Beat a UX Design interview

hey editing andrew here thanks for watching the video it was recorded on a zoom call during a webinar so apologies for any quality issues that might be with the video itself we had over 500 participants join the session and they asked a lot of questions so many in fact that we made a separate video just for that and i'll link to it in the description below so with that said i hope these tips and tricks help you with your ux job search your applications and your interviews thanks [Music] welcome everyone to our webinar on how to land a great ux job with andrew doherty also on the panel today i want to introduce tom cotterill tom runs a talent consultancy called fearless he has been working in design hiring for six years with some of the biggest design leaders in the industry so without further ado over to andrew to kick things off thanks chris and hey tom and hey everyone it was so great to see everyone's messages coming in from all over the world i'm really excited to speak to you all we've got a lot of questions that came in and i'm just so flattered and humbled that you've all shown up tonight and thank you so much so i better get started many of you might know me already because you've come via my youtube or from linkedin but for those of you who don't know me i'm andrew doherty and i've been working in ux design for quite some time i like to say that i has experience like i has cheeseburger and some of the clients that i've worked for over the years you will recognize and i've worked on projects that are probably part of your daily life which is as a designer something that i'm consistently humbled and also a little bit terrified about when i see some of my mistakes impacting people's lives everywhere but i've also worked for some great australian companies that many of you if you are overseas haven't necessarily heard of and i've put some logos up here but i just wanted to show that i've been doing this for a while and every time i would get a new job my peers and colleagues would ask me how i did it because they would want to know how i advanced or how i accomplished it and then it just kind of bloomed into this question which was but how do you get the job but how do you get the job so i want to just focus on that today why is this important now what's actually happening in the world now that's making this topic relevant i want to share some data with you about four to five years ago i gave a talk at a keynote presentation in hungary in budapest about how to get a job at google how to get a great ux job and much of what i discussed in that talk i'm going to cover over again today not all of it because we've got some extra detail we're going to go into tonight but a lot of the topics were related to how to get the job what's the process how to nail an interview and what i found really interesting was that when that video went up on youtube in late 2016 there was a little bit of a bump but just in the last six months it's gone sort of crazy and there were some days there over the last couple of weeks where we've had i think around three and a half thousand people viewing the video per day and it's just gone mental and i can only really attribute that to the fact that entropy and change is a thing and also maybe coronavirus so a lot of people are really self-reflecting trying to figure out what their next move is going to be and i think that this data is representative of the fact that there's been a change but what has actually changed careers change and when we look at the data and ransom numbers it turns out that people you me everybody we change careers completely a lot you in your life will change career probably somewhere between five to seven times while you are living and if you look at the actual frequency of change it's about 30 of the workforce is changing their job every 12 months you're probably one of those people just like me we we're constantly changing in our positions and also very importantly change is not a bad thing there's this perception that changing your job makes you look a little shady or a bit wishy-washy but that's just not true recruiters expect you to work probably somewhere between 12 to 24 months in a single job and for project oriented work like ux it could even be as low as six months for a project google released some data suggesting that the average time a googler will stay at google is 14 months so after all that work of getting all the way there they leave within 14 months i think i stayed just around 18 months so i'm a little bit over the average but it still wasn't a long time and it's because ux design is a career that i think is blooming there's just more and more and more need for us it's a candidate short market and i know when you look at the data and you you look at the job advertisements it gets a bit worrisome maybe there's not a job there for me but the truth is that there just is there's so much work for so many of us to do and when we look at coronavirus and we look at what's actually happening in the world a lot of companies are going to be moving very rapidly to move what was typically bricks and mortar businesses online so while you might not see that uptick in employment happening just right now i'm making the guess that it will happen pretty soon and it will happen quite rapidly so sit tight this this space is pretty hot just to give you some stats that i found about ux jobs right now in the usa there's over 238 000 ux designers currently employed in roles as ux designers over 129 000 companies and in australia it's around 16 000 ux designers are employed right now and that doesn't include cx so people who call themselves customer experience or product designers so this is just a number pulled straight from linkedin it doesn't include ux engineers or ux riders or any of the verticals it's just ux designer and there's about 16 000 rolls salaries are high ux managers is one of the top salaries in the entire united states not just in tech in any job it's in the top 25 and the average salary for a ux designer in the united states is around 100 000 australian it's around 83 000 u.s so it's quite a high salary for people who don't necessarily have a graduate degree and when we look at experience like my own i didn't have a graduate degree ux design is still one of the highest paying tech jobs in the world where a graduate degree is not required to be successful it's not required to get the job and it's not required to do the job and it's not required to be promoted in the job so how did i get started how did this whole ux design thing happen for me i started about 14 years ago but i want to go a little bit further back from that just to give you an indication of how my story played out and i hope it will make sense as we go through because i don't want you to think that i somehow bought my way in that i went to some ivy league top tier university and that i got lucky i'm just this little farm boy kid who grew up in queensland in the