stand up and present it up to four or five times. And it’s a shocking experience still now. I believe that in 2019 know this is kind of, this is old school stuff. Yeah, absolutely.

Hawk: From Julia: “I live in San Francisco, California,” (and this is a problem, believe me, that extends well, well beyond the boundaries of California) “and no one will hire you without examples of real work”. So coming back to that portfolio, but not a contrived portfolio, a portfolio of stuff that you’ve done. And for Julia, that’s even university graduates. So how as an industry, can we be proactive and break that cycle of ‘we’re not giving you a job because you’ve got no experience’, and ‘we’re not giving you a experience because you won’t give me a job’. How do you think that we can help to combat that?

Simon: Julie if you’re still listening. Thank you again cause that’s such a good a question.

Julia: Yeah. Sorry. I live in a bubble.

Simon: A big bible, if you’re asking questions of this calibre, it’s fine. I’m impressed. Again, for fear of sounding like a stuck record, I think we as a community should go into certainly tertiary level in terms of portfolios, perhaps the high school level as well. And help students create opportunities to do live projects. It can’t be that hard in, it can be projects that we worked on and that will support the teachers as well. So again, it takes some managing, but we all have loads of work experience, loads of projects, loads of briefs that we can do that we can help students with. And as part of that also helps students understand what type of work they want to do. I think it could be really valuable pathway, certainly very supportive for those teachers, in theory and in practice I would hope, very supportive for students. So let’s us in industry, just get in there and really, really help these kids. Yeah. I’m sorry, I’m calling you kids. I don’t want to sound patronizing. Students.

Hawk: Nice! I’ve personally got no problem with being called kid. But that’s really helpful, and that’s the same kind of advice that we try and give here at Ux Mastery as well – go in and offer to do some pro bono work, go in and talk to your local school, your local museum, or hand off that project that you don’t have time to do yourselves to a student that’s got some time to run with it. And there was so many opportunities out there to do the work. I often hear pushback from people that don’t want to go and approach organizations, but you’ve kind of got to. Cause that’s, that’s also a big part of being an employee. You’re going to have to start learning to do that kind of stuff at some point. It’s not all about designing. So yeah, I encourage everybody to do what they can to find real world examples.

Simon: And actually a fairly easy, or an easier, way to start with that too, Julia, and to you, Hawk, is charities. They love creative and they, they haven’t got the big budgets to pay for creative. So any support you can get from them and they often will support it. And it’s often a very pleasant experience. I’ve done this a few times for students, for charities and not for profits because the people who run these are fairly illiterate in terms of design, probably, just because that’s not their background. So they usually learn from the process and, and as a result, really enjoy the process, which is really uplifting for the students too, in a way. A classic that’s coming to mind, I’ve done a few, was for the Tram Museum here in Sydney and these lovely old codgers—trams, so men, unfortunately there were not very many women I met, but that’s the way it is—they were just the fact that students would even want to spend some time thinking about doing some design work for the Tram Museum was kind of, you know, their faces lit up. They thought it was amazing. And then when they saw the standard at work, they just… you know? These were men became boys again. It was fantastic to see. And how lovely a response is that for the students? To know that you can have that kind of effect on people. Great! It’s brilliant.

Hawk: I’ve got a question from Rick. I might have to put my own spin on this. Work experience can indeed be problematic (which we’ve already discussed, obviously) and he’s saying it’s probably better for schools to teach UX design (which is to a degree what you were saying) But he’s saying the problem is what do we learn? Do we learn art? Do we learn programming? Do we learn business? How do we encapsulate that into a valuable topic that that does take a student to somewhere valuable for the next step. I hope that is what you were asking, Rick?

Simon: Yeah, that’s a good question. Thank you. Rick as well. The answer I think I want to give is probably not going to be that useful. I think it’s going to be a bit of a pipe dream, but in a perfect world, what I would like to see us doing is going to ask the students, first of all. But then also, what areas are they interested in? And then try and support them rather than be prescriptive about, well, this is what you have to do. Are you mentioned it in the world of medicine? Or are you interested in science. I mean, I don’t know what the questions are even, but to ask the students. Because if we go in feeling prescriptive, about it, or with a particular mindset, we run the risk of the students not being engaged because they don’t particularly feel interested in what we’re talking about, or missing an opportunity. Back to the drone pilots: if we went in saying, okay, we want to teach you these skills. But this kids sitting there at the back of the class thinking, shit, I love flying drones. But if we hadn’t talked to him or asked him about that, he would have missed the opportunity with our support to become a drone pilot. Yeah, right. So I think trying to go in and with questions before we go in with answers. It’s idealistic, but I think if we can try and do that, then it’s going to be more constructive actually for everybody.

Hawk: Yeah. Great. Um, I guess along the same lines from Rick, um, we know that lots of courses focus on tools or on processes. Is that a helpful approach in your opinion? How do we know which course, which process, which set of tools, which approach is the right one for us?

Simon: Again, it’s the right question to be asking. Actually UX is not my background. I know a little bit about it, but it’s not my core skill. But I think my answer would be, irrespective of that, not to worry so much about what software or what technical skills to teach, we have to do some of that, students have to learn some of that. but it’s the  higher levels of thinking perhaps rather than the pragmatic skills. So creative thinking, design thinking, lateral thinking, different ways of approaching, how are you consult, particular communications or design issues? And again with UX almost in particular really, really work hard on the whole customer experience and the CX thing. But do it from a customer’s perspective. So from the other side of the screen, not from your side of the screen. You can learn a particular software, you know, those of those on the planet that learned QuarkXpress 100 years ago and I’m sure now are really good in InDesign. So it’s, it’s not really the technical skills you need. It’s all the other stuff. You have to work in a studio, I understand that. So you do need technical skills, but I don’t think it needs to be a priority.

Hawk: And those things are reasonably easy to learn reasonably quickly as well. Whereas some of the overarching strategies and frameworks take a lot more time and a different focus.

Simon: And these these days, I mean, I’m not so sure. I’m not so confident, I guess in the UX space, but if you’ve mastered one software or one particular piece of technology, the chances are you’re going to get onto the next one really easily and quickly, or fairly easily and quickly. It’s not gonna it’s not going to break your balls, but if you don’t understand all that other stuff then your balls are already broken.

Hawk: Yeah. It’s not a good space to be in, I’m sure. What we tend to see in our community is a lot of people asking questions about bootcamps. You know, which bootcamp is best for me? They’ve come out of high school or they’ve come out of a kind of tangentially related degree and they decided they want to get into a design role. And so they’re kind of sideswiped by these massively expensive bootcamps which pretend to be all things to all people. Do you have any thoughts about that as, as the kind of middle ground between high school and industry? Is that the right approach? I know that’s a difficult question. But that’s the one that I’m probably confronted with the most at the moment.

Simon: Of course, of course, and then making the question even more muddy, if you like, (I’m not sure if that’s quite the right expression) but some bootcamps are really good, some are rubbish. Um, and then make it even more complex is some people go to one bootcamp and and love it and others will go to the same one and get absolutely nothing from it. And will say they hated it, so you know, wow, in theory it’s a great idea. Of course it is. I think the secret to having any success is have a look at the outcomes that the bootcamp is offering, but really have a look at them. And even talk to some graduates if you can and be selfish about what you want out of it, and make sure as best you’re able, that where you’re going to end up after your boot camp, whether it’s two weeks or 12 weeks or however long it might be, that you’re going to be, you will have moved forward in a way that you’re happy with. And that represents value for money because its obviously a lot of money. It is difficult though. I know of some quite clearly where I’ve spoken to people and they’ve said one of the best things I ever did, but someone in the same class said don’t do it, they’re rubbish, quite literally polarized opinions at each end of the spectrum. So never easy.

Hawk: And I think for the audience that is listening as well. I think one of the perceived benefits these days, especially in UX  bootcamps is the portfolio of projects that you come out with. What Julia and I are seeing more and more now is that employers aren’t even looking at these graduates or these projects because, let’s be honest, they’ve all got the same project. Um, and so it’s become such a narrow size that, that it’s lost its value all together and these people are paid thousands of dollars for this waste of paper.

Simon: And I think that’s really important. If that’s one of the outcomes when you’re doing your research, walk away. Save your money I would suggest.

Hawk: Yeah. Yeah,

Simon: That sort of thing was happening at tertiary level schools, and actually still is too. How many of us had been to student exhibitions from art schools and we’ve seen where they all had to design a book cover or they all had to design a poster. You know, it’s just heartbreaking stuff.

Hawk: Yeah. Yeah. Agrees

Simon: If someone went through them, they’d never go back.

Hawk: The other challenge that we face, as designers and UX designers is a lack of mentorship and a lack of really personal guidance. And that’s one that Luke and I’ve been struggling to crack as well. In terms of how do we support our audience to find this kind of mentoriship. Our community does it to a degree, but there just seems to be a real shortage of genuine mentors. Julia’s suggestion is that more companies need to do mentoring. What are your thoughts about that?

Simon: I couldn’t agree more. But again, I thinkthat can happen if we start building a community that includes teachers. And then mentoring just automatically becomes part of it. Cause at the moment there’s no environment that allows this conversation that we’re having right now, that includes teachers. I’d be fascinated to know if there’s any design teachers in the audience today. I would guess there probably aren’t, maybe some people today had done some teaching or do some part time teaching, but um, you know, let’s, let’s really go and embrace the teaching community as our friends and as an investment in our future, which is our graduates and have these conversations. It’ll all become much easier, much, much easier. But yeah, mentoring. 100% Really, really valuable stuff.

Hawk: What we’ve been discussing so far this polarized aspects of education and of industry – really quite disparate rather than kind of the same spectrum where we are always learning. It’s not “Right. I’ve done my education and now I am a professional” Maybe we need to reconsider what that spectrum looks like, and think about education as a continuing journey through the workforce.

Simon: Exactly. I mean, as you were making that point too, I don’t know where this came from, but I was just thinking of the sports industry. The coaches and the managers (the teachers) are there all the way through. They are part of that community and are as much a part of that community as the fans are as well. I mean, they get it. We so don’t. We’ve kind of come compartmentalized, you know, when you’re in a box at high school, you’re in another box at tertiary level, and then you’re in the industry box. Crazy. Let’s get rid of those barriers.

Hawk: So what is it as an industry, that can we do to make hiring managers more open to who they hire? Kind of going back to that, I’m not going to look at bootcamp graduates because they all have the same project. So I’m not going to look at people that haven’t done this. I haven’t done that or haven’t got experience. What do you think we can do to blow that apart a little bit and, and soften those boundaries, all those barriers to entry. Hard one.

Simon: I think probably not very much. Okay. I think we have to see this as a long game and that the end game is worth it. So let’s go and invest our energies now, starting in my opinion, at the high school level, and start building up this community so that. If we started right now, in theory, in three, four years’ time as these graduates start coming through, this will be much less of an issue. I think, right now, however, and I’m tap dancing here a bit, so forgive me, but we can certainly make sure we start conversations within our existing communities. UX Mastery can talk about it more, AGDA can talk about it more, the DIA can talk about more, and Julia and all the other people in the states can talk about this more and get the conversation going. But actions always speak louder than words. So let’s get in there, let’s start gathering these people up and brining them in, you know, and, and, and making them feel like we’re joining their community too. We mustn’t be patronizing about this, we want to be as much a part of the teaching community as we want them to be a part of us.

Hawk: Nice. Again, Julia (and gosh, you’re full of all the good questions, Julia) what did you want to ask us?

Julia: Oh, you want me to say it instead of just you reading it? You’re really good at articulating what I say.

Hawk: Well I can do it if you want?

Julia: Yeah, you’re better at it than I am!

Hawk: You just want to laugh at my accent! Simon, Julia asks what your opinion is of teachers with industry experience vs academics. So she has seen teachers that have awesome experience, but aren’t particularly good at translating that into education or into teaching. What are your thoughts on that?

Simon: Dead right. I also have seen lots of seriously lovely people who are very talented creatives, scarily bad in the classroom. Not their fault. You can either relate to the students or you can’t. Actually I’ve just said the wrong thing. The students either relate to you or they don’t, it’s got nothing to do with you. Um, as we all did when we were 15 to 18, we formed opinions about who thought we can learn from and respected in a heartbeat. And that’s the way it is. And they can try and be as cool and as knowledgable and as open as they wanted but you know, you switch off. So, that’s in trial and error thing. You just have to be honest about it. I’ve had to let lots teachers go, which means I’ve let designer go who’ve said I’d love to do teaching. And it’s really tough. Many of them are friends of ours, friends of mine, but you just say, I’m sorry, but as talented and lovely as you are, it’s not working. Yeah, it’s really hard. And academics, trained teachers, yeah. Generally probably pretty good because they know how to teach, but they’re the people that need our help because then you can help them with the industry stuff. Luckily quite a lot of industry people who offer to go and teach, they get paid for it, of course, and a lot of them are, are good, and a lot of the students relate to them, and do learn a lot from them. But Julia is right. There are quite a number that don’t. So I don’t think we should put pressure on ourselves for suddenly all of us to become teachers. I think the pressure should be for all of us to help the teachers. And that includes industry practioners too, we can support them as well? No question about it. No reason why they aren’t part of the equation because they are us.

Hawk: So I’ve got a challenge, or I guess a ‘challenge’ might be the wrong way to put it, but we’ve got Moses from the chat, who is asking, “What criteria are you using to form your opinion?”

Simon: To form my opinion about forming a community?

Hawk: Maybe we’ll ask Moses for some clarification on that and I’ll pose this next question to Simon in the meantime?