country growing watermelons and dirt roads and tank water and sometimes no electricity i remember there was a christmas where the entire house was completely under water for two and a half weeks because we got flooded in a crocodile swam in our front yard so you know i'm from the styx and i didn't study design or technology at university in fact for a long time there i didn't even go to university i went to uni when i was about 23 and i studied rocks i thought rocks were super cool so i was studying livoli techniques which is a way of slicing a rock with another rock to make it sharp super cool topic actually because turns out that these designs were some of the first designs ever made by humans and they were iterated on just like we iterate on designs as ux designers so i love rocks and that's how i got started and i actually failed design in school i didn't do very well in many subjects including mathematics so yeah failing design didn't really set me up to be a successful designer and my first job was working at mcdonald's and i'm not ashamed to say it mcdonald's was an amazing job i was 13 and 9 months old i remember because that was the earliest you could start work in queensland it was 13 and nine months and i started part-time at mcdonald's and my job was serving on the counter that was also new for mcdonald's they didn't have boys or men serving on the front counter we were supposed to be cooking but i insisted that i wanted to get closer to the customers and you know deal with customers and it was great i dealt with a lot of customer complaints a lot of problems a lot of babies getting lost in ball pits and yeah it was a really great job my second job was working for a bank it was working in a call center and my role was to take complaint calls from customers who'd had something go wrong like the card going missing in the middle of the night or their loan repayment not being able to be made mostly it was people who were at their most stressed most afraid calling an implacable company hoping for help and my job was to empathize with those customers and see what i could do to help them the reason that i'm painting this picture is that it's not typical of what you'd expect for somebody who ends up working for a company like google i didn't start in tech and i didn't get a graduate degree in tech i came via mcdonald's and a call center working in a bank so it's a really hard job to get and i i just want to draw that parallel for you that i shouldn't have been able to get it and i did and i'm going to share with you how i did because i think you can do the same sort of thing too not necessarily that you want to go to google you might want to work anywhere you might want to work for a local company or a startup but the process that i went through is the same process regardless so how did i start applying the process well i went back to my roots and my passion prior to working was actually playing games playing on my commodore 64 and writing programs on my commodore 64 from a book you had to like transpose them it was super laborious and most of the time it never worked when i got my atari it was like game changer for me because i was able to just play games by sticking in a cartridge and solving puzzles was a huge part of my life growing up as a kid and when i meet ux designers all around the world and i speak to them this is something that i found that many of us having in common not necessarily that we all played with commodore 64 but that we all get a kick out of solving a complex puzzle and solving it efficiently and solving it quickly but one thing keeps coming up which is that to get a ux job you need to have experience and i refer to it as the chicken and egg paradox because i even experienced this as well i know many of you do because i hear from you all the time which is how do i get experience without first getting experience because the first job wants you to have experience before they'll give you the job so it's sort of this paradox and how do you break that paradox well the good news is that since i started it's gotten a lot easier to break and i'm going to go into a little bit of detail here first my career timeline because this will help me illustrate how i broke the paradox the actual project experience that i used to get you know my role at google probably was the three years prior to that but how do they get those first jobs how do they get to macquarie bank well i actually started working at a company called squis which was a small web development firm and they required also that i had experience but back then there was no way for me to get it there was no clients that were willing to give me a job so i actually registered fake websites and paid for domain names and made a cupcake bakery a veterinarian a few doctors clinics and it was all completely fake it was just me designing and coding these websites so that i could put something together in a portfolio and that was a lot of work and it also almost backfired i didn't lie to squeeze i didn't say to them that those companies were real but it was very like you know i'm winking and i'm nodding at you and hoping that you realize that i had to do this because i won in and this was the only way i could give you what you asked for which was experience but since i met with chris who is working with harness projects it turns out that there are more and more ways for you to get project experience that doesn't involve you kind of pulling together a fake cupcake bakery website so i'm going to touch on that again later and just talk a little bit more about project experience but let's assume that you've gone got some project experience either through one of these courses or through faking something or through luck but you want to get that next job and getting a job is a bit like solving a rubik's cube you can't just start spinning it and hope for the best it doesn't solve itself you have to apply an algorithm you have to apply thought processes you have to use math you have to have steps that you take to get the cube to be solved and getting a job is exactly the same and if you imagine sitting there with a rubik's cube and just sort of spinning it and hoping for the best you'll just be spinning it forever and you'll never actually get anywhere and and that's some of the feedback that i get from my students and from my peers is that they try and try and try and for some reason it just never works out and i feel like they're not applying the formula so i'm gonna go through the step-by-step formula with you getting the job is the job and what i mean by that is that if i can't demonstrate to the customer to the client to the company that i am good at getting the job then it's hard for them to imagine that i can actually be a good designer because my project is my application i am the product and getting the job is just like selling a product my features and benefits are actually my experience and my capabilities if i think of myself as the product then that