Moses:  Hi Simon. It’s Moses from New Zealand. The criteria you’re using for your opinion on that teachers with industry experience versus academics. At the moment in New Zealand, the teachers are striking because they’re not getting their wages on par with the local industry. But again, that’s not the question. So what criteria do you use to form or as a basis for your opinion that you’ve just offered?

Simon: My opinion on practitioners sometimes being problematic as a teacher? Or? I just want to make sure I’ve understood your question Moses.

Moses: Well you’re sort of offering an opinion with teachers in the industry experience versus academics. So the teachers with experience, and those with just experience, how do you compare them both? The academics and the teachers with industry experience? What part you already use to make sure? Your opinion on both?

Simon: I don’t think making a straight comparison is actually that useful, Moses because they’re coming into the process with different experiences, different backgrounds and different things they can offer the students. I think teachers want to be paid a more realistic wage, and their professionalism is absolutely legitimate. There is never big money available in education as we all know. So it’s a hard one, but I think the right to ask for more respect about what’s being done as a teacher is absolutely correct. And, and I think governments the world over should acknowledge that. I think they kind of do, but meanwhile they got roads to build and hospitals to build, and bullets and stuff. So it’s, it’s a hard one. But I don’t think you can make a straight comparison. So I think the focus is probably on people who are actually teachers and less focus on industry people coming in to support what they’re trying to do.

Moses: Thank you, Simon.

Simon: Pleasure. Thank you for being part of here. Good.

Hawk: You’re welcome, Moses. And I guess along the same line, um, what we are noticing is that organizations like General Assembly are starting to approach designers sometimes in our community, sometimes outside. (Sorry, I just got excited because the sun’s come out.) What advice do you have for those people that just decide to take this offer up and therefore start to become design educators? Arguably good ones. What advice can you give them, about how they start to challenge these issues that we’re seeing. What advice would we give to people that are new teachers to kind of break down some of these barriers?The question I’ve got here says, “do you have specific advice about at least in terms of more longer term view as to how we can improve results for students?

Simon: Predictably I’m going to say let’s invest in the education industry. But I guess more immediately places like GA, almost in particular too, given that we’ve named them already. I think if you’re considering wanting to get involved in education through the process, through something like GA, be clear in your own mind about why you’re doing this, and who you’re doing it for. It’s very, this… I could end up in trouble over this… very clearly they are doing this because they are a business. It happens to be they are in the business of creative education, but it’s a business first and foremost. Anyone who’s worked with GA would know exactly what that means and what that feels like. So that aside, and you can’t blame them for that and that’s their commercial pragmatism. That’s, that’s okay. I have education running through my veins, so I had mixed feelings about how I feel about that, but I get it. I certainly understand that position. So I think, yeah, just be clear about what you’re trying to do as a teacher and exactly what it is you’re teaching. Is it just more of the same or is it something actually useful that the students can really relate to? Um, and also ask yourself as you’re putting your content together, if you were to present this to a panel of industry board members, what kind of review would they give you? Would it be one that said, okay, this is useful? Or is this one that says, okay, this might earn a few dollars, but actually I use what is in terms of the student experience. I think if you can go through that process yourself and come out the other side feeling as though you’re onto something, then have a crack at it, and then do the other thing which some teachers may do at GA. But I suspect not many do or do properly – follow up with the students and make sure he get the feedback properly from them, not from GA, about what he thought, what they got out of this. Easier said than done, but just to make sure that what you’re teaching is what they wanted.

Hawk: Cool. Well Julia is a brilliant example of somebody that’s come from industry and taken this education career pathing and I strongly agree with her. She chose that as, as a third option. Once you get to that point in your career where you’re looking at becoming a principal, when you look at becoming a manager and you look at what your next step could be, then I think that it’s a strong approach from us. If we start to encourage people to consider educators or teachers as, as a third career path and it’s probably not something that is thought of often enough. I often give advice to people who are sort of stuck at that. What should I do now? I’m intermediate, I’m senior and I kind of want to be a down a particular path. And, becoming an educator isn’t one that’s often raised, and therefore we just don’t have enough and not strong indicators. So, yeah, I encourage people to consider that as an option that is, as valuable, if not more valuable than than a manager or a team leader or a or principal of an agency.

Simon: As long as you’re doing it for the right reasons. Not doing it just because you’re afraid of freelancing or you’re running out of work, for example, The old adage is “those that can, do. And those that can’t, teach” Unfortunately still kind of exists out there a little bit. And also harder and harder these days is – and I don’t know what it’s like in the States Julia, but certainly in Australia, I don’t know what it’s like in New Zealand either. But you as a teacher, you are now required to have minimum level qualifications in a number of area if you’re teaching in a higher education, you have to have, well in theory you certainly have to have a degree and ideally you have at least a masters and not many graphic designers yet. Well it’s changing. But not many graphic designers have those levels of qualification. So that can make it more complicated. So back on my old soap box, I think yes, by all means do that if that’s what you want to do. And if you can find an environment where you can do it, but equally support the teachers and make our contribution that way. Not necessarily by standing in front of the group of students.

Hawk: Right, solid advice, right. We’ve reached the top of the hour. I guess I will ask you what key takeaway you want to leave people with. You’re not allowed to use the word ‘community’… Haha, yes you are

Simon: Actually, it’s it’s a nice challenge. I’ll try not to, I think keep this conversation going, keep thinking about what we can all do in our industries to support education. And talking, talking is always good, you know, just keep the conversations and talk to teachers, talk to students, talk to parents of students. So the more we learn now the better equipped we’ll be as we do start moving into getting engaged more with students. Um, so I think anything and everything we can do to start off – step one, learn from the students, what do they actually want rather than us telling them what we think they want to know, what do they want to know? Start there. Easier said than done. I’ve said that a few times, but um, I think that would be really useful. And then based on the level of interest we’ve had today and the amazing questions we’ve had, We’re on to something here. As an industry we’ve kind of waking up to this, this could be really, really fun and certainly really valuable. Yeah. Um, and not a difficult way for us to build our industry’s future. It’s not going to be hugely time consuming. It’s talking and working with stuff we already know about and we’re talking and working with a bunch of students who want to join us so they already love us or they’re interested in us. What’s to lose? This can only be a good experience for everybody.

Hawk: Well then thank you so much for your time today. Simon, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. I encourage anyone that’s listening, or that listens in the future, then wants to continue this conversation to either jump over to our forums, community.uxmastery.com or contact us. You’ll find you’ll find Simon at industryfish.com, is it?

Simon: dot co

Hawk: industryfish.co but if there are any questions. I’m happy to field them and put them through to Simon, but otherwise, yeah, I hope to continue the conversation, and figure out how we can push through some strong ideas here. So thanks heaps Simon for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Simon: Thanks to you and Luke for the opportunity—and also, more importantly, for everyone who’s out there—thank you for giving up the time to be part of this.