must mean that the employer is the customer and they're actually buying me the customer is always right that's the other thing i can't argue with them and tell them you're wrong i'm great although i will show you a little hip how you can get close to saying that but remember the customer is buying you so you're the product the employer is the customer getting the job is just like doing the job if we're ux designers we know how to ux our work right we have a process in place we can apply ux principles to solving problems so we can apply these same principles to our job application process i have a little quote that i've used over the years which is that when you can't differentiate on product or price the only thing left is customer experience and what i mean by that is in a world where the market is being saturated by other ux designers who all say i can do the same thing as every other one how do you differentiate yourself well the way that you are interacting with the client with the customer which is your your company your experience with them their experience with you that's how you differentiate yourself a generic ux process definitely has these three steps there's many more interim steps and you can loop and iterate and you can do the double diamond and you can do all of the stuff but for simplicity's sake i've narrowed it down to the three primary buckets which is do some research design and iterate and then deliver i'm going to go through each of these buckets but let's start with research if we look at a research plan we can make this plan much longer but i've tried to make it pretty short so that we can get through it all we first do a bit of a refresher right so we want to understand what is the job application process like what is the timeline of that process how does it actually work some of you listening today maybe haven't actually applied for a ux design job just yet and you want to know what that process is because it is different to applying for other jobs there are steps that you've maybe never experienced before so i want to give you that heads up you need to research the market as well which is what's your location what are the jobs available in that location what are the salary ranges for jobs of that type in that location and what are the kinds of companies that are available the job itself is also important and that comes from what the job is described as in the position description and the requirements of the person who needs to do that job be careful because not all of the requirements are actually real especially the ones where they talk about years of experience they're pretty flexible so don't feel disheartened if there's one requirement in a list that doesn't resonate with you and we also need to look at our personas our people the sources the recruiters the interviewers and the managers we want to understand how they think what they feel and what they're likely to do based on how we interact with them and the fit is this company the right company for me do i actually want to do this job for them is this going to advance my career or put it on hold or maybe detriment it in some way okay so i'm going to go through the process which is the refresher on the timeline of how you apply for a job and what steps occur step one is the application whether that be inbound or outbound inbound means that you were approached outbound means you applied for it by approaching that company and the application is reviewed by i call them implacable sources which implacable means unable to be pleased so then after that a source of screen record will take place if you're successful that first step's really hard because a lot of the sources don't even read it but they just reject you and be careful because it's the most difficult step they're actually not wanting to care about you not wanting to help you not wanting to spend more than they have to with you in minutes they just want to move on to the next one it's like a net and they're just trying to catch big fish or the fish that they're looking for step three if you succeed with getting through that implacable saucer is to meet with the recruiter either in person or over the phone and i found that recruiters lately are much more likely to be located off-site or random places so it's usually a phone call or a zoom or video or skype or something like that and their job is to confirm that you're not a dud so the sourcer is just trying to confirm that you've got the buzzwords and the checklists match up and the recruiter is just trying to confirm that you're able to speak with them understand them when they speak to you answer questions quickly and effectively that you're able to impress them the way you would maybe impress an interviewer if they were to pass you forward and they want to be on your side so the source is trying to reject you the recruiter is looking for a reason to keep you they're actually hoping that you're not wasting their time they're hoping that you're the real deal so think of them as a potential ally they're not your enemy and if they're on your side the doors open step three if you get through the recruiter is to get to an interview with a hiring manager or an interviewer or multiple of those so it could be one interview or multiple i think i had seven in total with google the second time and another three after that when they put me up for a different position but the interviews could be numerous and difficult they're usually situational based questions so tell me about a time when and we'll go into that in more detail soon and there's probably some design challenge which we'll also talk about in this presentation tonight if you succeed in getting through the interview or interviews then you'll be bounced back to the recruiter either to offer you a job or to reject you if you if you didn't succeed and how you handle this step matters a lot rejection is probably what's going to happen to you to me to anyone so don't let it break you because the way that you handle that rejection matters a lot in terms of what the recruiter thinks of you and whether that recruiter will talk to you again for another position if you're successful after an offer there is also usually a background check whether it be for the client or whether it be by an alternate company that is offshore or doing a back office related task and it's super important as well because you've gone through all of this trouble to get through these steps only to discover that you were mistaken with a date that you put on your resume by a couple of days even then it comes up in the background check and it feels like the world's ending and sometimes it can actually derail the process so i would say those five steps are the primary buckets of what happens you'll get an offer letter after that and then onboarding if you're successful so that was our process refresher i want to just talk about the market for a second the uxcx market is an interesting one because while it looks like there might not be many positions we must always remember that the attrition rate in those positions is very high so those people who are doing those jobs don't stay for very long remember we we saw that they leave usually within six to twelve months because it's project-based work it means that there are many jobs they're advertised quickly and they come up and down and it's still a candidate short market and tom i think is going to talk about that a little bit later when we ask him some questions he might have some unique insight about the market itself okay a little bit about the job you probably saw a position description whether it was because you were hunting for the job on linkedin or indeed or one of these uh job aggregator services or because a recruiter reached out to you or a sourcer reached out to you and gave you a position description to look over it beware when they ask for too many things so i call it a unicorn position and you might even see them say this we want a unicorn we want a unicorn and a unicorn is somebody who's expected to do everything so you have to be a ux designer a ui designer a project manager you need to be able to code and you need to be able to code in the back end as well and you should have some ridiculous number of years experience and you should be comfortable working overtime to just get the job done and our company's great we have free snacks so um be careful when you read positions like this you i mean you can apply sure go for it not necessarily just yet i'll tell you when the right time is but be prepared that you might not actually want that job uh so if you're wanting the practice of applying sure let's do it but just be careful because these particular jobs indicate to me there's a bit of a red flag in the way that the organizational company is structured and it could result in you getting a job that you hate that's difficult to leave because you just did one or two months and then it makes it look like you were fired when you weren't you just hated it but if you're if you're in any doubt reach out to me and i can tell you we want to do a little bit of research on the people as well so if we see a job and we see that it was advertised by acme holdings i'm using them as an example i don't think it's a real company i hope i would typically go into incognito mode i have a fake linkedin account and i log in as joe smith or whatever the name is and i look at the people who work for the company i look at who the sources or talent scouts are the recruiters where they've worked before i look at the interviewers so these are the people who usually have the job title hiring manager or manager or head of design or something like that i check them all out and i want to know where they've worked before whether they've worked for companies that were evil whether they've worked for companies that i respect and that i look up to and i just try to get a lay of the land who am i dealing with here so that if i do end up being passed between these different phases of the interview process i have an idea of who sam is and who mary is and has worked for me in the past to know this information because it's made me more agile in my way of navigating the murky waters of job applications don't do it from your own linkedin though because you get one shot so they they're viewing who viewed their profile if you look right now and you're using your linkedin at a job application and the different people working for that company they might look at your profile just to see if you're a viable candidate and if you're not ready and you haven't got all of your ducks in a row then your one shot is spent when you were just browsing so that's why i recommend just having a fake linkedin account it's not because you're being cd or dodgy it's just you don't want to waste that one shot that you've got to really blow them out of the water when they see how awesome you are there's a few personas to consider if we think of it as a ux project i don't know if you know who sophia is but she's the robot there on the left and i like her because uh she reminds me of sources if any of you on the call tonight are sources i apologize humbly for offending you but i've had some pretty negative experiences with sources pretty much every time i've ever had to deal with them i really i really struggle with finding sources who care about humans care about the company they work for and care about finding the right person for the job so i put her in there as a robot the recruiter is somebody who's a bit more ominous they're looking at you squinting and trying to really understand who you are they're really looking deep they want to see what you're capable of they want to see whether you're going to embarrass them if they put you forward for interview and then interviewer or as i've put this tired dude you can't see his coffee but he's tired and he's drinking coffee and the reason i've done that is because mostly interviewers inside of companies are people who are just doing the job and have been told by the way don't forget you have that interview on friday at lunchtime and now you know in addition to doing all of their work they have to find an hour somewhere to spend with some random who probably won't get the job and they have to try to be nice to you for an hour and help you try to apply for a job that you're not going to get so yeah interviewers tend to be the most battered and tired employees i meet with when i go to companies which means you should be nice to them because they're taking time out of their normal lives to help you and they really do want to help you so i've put external recruiters here as superman so they're also called headhunters or talent sources and they have many different names but they will fight for you they will get into an argument with the client and say you're wrong he can do it she can do it you just didn't read it you know and they're allowed to fight for you because if they sort of fight then you're not embarrassing yourself in front of the client you're not kind of burning down the forest they're able to do it it's their job to find the right candidate which means sometimes speaking truth to power okay and just quickly the fit with the company if you're doing that linkedin stalky thing that we talked about and you figure out who the boss is who the ceo is or who the head of is check them out and what have they done before what does their twitter feed say what does their linkedin post say have they ever said anything that you really don't agree with or have they written a medium article that says users suck or something you know whatever it is just check out the boss you want to make sure that your boss is somebody that you can respect if you can try to meet with them if you're going through the interview process as well ask to speak to the boss you want to know who you're going to be working for and then the position it's hard it's hard to answer this question because you're not inside yet but you