Hawk: Yeah, absolutely.

Simon: I hope most of you got something out of it.

Hawk: I’m sure everyone did, and thank you very much, Julia and Moses and Rick for your awesome questions. Cool. All right. Take care. Enjoy the rest of your day everybody.

Simon: Thank you. Bye!

Hawk: See ya!

The post Transcript: Simon Pemberton – “The Best Way to Predict Our Industry’s Future is to Create It” appeared first on UX Mastery.

Your questions were amazing and they made for an insightful and valuable session. Thanks to everyone that sent one in.

If you didn’t make the session because you didn’t know about it, make sure you join our community to get updates of upcoming sessions.

If you’re interested in seeing what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, you can watch the recording below or read on for a full transcript of the chat.

Click the thumbnail below to watch the video or check it out here.

Transcript

The post Transcript: <em>Ask the UXperts:</em> A Practical Approach to Getting A UX Education — with Mads Soegaard appeared first on UX Mastery.

As an aspiring UX designer, you probably also have tons of great ideas that you want to turn into fully-designed portfolio projects. But how do you learn the right process to follow to turn those high-level ideas into comprehensive and well-researched projects that will impress employers?

Don’t worry – you’re not alone. We’ve spoken with dozens of experienced designers and hiring managers over the past year as we’ve built up our Design Portfolio Starter Kit to try to understand just what makes an impressive junior UX portfolio and how new designers can maximize their chances of creating a portfolio that will help them get a job.

In this article, I’m sharing a few of those tips to help you build your own amazing UX portfolio.

Figure out what types of UX work interest you and become an expert

First things first: what types of projects should you include in your portfolio?

The simple answer is that you should focus on what interests you most, and develop a deep expertise in that specific area of UX design. Employers want to hire candidates that have a demonstrated interest and expertise in the specific type of work they’ll be spending most of their time doing. So take time to figure out what interests you the most and then dive deep.

If you don’t know what kind of UX work interest you most, do a simple test. Spend a few hours browsing and using a variety of different websites and apps (use a site like Awwwards or CSS Winner for ideas). Take careful notes of what you enjoy most about them, writing down details about the sites and apps you like using most.

After a few hours, take a look at your notes and try to identify any patterns in the things you liked most. Were you most impressed by how easy it was to use certain apps and websites and logically find the information you were seeking? You might be interested in information architecture.

Did you get the most pleasure out of the visual aesthetic of some of the apps you were using? Then a role as a user interface designer might be best for you. Also pay attention to the types of products you enjoy working on, whether that’s mobile apps, ecommerce stores, or startup websites.

Whichever type of UX/UI design you find yourself gravitating towards, start to develop a deep expertise in that field. Simultaneously, employers love well-rounded designers so be sure to supplement your studies with learning about broader design principles as well.

For instance, if you decide to focus on UX design, make sure you fully understand research, user flows, and user testing so that your designs are informed by well-tested UX processes. And if you’re more interested in pure UI work, learn about design principles like grids, color theory, and typography, as well as fundamentals like hierarchy and repetition so that you can turn your research and user flows into beautiful final products (or at least work well with designers who can).

Once you’ve decided which subset of the UX field to focus on, it’s time to come up with project ideas.

Come up with projects that solve real problems

Early in your UX career, your portfolio will probably feature a lot of projects that you’ve come up with on your own. While having “real work” in your portfolio is always great, employers understand that you won’t necessarily have real projects to show when you’re just getting started. If your portfolio is going to be comprised of mostly theoretical work, it’s absolutely crucial for those projects to focus on solving real problems.

There are a few different ways to solve real problems with your first few UX projects. The most straightforward way is to think about problems that exist in your daily life or in industries you’re interested in and brainstorm how you could create a UX project to solve those problems.

For instance, if you’re interested in sports but live in a city, you could create a website or mobile app that makes it easy for anyone to find local intramural sports teams they can join. Or if you are passionate about nonprofits but have trouble finding places to buy nonprofit apparel, you could design an ecommerce site where nonprofits can sell their products. It’s really as simple as that. Spend 30 minutes writing down industries you care about, and problems in those industries, and use that as a basis for your project ideas.

Another easy way to solve real problems with your projects is to launch your own side project. There are thousands of great side project ideas you can design and launch in just a few weeks, so do the same exercise of writing down a list of possible side projects you could work on and choose the one that excites you most and can leverage the type of UX work you want to do. This could be creating an ecommerce site where you sell prints of your own artwork, an online course where you teach a specific skill, or anything else you care about!

From here, it’s time to move on to the actual project creation process, the most crucial step.

Follow the correct process – don’t skip steps

One of the biggest pieces of feedback from hiring managers is that many junior design portfolios showcase beautiful single screen designs without any context behind the project.

You can design the most beautiful landing page imaginable but if you don’t have a process behind it and a story explaining how you got to the final design, employers will move on to another candidate. After all, they want to hire someone who can solve problems, iterate on their designs based on research and testing, and ultimately reach the final design only after completing those steps.

If you have a great idea for a project, it can be tempting to jump right into Sketch or InVision to wireframe and prototype the idea right off the bat. We recommend taking a breath and following a few steps before that phase, steps that you’ll need to follow in any client or job setting.

First, do research. Look at similar products to see how they tackled the same problem. What decisions did they make that you like and what about their designs don’t you agree with? After this, create user personas, outlining who is actually going to be using this product and why they’re going to use it. What are their primary goals when interacting with this product?

Next, get your ideas out on paper. Sketch out thumbnails of what the design could potentially look like. These don’t need to be too detailed – get every idea, good or bad, down on paper in 20 minutes. Next, depending on the complexity of the project, you might need to create a user flow to show how the user will move through the full web or app experience. From there, create wireframes and ultimately prototypes.

At this phase, it’s time to test. Get a “sample user” (a friend or peer) to test out the wireframe or prototype. Watch how they use it and ask them to explain what they like and dislike about it. Based on their feedback and how they naturally use the prototype, make adjustments as needed. From there, it’s finally time to create it into a high fidelity design, incorporating colour and typography and ensuring that the designs are consistent across screens.

It’s a pretty straightforward process that so many people choose to ignore, but we’ve been told by many hiring managers that following this process will help you stand apart from so many other UX designers.

Showcase your projects as detailed case studies

Most recruiters only spend around 60 seconds reviewing a portfolio before they decide whether to give the candidate an interview. So it’s absolutely crucial to cleanly and logically showcase your projects on your portfolio site. You should show every project as a case study so employers can understand your thought process and get a feeling for how you’d solve similar problems if you worked for them.

Start by outlining the initial problem, how you approached solving it, and then showing your process as you went. This can include early wireframes and sketches and then slowly show the iteration of the project, including details of when you received feedback (and from whom) as you went. Also be clear about your role on the project if you had any help. Finally, show the beautiful final designs mocked up.