can sort of maybe reach out to people who used to work for the company you can find them on linkedin as well and reach out and say hey i'm looking at applying for a position at acme holdings and i just want to know what was it like for you when you worked there and they might be able to give you some information that you can't find easily online like don't do it or it was great they were amazing so i put this person as a goalie because if your job is to be expected to catch things before they go live and try to hope and pray that they don't go live it's going to be a really hard job for you because the system is going to be set up for you to kind of fight with everyone and get hit a lot by flying balls through the air which are you know products that shouldn't be going live in their current state and the business and everyone's fighting for it to happen and get the goal and you're the last little goalie trying to prevent the catastrophe from happening so just when you're doing your own squint test remember that you're interviewing the company too and what they think of ux design or product design and the way that they approach projects matters because your success will be a direct consequence of how this goes how they treat ux and lastly the product itself are you selling sugar to kids or cigarettes or are you working in gaming or are you working for a company that has typically done the wrong thing by customers and the reason i mention this isn't just because it's evil but because it does make it harder for you to get other positions that you want to go for i can pretty much guarantee that if i had worked for big tobacco like one of the consulting firms that i worked for asked me to do and i put that project on my website i would not have got my job at google or amazon the nature of the project matters and what it does matters now i'm not saying that you're all in a position to just reject every offer that comes your way but you may need to hide that you worked for one of the you know companies that has made the lives of people crap and more and more as we move into the future some of the social media companies are actually starting to fit squarely into this bucket of products that aren't necessarily good for humanity that's our research process done i mean that's a lot of work to do up front for a position you may not even apply for but you'll notice that at no stage throughout that process did we click apply now we just wanted to get a lay of the land and try to understand what was happening apply now is not what you want to do just yet because if you do that's your one shot and you're not ready and it could be terrible so no we are not going to apply now and i'm going to give you an example i actually did a little test so there's a company called small pdf and they're located in switzerland they had a job advertisement i liked their little logo with the boxes it reminded me of post-it notes so i clicked apply now and it did the autocomplete on linkedin and off went my details and within a couple of days of applying i received this email from a employee from smallpdf dear andrew thanks a lot for your application we appreciate you taking the time generic generic generic although we were impressed by your qualifications the competition was stiff and unfortunately we've decided not to move forward with you and we're going to go with other candidates and we wish you every success sweet except that it can't possibly be true um i want to put my ego up there and put it on a flag and say i'm waving it hello ego but i've got a lot of experience and i've probably been one of the first ux designers in the world to start calling themselves that so for somebody to have more experience than me is sort of a red flag and i did it because i wanted to prove to our students that they didn't even check my application was absolutely not reviewed i'm i'm sure because if it was i should have got through that first step um so just keep that in mind that apply now is not a sure route to success it's highly likely you will be rejected without them ever viewing you know your profile or checking out what you're capable of and i looked just now to see if small pdf is still advertising and that position is still available so they told me that the competition was stiff and they found another candidate turns out maybe they didn't because the position has just been re-advertised and they're still looking for someone with enough experience to get through my friend david who i adore sent me this amazing tweet which reminds me of that story which is a developer who created an api he said i saw a job post the other day required four years plus of experience in fast api unfortunately i couldn't apply because i only have 1.5 years of experience because that's when i created it so the person who created the api for the very first time is not eligible to apply for the position to work for a project that uses that software that product so yeah just keep in mind that when they list years of experience it's not necessarily the truth and if you are rejected by a source or a first step they probably haven't even looked closely at your profile and it's not personal and they aren't trying to make you feel bad or anything like that they're just a big business with a lot happening and you're just slipping through the cracks so we have to now share with you some ways that you're not going to slip through the cracks before we move on to applying i want to just open up to some questions we can just see if chris is available and if you have any questions chris that have been asked from any of the group sure andrew so we do um i will try and pick the most research related questions we've got about 15 so we'll get through a couple of them now um first question is actually a good question for both of you andrew and tom um how long do recruiters typically spend viewing an applicant's website or portfolio my opinion is about 15 seconds what do you think tom um i would say about 30 seconds to a minute i think it they look at like the top line stuff first so have that sort of very generic overview and then if they're interested they go deeper and explore but a lot of internal recruiters for example don't actually understand design so there's kind of they kind of just look for buzzwords which is yes um but yeah i can talk a lot more about that later down the line but not long at all awesome thanks guys so next one uh is is it a good idea to apply for multiple positions uh in the same company why or why not yeah um no um so i was working with um a company called zlando in berlin earlier early this year late last year and essentially your application goes normally in these big companies goes to an ats system which is essentially where hiring managers internal talent managers stakeholders in the business will uh see who's applied for what role and if your name keeps popping up they kind of look at that in a bad way around that you haven't done your research you're just applying for everything kind of spamming the company so it's good to be a little bit more tailored in your application process in my opinion anyway yeah i agree yeah there's a sense of desperation and it's not necessarily the truth but the perception matters because again it's unfortunately you're selling a product and perception matters uh i'll move on chris because i've realized i'm talking too slow even though i talk too fast so i want to make sure i get through the design if that's all right so the design steps is what comes next and we've got four buckets design your cv resume design your website slash folio design a cover letter if you need one and design your social media so i'm gonna power through and just quickly show you an embarrassing cv which was mine this was a cv i created to get a job at a bank when i was young and it worked which is the funny thing because it shouldn't have but i i thought you know banks criminals bank robbers i should make myself a wanted poster so yeah don't do this but it worked and the reason it worked is that it stood out but there are ways to make your cv stand out that doesn't involve you putting your face behind bars so don't use microsoft word templates unless the recruiter that you're dealing with as a headhunter has asked for it specifically because they've got a system where they take out the data and put it into their own special branded cv for you otherwise don't use them because they're ugly and they're recognizable and they suck and don't make it too fancy either don't spend a lot of time trying to you know refund the design because if it looks like you've made it too elaborate and with ornate kind of filigrees and stuff they're gonna think what were you doing why did you have so much time or you don't have a job no experience stars or those sliders that say oh andrew's 70 proficient at ux design just don't put them in because why would you say that you're not good at something and no typos ever read it backwards get a friend to read it backwards and that's how you catch the typos because when you read things forwards your brain will fill in the blanks of the mistakes and you don't even see them anymore and no head shots no age no date of birth no religion you would be amazed how many times we get resumes with people putting that stuff in because they think it's important but it's actually really dangerous because if we interview a candidate and then reject them when we knew the whole time that they were old young big small gay straight trans a certain religion it puts it in this very murky territory about they were rejected because of the merits of not being able to do the position but we knew that they were a scientologist for example oh what happens now you know so just don't put it on there and then you're avoiding that mess entirely of being judged or so yeah just leave it out and if you apply for a position where they ask for it that's a red flag so here's just a quick view on my cv it's just bland it's just very bland i try not to put as too many words like my my rule is five lines if there's a paragraph and that's it and one paragraph only and i just try to keep it very very simple um and you can probably find it online but there are other i'm not saying it's the best but i just wanted to show you that it has improved since i put my face behind bars and i try to just tell a little bit of information about what my role and responsibilities were and maybe what was the unique differentiator of that product or project versus others so that's a bit on cv keep it simple keep it clean make sure there's no typos and don't be too crazy with it now time to move on to website and folio and i know i get this question a lot how do i design a website how do i design a folio so i want to bring you back to that first question where i talked to you earlier about getting the job is doing the job so try first to solve this yourself because if you can't design your own portfolio we might start to wonder whether you can do the job as a ux designer so give it a good shot first before asking for help because modification is much easier than creation just get started and you can start tweaking it and fixing it rather than going to someone when you've got a blank piece of paper and saying help so the website is obviously needs to be online i don't think you should just attach a pdf folio that's very graphic designer that's very like 1990s and early 90s so it should be online use your name as a domain name no like sexy chick.cc or whatever it should just be marysmith.com you can't get marysmith.com get merrysmithdesign.com and just keep adding words until you can get it merrysmithdesigner.com or something like that but you should use your name as best as you can and try to get the dot com they're about 12 a year and it's worth the cost do not roll your own which means code your own unless you're like super proficient with html css and js and that you've coded websites a lot just don't do it the reason is you might make it look really great on one viewport like a laptop but then as soon as it needs to be responsive or the person's on a bigger screen or small screen it starts to break and then that makes you a failed ux designer because you didn't consider what happens when your customers use a different platform to view the product so some of the advantages of using templating engines like wix or canva or squarespace is a team of very talented designers and engineers have done all of that work for you and the last thing you need to do is just white label it with your own brand put your name put your logo put your brand colors and your project work in there i tried to reach out to squarespace to see if they would give us a promo code the answer was no so please try wix or canva and the website folio needs to contain your project experience do not make the mistake of thinking that you need to have 20 years of project experience on your portfolio you don't you just need to have maybe two or three key projects that show what you're capable of whether the project was successful or not doesn't actually matter in fact even if it didn't go live it doesn't matter because the people who are viewing it aren't going then to the website and checking most of the time projects are internal they're an app that has not yet launched there's a lot of stuff that you can't view as the hiring manager trying to check it out we only get to see what you show us so what you show us matters and it's up to you which means you don't have to show everything just pick a few projects that you are proud of and when i went for google i had two projects on my website just two and that was enough for me to get the hardest ux job in the world so if you get two projects you're in a really great space to get started obviously there's a lot of work around what you do with that and my other talk on youtube shows a lot of detail about how to get your folio up and running and certain techniques to make it look right but i can say that