Conclusion

So get out there and come up with ideas for your first UX portfolio projects!

Creating your first UX portfolio is an exciting process. Even though it can feel overwhelming, try to take it one project at a time. Think about problems you really care about solving and don’t be afraid to be ambitious. Employers will respect you more for the complex problems you’re trying to solve than the beautiful visuals you end up creating.

If you ever need help coming up with project ideas for your portfolio or need guidance to actually turn your ideas into full-formed final designs, check out the UX Design Portfolio starter kit we created at RookieUp, which includes tons of projects, resources, and guides to help you craft an amazing portfolio on your own.

How did you create your first UX portfolio? What types of projects did you use for examples? Leave a comment here or share your tips in the forums!

The post How to Develop Project Ideas for Your UX Portfolio appeared first on UX Mastery.

Leading an organisation from this role is also a major challenge. It’s hard work implementing a UX focus in a company where none exists. There will be battles against corporate biases, conflicting business needs, and results-driven culture.

In such a difficult position, how can a UXer go about creating a culture of great user experience?

It’s imperative to establish a baseline process, socialise the benefits of great UX, and prepare for the long road ahead.

Above all else, establish a process

When starting a culture of user experience focus, the first step is to establish a clear UX process. 

“UX process is a cornerstone of UX design, it’s a make-it-or-break-it aspect of UX design,” writes veteran UX professional Nick Babich in his blog for Adobe.

“Without a solid UX design process, a designer could be completely moving in the dark. A clear and concise UX process, on the other hand, makes it possible to craft amazing experiences for users.”

Every UX professional should have a favoured baseline process. In fact, you’d expect this to be the first question in any UX interview. Part of any quality answer to this question should be to acknowledge the importance of context. No two companies or products are the same. Processes should differ depending on organisational needs, technology stacks, and delivery speed.

No process is bound to be the perfect fit. An initial process’s existence is more important than its perfection. Install a process to address the largest problems and work to resolve the kinks later.

Whatever process you choose, tailor it to your organisation’s needs. This will help you with the second facet of gaining UX buy-in: socialising UX benefits among stakeholders.

Socialise the benefits of UX among stakeholders

In his Forbes piece Good UX is Good Business, Andrew Kucheriavy, founder and CEO Intechnic, lays out the argument for the business benefits of an improved focus on user experience.

“Good user experience is clearly good for business,” he writes. “ Studies show that companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower support cost, increased customer retention and increased market share.”

While the benefits are clear, you must be able to explain why the UX process is beneficial to your stakeholders. 

UX success hinges on the cooperation and participation of the business as a whole. While you are the engine propelling the car, the whole machine must move forward together. It’s often difficult for internal stakeholders to see the progress and impact of UX focus. By clearly explaining the benefits, you’ll bring your company one step closer to fully embracing a culture of great user experience.

I’ve written previously on how big of a part UX professionals play in facilitating internal communication. We sit at the epicentre of our business. We speak with our business partners to understand project requirements. We work with our technical teams to understand what’s viable, and to support development efforts. We talk with customers to understand their wants, needs, and expectations. An established process allows UX pros to speak about the project pipeline and its direct impact to any stakeholder.

If we are successful as UX professionals, the benefits we add to our organisations should be clear. Our business partners should have a better understanding of our customers’ needs through UX testing. Our technical teams will receive projects that are both practical and well-defined through iteration and revision with our business partners. And, most importantly, our customers receive a product that exceeds their expectations.

Be aggressive in explaining your expected benefits. Take advantage of your team’s rituals and culture to discuss your roll and how your process will benefit specific projects and initiatives. This gives UX pros excellent opportunities to speak on how and why our process benefits the company as a whole, and gain allies in promoting usability throughout the company.

Cindy McCracken, a UX professional with more than 10 years of experience working for the likes of Fidelity Investments, agrees.

“The more you work with co-workers such as support, sales and development and show them the value of UX, the more support you will have within the organisation,” she writes in her article Proven Strategies to Win Over Stakeholders for Your UX Project. “These in-the-trenches supporters will see the value of your work and the successes with customers first hand, and that will go a long way toward impacting workplace culture and filtering up to senior level support of UX.”

There are a few ways UX professionals can quickly integrate themselves into the rhythms of the business.

Attend development standups. Listen for blockers and speak about how your UX process will ease these issues in the future. Pay attention for upcoming work, and ask for inclusion where practical. 

“In planning meetings, be alert for extensive development work planned to go work with interfaces that clearly need to be redesigned,” writes McCracken. “Rather than just let them proceed, bring potential design problems and ideas for improvements to the team.”

Set meetings with your business partners. Work to understand their underlying problems. Explain UX’s role in fixing those issues. Find the low hanging fruit to get some quick wins on the board. 

Take part in retrospectives. Retrospectives are a great platform to show the type of value you can provide for your new team. 

Listen for issues on previous releases. Present your UX process after discussing these issues. Prepare to speak on your process, and how that will affect any issues raised. After your first couple of releases, plan on asking for feedback to adjust your basic process.

Get in front of your customers. Some would argue that it’s not UX unless you’re getting in touch with your users. This is where great UX starts and ends. Working with your clients shows your engaged in their needs. It allows you to talk about projects that are in development. And it allows you to understand wants, needs, and pain points. We take all this back to our business partners to help create a better product.

According to McCracken, a great way to do this early in the game is to test early iterations of projects with your clients.

“[Use] an online first-click test to see if participants go where you expect when asked to perform tasks,” She writes. “You can even ask what people notice first on a page. Better yet, run one study with an image of your current design, and one with an image of the new design to see how user performance compares. If you have a clear winner, it should be easy to get buy-in to improve conversions, which would be a great return on investment.

Prepare for the long road ahead

The road to establishing UX as a team of one can be difficult and lonely at times. Larger teams, for starters, can divide and conquer work.

A team of one, however, does not have that luxury.

As solo teams, it’s important to take some steps to avoid over-extension. With no one to pick up the slack, whiffing on an objective or project can have major consequences. What’s more, the stress of working alone can be intimidating. 

So how can you make life as a solo UXer easier on yourself?

Work with your higher-ups to set reasonable goals and benchmarks. Talk about when you’d like to have processes installed and how you’d like to go about its implementation. Make sure that everyone is clear on mutual expectations and goals. Review your progress and blockers regularly. 

Engage with the larger UX community. One mind rarely surprises itself. In larger teams, UXers have comrades to give feedback. In solo teams, isolation can inhibit creative solutions and stunt professional development. Go to UX meetups. Follow industry leaders on Twitter. Start a blog. Ask and answer questions on Stack Overflow. Join an online UX group like the wonderful UXMastery Community. Whatever you do, get involved with the UX world as a whole in some way. Your conscious and career will thank you.

Conclusion

Working as the solitary UX professional in your organisation is not an easy job, but it can be tremendously rewarding.

In Leah Buley’s The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Survival Guide, she makes the best case I’ve yet seen for the allure of working as a UX team of one. The team of one’s work is as close as one can get to the fundamental values of the UX community as a whole.

“UX is a force for good,” she writes. “[As a team of one,] you help spread the growth of a new and exciting field, one person, team, and company at a time.”

What do you think are the greatest challenges for the solo UXer? Share your thoughts in the comments, or join the conversation in our friendly forums.

The post How to Survive as Your Company’s Solo UXer appeared first on UX Mastery.

The Japanese have a great word: ikigai. It has no direct translation into English, but roughly means your level of happiness in life, or your ‘reason for being’.

As you can see in the chart below, you can achieve ikigai—meaning in life—if you can find the right balance of 4 things:

• Passion
• Mission
• Vocation
• Profession

Your design Ikigai

Your ikigai encompasses your career and your personal life. But it’s also a great lens to use when looking for the next step in your design career.

With Ikigai in mind, we can design our own careers, finding a balance between working on the things that we love doing, the things that we’re good at, and the things that add meaning to the world. And yes, we need to be paid for our work too.

Many people spend their lifetime working out their reason for being.

But understanding where you sit on the chart above might help you realise what areas you need to work on to get there. Here are the questions to ask yourself.

Are you in a role that you love?

Nothing makes us happier than working in a job, or at least a project that gets us into flow state.

Ask yourself, “am I truly happy with the work that I do?”. Are there changes that you could make in your current role that could make you truly love your work? Or would a new role get you closer to finding your passion?

And if you haven’t found your passion yet, that’s okay too. Keep looking.

Are you building things that the world needs?

Where’s your moral compass at? Is working ethically important to you? (Hint: it should be). Are you producing work that benefits society?

If you’re not feeling satisfied with your design career, perhaps it’s because there’s not enough meaning in your work.

Are you doing what you are good at?

To be really satisfied with what you do, you need to be doing things that you are good at. And you need to feel empowered to do your best work.

Knowing that we can do something well gives us a sense of accomplishment. And when we’re stuck in jobs and work environments where we can’t achieve our full potential, it sucks.

Are you in a role that pays you fairly?

A good salary is, of course, another consideration to being happy in work.

We all know more money doesn’t make us any happier, so striving for big salaries is not the be all and end all. In some ways, getting paid more can make you less happy. But we do need to get paid enough to make ends meet.

What changes do you need to make to your career to reach your design ikigai? Finding your design ikigai won’t happen overnight, but I hope by next UXmas you’ll be a little closer.

This article was originally published for UXmas – an advent calendar for UX folk. Catch up on all 24 posts at uxmas.com

The post Your Design Ikigai appeared first on UX Mastery.

James Brown, that funky Godfather of soul music, held an important contrast: “Thank God for the journey”. 

Between the depressing scepticism of Nietzsche and the enduring passion of Brown, there lies some wisdom for how we can approach our vocations.

There isn’t a clear-cut, authoritative approach anywhere that can guarantee a successful career, whether that be in user experience design or any other field.

This is both daunting and exciting; daunting because achieving our dreams is a unique and slippery struggle, but exciting because identifying, planning and thriving in a career can be one of the most meaningful and satisfying things we ever do. 

We might begin surmounting the daunting pathway by simply taking pause to mindfully assess our position and set some goals; once we’ve set our goals we can start taking the steps to make them happen. 

For example, we might be strategic and deliberate about our next career move, whether it’s that promotion to product manager, moving into a coveted in-house role, or striking out on our own as a freelancer.

There are troves of career advice all over the internet, but sometimes we must wrestle and go a little deeper to find wise and honest help. And that’s where it pays to pick up a book to explore the heart of your strengths and weaknesses and for gaining a more complex understanding of something outside your own experience.

Here are seven of our favourite books we recommend you dive into for the next step in your UX career.

1. The UX Careers Handbook – Cory Lebson

Cory Lebson’s definitive book on UX careers is for newbie and experienced designers alike. Industry-leading UX professionals share how they got their start and how they evolved their careers over time. Across four sections, the book covers career pathways, learning, personal branding, networking skills, building resumes and portfolios, and actually landing a UX job.

Cory is a strong believer in education as the foundation for success for UX professionals, including continual learning. He also shares our opinion that UX has many pathways—that there is no one single career trajectory within UX.

The book has an accompanying website full of links to resources building on the foundations of the book. In particular, Cory provides further reading and study options for each UX profession, including recent articles and study options from content strategy to service design. It’s a great online reference to find out the specifics of each UX stream.

Read more reviews and details about The UX Careers Handbook »

2. How to Get a Job as a Designer, Guaranteed – Ram Castillo

This is great one for newbies. Ram Castillo’s blog-turned-book is pitched at students and new graduates looking to break into the industry. The title makes a pretty big promise, but Ram does cover all the essentials to prepare for your first design job: education, design, networking, interviews and building a portfolio.

The content is grounded in Ram’s own experience working his way up the ranks in his first agency job, and he aims to help others learn from the successes (and mistakes) he made along the way.

Read more reviews and details about How to Get a Job as a Designer Guaranteed »

3. Stand Out – Denise Anderson

For designers and UX practitioners, a portfolio is a key collection of evidence about your experience. Denise Anderson’s Stand Out is an excellent guide for creating a portfolio that demonstrates your strengths. While it’s primarily aimed at helping students, many seasoned pros will also benefit from revamping their portfolio following Denise’s guidance.

The book takes you on a step-by-step journey, beginning with defining your personal brand and brand story. Once you’ve understood this, you’re ready to start building your portfolio, choosing the most appropriate projects, and designing a portfolio that communicates who you are and what you do. You’ll also find helpful handouts on the book’s associated website to help you through each stage of putting your portfolio together, and eventually building your ideal career.  

Read more reviews and details about Stand Out »

4. Pivot – Jenny Blake

Having no single entry point, people often come to UX from a multitude of different careers. Jenny Blake’s Pivot is designed to help you harness your existing skills and strengths and translate them into a new job. While not UX specific, it’s a practical read for side hustlers or anyone looking to harness an existing skill set for a career in UX.

Jenny advocates a cautious approach in her four-stage process, drawing from her own experience moving from Google to launch her own book and brand. The book teaches you how to test ideas by running small experiments, and how to learn from failure. Plenty of agile development analogies in here!

Read more reviews and details about Pivot »

5. The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Survival Guide – Leah Buley

More survival guide than career planner, this book by Leah Buley teaches readers how to make the most of working as the only UXer in a cross-functional environment. It’s aimed at helping UX professionals understand the other members of their product team, and helping those other product team members understand (and potentially cross over into) a UX role.

If you find yourself in a UX team of one, you’re likely to be charting your own course and figuring out your own career path, without many close role models to follow. Leah works through the foundations of building your team of one, first explaining the fundamentals of UX and how to build support for your work. She then goes on to work through research and design methods, and how these can be adapted (you guessed it) for a team of one.