there are ways for you to benchmark yourself if you found another ux designer who's done it well copy them and make it your own and email them and apologize if you want to feel better but they won't care because they copied somebody else too okay and no typos on the website either no typos ever typos are super easy to fix and if they get through it means you weren't paying attention which means what's your attention to detail like on the job i've got three examples of some portfolios that i really liked and not because i went into the project work of those particular designers maybe the project work wasn't so great but they certainly caught my attention and they did it because they made me feel connected to the person straight away so vera chen here has really won me over by crossing out that people are users so she's saying don't call them users they're people and right away without ever seeing that she worked for uber or facebook i would have kept scrolling and wanting to know what she was up to and what she's capable of because she's been very opinionated about something that matters to her and matters and should matter to the world and she's shown it to me in the very first thing she says about herself priyanka's done also a great job at showing a little bit about her personality she included an emoji hi there i'm a product designer and tech enthusiast based in san francisco so it's very simple but it's just conversational in tone and as you scroll down check it out there's a lot of great work there that she's put in for her projects and then i love elizabeth's i love this because elizabeth is a product designer and aspiring princess now i don't know what it would be like to work with elizabeth but i can tell you i want to meet her and i want to have an interview with her and i want to find out why she calls herself a princess here is a perfect example of how showing a bit of humor and a bit of personality is not a bad thing she's won me on her side before i've even got close to looking at her project work it's unfortunate because it's a screenshot but there's a little star here above her photo and it actually animates and it's very very majestical so is that a word majestical majestic okay let's keep going there is no portfolio that i was prepared to put up that was bad because i didn't want to shame anyone um i tried to get a internet archive version of my own portfolio when it was bad but i couldn't because they deleted it so that was both beneficial for me and bad um so here's some examples of things not to do a very dark and ominous image as a as a kind of leading image a lot of stuff that i have to read i ship stuff and like creating engaging visuals and i also like craft beers and wales to learn more click here big mistake here's those skill sliders i was talking to you about before don't put them on your portfolio don't put them on your cv design with a process i actually like except that this sad little photo of like four post-its on a dark wall is just miserable and my work and there's a bit of a parody here about using psd blanks i actually agree with using psd blanks but it looks like an apple advertisement rather than an advertisement for the design so typically if i do use psd blanks i flatten them so that they're no longer in three-dimensional space um certainly not in motion in somebody walking through a car park so yeah check it out there's some real funny stuff it's called the worst portfolio in the world i think just a few quick continued tips about designing your portfolio as i said before if you can't do this then we're going to start to ask questions about whether you can do the job we're here to see project experience quickly to see if you're going to be able to do the job and there's no need to show everything tell us a story about yourself and engage with us quickly and tell us what to do at the end um reach out to me here just you know tell us what to do but don't make it too desperate sounding is what i wanted to say quickly just a bit on cover letter if you have a recruiter on board there's no need for a cover letter if you have to go through and apply now flow which i would try to avoid at all costs or somebody asks you for a cover letter or you're reaching out to one of these people directly because you're at that stage where you're ready to launch your product make the cover letter super simple try to match a few buzzwords with the job description if they put it in there and if you have a real question that you can ask like i'm curious to know is this possible put that in there as well because it prompts them to answer no dear sir no dear madam know yours sincerely keep it extremely short and show a sense of humor i'm just going to quickly read this hey google i'm really excited to apply for the position of ux designer i've been working in ux design for x years and in that time i've worked on more than x projects and focused on artificial intelligence and physical interfaces my colleagues and peers describe me as dedicated animated focused and fun when i bribe them with cupcakes or deliver work early they also describe me as awesome you can view my portfolio here thanks very much for your time and please let me know if there's any extra info you need that's it it's like three four sentences if you make it an email length they're not going to read it so i tried to make it a little bit funny i tried to make it light and bright and airy and no drama and this would work you're welcome to steal it take it and use it if you need to write a cover letter and social media i strongly suggest that you delete it either keep the account but make it all completely private there is no news um that is good news so you might say something that gets 80 of the world on your side but 20 offside you might have a photo of you that you know was um ingest but somebody takes offense to that i remember once um one of my talks i said why would you do that the job's gonna be stressful and you'll lose all your hair and go bald and i really offended someone who had alopecia and was going bald so and i'm going bald so i was like but it was just me making fun of myself but i also offended someone by accident so no news is good news just leave it blank empty they're not going to say well i would have hired her but her twitter feed's blank you know they're not going to say that if you meet all of the criteria the twitter feed is the thing they check to find out reasons not to hire you and they will find something so just remove it instagram twitter and all your social media so we've done a quick view on design and iterate so quickly going to deliver add the questions though if you had questions about that process of design because we'll cover them but i want to make sure i can get through everything now it's time to apply for the job and interview for the job and deal with the design challenge so quickly applying for the job do not click apply now unless you're out of options try to get internally referred or go