We suggest reading it cover-to-cover and then using the techniques section as a reference when you’re embarking on a new project.

Read more reviews and details about The User Experience Team of One »

6. Mike Montiero – Design is a Job

A must-read for anyone working with clients—which is essentially all of us, whether we work agency, freelance, or in-house with internal stakeholders. Written in Mike’s irreverent style, Design is a Job is packed with pithy advice based on Mike’s personal experience managing design businesses for the past 20 years.

Mike Monteiro guides designers through designing their business, from choosing the right work, following process, presenting design, and managing feedback— including all the nitty-gritty details of contracts and actually getting paid.

An easy, personable read packed with insightful gems, you can easily read this over a weekend afternoon. But you’ll spend years remembering the lessons it contains. Pick it up if you want to improve your design business savviness, or if you need a new approach to managing clients.

Read more reviews and details about Design is a Job »

7. Get Started in UX – Luke Chambers & Matthew Magain

Of course, no list of UX career planning titles would be complete without our very own ebook Get Started in UX.

We wrote this because there was nothing else like it available anywhere—the UX community was asking the same questions but no-one had put together the essential, practical advice for aspiring UXers in such a straightforward fashion. So we collated advice from our own experience into six steps for building your UX career, starting with options for education, and assessing your current skills.

From there, all the basics are covered; from choosing the right tools for the job to building a portfolio, getting a mentor, and finally, landing that dream UX gig. You’ll also find plenty of useful templates to help you out at each step. Overall, this is a concise and highly practical guide for those looking to break into the field.

Read more reviews and details about Get Started in UX »

For more books covering every UX topic under the sun, make sure you check out our top recommendations in the epic list of UX books.  

The post 7 Books to Level Up Your UX Career appeared first on UX Mastery.

Each year, UX Australia brings together user experience professionals from across Australia, and around the globe, for a learning and networking conference extravaganza.

All the action is happening in central Sydney this year, beginning with a series of full and half day workshops from next Tuesday, followed by the main event on Thursday and Friday. 

Emerging technologies, evolving niches and adapting methods will be covered, from mixed reality, chat bots and writing for UX, along with plenty of insightful design topics.

As is UX Mastery tradition, we’ll be there with bells on, and we’re pretty excited. Here’s why.

The buzz of new ideas

Conferences like UX Australia are always inspirational—mixing with so many people, of calibre or conviction or composure, in quick succession creates a hyper-stimulation that keeps me going for the rest of the year. Meeting new people, seeing fresh ideas and combinations explained, all adds a renewed energy and direction to my work.

Of course, learning is a big part of that – whether it’s from the talks or through the workshops. The keynote speakers are chosen specifically for the power of their thinking, but often it’s the lesser known speakers who surprise you with their experience and insights.

If you really want to build your UX skills, the workshops have a reputation for being colourful, practical and eye-opening. Shameless plug alert: we’ve been asked to run our popular Introduction to User Experience Design workshop again on Tuesday 8 August. More on that below.

Other workshops will help you brush up on research skills, plan your career trajectory, or learn how to use mixed reality in your work. You can even spend the whole day with Mike Monteiro for a workshop based on his famous book: Design is a job—a masterclass in making a living as a designer, and upping your game when working with clients. Take a look at all the workshops.

Getting social

You never know who you might meet at a conference like this. The duty of “networking” is replaced by a delight in discovery — the UX Australia conference is one of the friendliest in the world, so you’ll be happy in a sea of fellow UX nerds and have plenty in common with other attendees. Plus, the UX community is full of introverts (here’s some proof) expert in creating positive experiences, so there are plenty of opportunities to take time out, re-charge or mix with smaller and quieter groups.

Striking up a cold conversation can sometimes feel awkward, so check out these handy conversation starters. My favourite networking tip is to approach people already standing in a group of two. Discount any fears that you might be interrupting them; people in pairs often either already know each other (and know they should be mingling), or they just met and are already on the cusp of looking for a new conversation topic. Either way you’ll be welcome. Plus, who attends a conference to avoid meeting people? And if, ultimately, things don’t click it’s much easier to back out of a pair than to leave someone on their own.

If you prefer to chat over a glass of vino (hands up!), head along to the pre- and post-conference drinks on the Wednesday and Friday nights. These spaces are where the some of the most valuable conversations happen.

The presentations

The speaker program this year is a mix of friends and heroes. As with previous years, there are two stages, so the only real struggle will be choosing which sessions to attend and bustling through the crowds to nab a seat in the other auditorium. Here are a few picks that caught our eye:

• The opening keynote by Sharon Mackay, who has recently been working with the South Australian government applying design thinking to policy reform in the areas of democracy, public participation and strategic engagement. Talk about meaningful work!
• Co-founder of San Francisco’s Mule Design, Mike Monteiro is giving this year’s closing keynote. Anyone familiar with Mike will know it promises to be packed with candid, no nonsense pearls of wisdom on the business of design.
• Ash McKay, our friend and a frequent contributor to the UX Mastery blog and forums, offers a unique perspective on UX as an autistic practitioner. She’ll share what it means to design with and for a different kind of mind.
• Content strategist from Facebook, Elena Ontiveros will dive into content strategy for chat bots, and how to make communicating with a robot feel more human.
• Also on content strategy, one of our favourite content strategists Matt Fenwick will cover how UX research and content creation can be better integrated, and why content is essential for fostering good user experiences.
• If you can’t make it to Andy Polaine’s workshop on Wednesday, don’t miss his talk on Living Design, exploring how services continue to evolve based on user needs.
• While Accessibility is steadily (but still too slowly) gaining ground on the web, what about cultural inclusivity? Adam Faulkner will provide a framework for a more culturally diverse user experience.
• We’re super looking forward to what David Blumenstein and Luke Watson will share about using humour and visuals and stories to jump-start conversations in corporate settings
• And so much more! See the full list of speakers on the UX Australia site.

The UX community

Catching up with friends and fans is how we feel at home during conferences. It’s a chance to step outside of the usual internet bubble and connect with people face-to-face, including our interstate and international friends.

So, if you spot one of us before we spot you, please come and say hi! Here’s what we look like. We’d love to chat with you.

Teaching the fundamentals of UX at our workshop

Back by popular demand, we are once again running UX Mastery’s flagship workshop — Introduction to User Experience Design — on Tuesday 8 August. This time I’m privileged to be co-facilitating with Donna Spencer herself. It’s going to be great fun!

We’ll cover the essentials of human-centred design for anyone who wants to understand more about the practical side of creating experiences. This workshop will help graphic designers, developers, business analysts, or entrepreneurs—you don’t need any background UX knowledge to attend. You’ll go home with a day of solid experience, a brain full of ideas and your notes and worksheets created throughout the day. There are only a few tickets left, and we’d love to see you there. See the details and book on the UX Australia site.

Are you as excited as we are? It’s not too late to get a ticket, but be quick: www.uxaustralia.com.au/conferences/uxaustralia-2017/

Already coming to UX Australia? What are you looking forward to the most?

PS You might not know that UX Australia publishes copies of all presentations online with audio for free. Take a look: www.uxaustralia.com.au/library

The post 5 Reasons to Get Excited About UX Australia appeared first on UX Mastery.

Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with other UX professionals who are considering moving to freelancing as their next career step.

They usually say they’re looking for freedom, more money, the ability to work on more interesting problems or learn new things – or even just the chance to work in their pyjamas regularly. Since I started consulting, I’ve expanded my focus into more strategy and product work across a wide variety of industries, and have met all kinds of interesting, smart colleagues.

While I wouldn’t change a thing about my situation, I’m always cautious about encouraging others to jump into the freelance world, because it’s definitely not for everyone. Here are some things I’ve learned along the way to consider before you quit your day job.

Freelancing pros and cons

Yes, it’s true that I spend most days in yoga pants, travel frequently, and work on some pretty cool projects. But consulting isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There are many things that are great about consulting, some things that aren’t so great, and some things that just depend on the day.

Schedule: One of the things I love most about consulting is being in total control of my schedule. There’s no expectation that I’m at my desk from 9 am to 5 pm. Sometimes I get in a zone and finish an entire report in one very long day and take the next morning off to let ideas percolate. Of course I have meetings and deadlines, but I can usually finagle things to work well for my clients and myself.

On the flip side, juggling your schedule can be difficult. I’m quite disciplined about getting things done, but I’ve never quite figured out a way to create a consistent schedule. Sometimes I’ve had priority work on different projects collide at the same time or I’ve said yes to a few too many things and ended up working crazy hours to get everything done. Such is a consultant’s life.

Money: I absolutely find that I make more money freelancing than when I worked in-house, even in leadership roles. I’m still experimenting with how I bill, but I tend to use value-based pricing for entire projects rather than charge hourly. I often ask clients to pay me 50% of the total upfront and the rest upon project completion, which can make managing money tricky, especially when you’re used to a consistent paycheck.

You also have to know that you’ll never be able to collect money as though you’re billing 40 hours a week, every week. You have to account for supplies, tool costs, benefits, and set aside time for administrative tasks like sending invoices, business development, and, of course, downtime. No one gives you sick time or vacation days when you freelance.

Inevitably, I’ve also run into time periods where I don’t have anything billable booked. An open schedule can be scary, so I use this time to do things like reach out to colleagues or potential clients, write articles, research new tools, try to learn something new, or catch up on administrative work. One of the benefits of this downtime is the space to learn, exploring the vast array of available online courses or just experimenting with a new method or tool.

Work environment: I mostly work from home, which means I wear what I like, can pet my dog throughout the day, don’t contend with traffic, and for better or worse, have all day access to my kitchen. All great, but it also means that sometimes the only person I see in the flesh each day is my husband.

I have to make an extra concerted effort to hang out with colleagues, so I’ve become more active in my local meetups and groups (shout out to Ladies that UX Durham – love yall!) I also found I need to be more social during the week, even if that means going to a fitness class instead of biking solo or talking on the phone while I shop.

What services will you provide?

I’ve been focused on research and strategy for most of my career. I won’t rehash the “Should I be a unicorn?” or “Do designers need to code?” debates, but I’ll admit that when I first starting freelancing, I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to find enough work without doing visual work. Turns out, I was totally wrong. Phew!

You absolutely don’t need to be a unicorn or try to tackle projects that aren’t your speciality. But it helps to have a broad set of experience and at least one area of deep expertise you can market and use to define your services. You can match what you’re good at and what you like to define the kind of projects you target, the projects you’re OK with taking, and what you will certainly turn down.

Clearly defining your services and interests are important because it tells other people what to turn to you for. if I know someone has great interaction design skills and tonnes of experience with financial products, I’ll suggest them anytime I see a project like that. If someone tells me they’ll do anything that comes their way, they probably won’t come to mind for any projects I know about.

How will you find clients?

This is a question that I get asked time after time, and the answer is incredibly simple in concept but hard in practice: treat your clients and colleagues as you would users and provide them with a good experience working with you.

More specifically, you have to do good work and other people have to be willing to talk about it. This can either mean that your clients are pleased with your work and will re-hire you or tell other potential clients, or that your peers in UX like your work and can refer you when they need help or can’t take something on. It really is true that a huge amount of success in consulting is based on networking and who you know, but that only works to your advantage if the people you know have had a good experience working with you. Right now, every single one of my clients is someone I’ve previously worked with or have gotten a good reference.

This is where, once again, it helps to have a clearly defined, slightly unique set of skills or interests. There are tonnes of researchers and tonnes of designers, but if you’re known as a researcher who loves qualitative work and medical products, people will think of you whenever they come across that kind of project. Just be sure that you don’t define yourself too narrowly.

You can also use job boards to identify potential projects or try recruiting agencies, but I haven’t found either as fruitful as having my name passed on from a previous contact. More on finding freelance UX work here.

Are you really suited for all that?

Even if all the potential pros sound amazing to you and you have the skills and network to pull off freelancing, take a moment to reflect on your personality and soft skills.

Are you detailed, organised, and willing to juggle many different client requests and manage your own schedule? Are you a natural risk-taker who can cope well with slow periods or lack of viable work? Are you assertive enough to negotiate terms for yourself? Do you mind working by yourself a lot?

There’s a lot to think about before leaving the security of a full-time job. I love freelancing, but it’s worth carefully considering the pros and cons and your skillset and personality before taking the leap. Best wishes for whichever path you choose! 

Do you have experience or tips on freelancing for UX professionals? Leave a comment on the blog or in the forums! 

The post Is Freelancing Your Next UX Career Move? appeared first on UX Mastery.

How’s this? For the next 48 hours, all of our ebooks are on sale for just $5 each. That’s about 75% off, all our ebooks, for the rest of the month.

Been thinking about buying one of our insightful, practical and easy-to-apply titles, but haven’t taken the plunge yet? Now’s your chance to take advantage of this special deal, conveniently also timed for the end of the financial year.

Here’s a little more about each our ebooks.

Think First – A no-nonsense approach to creating successful products, powerful user experiences + very happy customers.

Everyday UX – 10 successful UX designers share their tales, tools, and tips for success.

Get Started in UX – The complete guide to launching a career in user experience design.

A Practical Guide to Information Architecture – Simple steps to tackle your own IA projects, large or small.

Bonus! Grab a copy of our UX Sketchnotes ebook, a collection of over 50 sketchnotes covering UX talks from around the world.

Get in quick, though, as this deal only lasts 48 hours!

Happy reading!

The post Flash Sale: All UX Mastery Books $5 Each! appeared first on UX Mastery.