through a headhunter or a recruiter that you know or somebody internal who can recommend you you can add sources talent or recruiters or linkedin contacts now don't do it before when you weren't ready what will happen is as you add them you do the generic ad you don't type a message you just say add contact and linkedin will add them they usually always say yes and at that time they will check out your profile they will probably look at it and that's your moment to shine you've set it up ready to go it's almost like it's made for them so this is the moment to do that when you're ready to apply and what might happen is you don't actually have to apply the talent person or saucer will reach out to you and say hey andrew i saw that you added me to linkedin we've got a position going it might be suitable for you and then they've reached out to you which changes the power dynamic from you being a desperate candidate to being someone they discovered which is much more in line with their objective to discover talent and bring them in rather than accept the application of a desperate andrew after they've added you maybe wait a day if you haven't heard from them or two and then send them an email and that's where you write that cover letter that's where you contact them and say hey i saw your ad it was for this position i have this question and here's a little bit about me and the question should be real because if you ask them the question they will answer it but if you don't ask a question they have no reason to reply so try to ask a question that's specific to the role that you actually do want to know the answer to and how to handle no reply um don't get angry if there's no reply don't get mad don't send them another email where you're mad and don't try to get even don't post about them on linkedin or social media just let it go for a little while and then you can message them again a few days later and say words to the effect of hey mary bumping this email in case it got lost in the chaos looking forward to hearing from you andrew that's it that's it no just emailing you to hope that no word just just hey mary bumping this email in case it got lost in the chaos what i did there is i gave her an excuse for being negligent that she is now able to take up and reply to without having to be the bad guy you don't want to make her feel bad or he or she or anyone feel bad you just want to tell them hey i'm just letting you know that i haven't heard back from you but it's completely okay because i know you're probably crazy busy and then they're going to say yeah i am crazy busy and he understands me i'm going to reach out to him or her or whoever and how to handle early rejection so i was rejected by google after an internal referral so here's the email a googler recently referred you for this position we have other candidates already in the process they're stronger match for the current open positions we'll continue to use our database and match you now i would have thought that that was a rejection right because we get these all the time but it wasn't i replied and i was super nice thanks for email it's sad that you didn't actually get to see my online portfolio here it is i knew that they didn't see it because i checked the analytics maybe if i was writing this today i would maybe tone that down just a little bit more but i was young and sprightly i'm user experience designer who can do this this and this and this and this seems to be sought after in the field please feel free to get back in touch with me should any position come available i'd be open to positions in other parts of the world now she replied with the that she reviewed the portfolio and now look here's the question when would you be able to start and what's your eligibility to work in the united states bam i mean so i was rejected and i turned it around into an offer essentially to go to the next step and that's what happened so she referred me through to the recruiter the recruiter had the call i made her an ally and then on i went if you get through all of these steps the hard part's over it's now time to interview the hard part is over you have got the job essentially now you just need to not screw it up and not make simple easy mistakes so interviewing for the job is certainly part of the rubik's cube solving process and you can do it so research refresh check out the company make sure that you know what their mission statement is dress smart casual before the interview behave like a crazy monkey if you raise your arms up in the air and you go oh yeah in the bathroom before the interview it can reduce your cortisol levels by about 15 and you don't stress or sweat as much in the room and you're super chill try it it works i did it in the buff don't get caught because it's a little bit nuts but try it arrive 10 minutes early at least do not be late ever ever ever ever ever do not be late the first 30 seconds when you meet that first interview in the room and maybe now zoom is the most crucial there was a study done by mit where they found that during that time they make their mind up about you and spend the rest of the interview trying to confirm that bias that they've thought of as they met you shake their hands firmly if you are in a corona enabled place if not do an elbow bump that maybe doesn't involve an injury or if it's over zoom wave and smile and make a very warm and open connection even if you're having a bad day just wave and smile hi mary hi hi and it's hard for that person to not connect with you um oh just a quick thing about shaking hands if you are able to meet someone in person then it is a post corona world when you shake their hand say their name back to them so as you're shaking their hand hi mary nice to meet you when you're touching someone and you say their name it's highly likely they will never forget your name be yourself don't pretend to be somebody else but still try to mirror the interviewer's energy if they're a bit demure you'd be a bit to me or if they're a bit excited you'd be a bit excited and be prepared for star questions so they're the situation task action results tell me about a time when a product was launched that wasn't representative of what you worked on well there was a situation and my job was to do this so i took this action and here's what happened you obviously draw the question out but that's the way that you answer all questions even if the question wasn't framed as a star question practice making these star answers and record yourself talking to a camera and giving them until you can make them sound natural treat everyone as an equal and don't be a douche even if you are a douche don't be one in the interview room which was something i struggled with because i came across as too confident and i interviewed at skype once and they thought i was a douche and they told me that we thought you were being too arrogant so i took that feedback on board and had to figure out a way to pretend not to be so that i could get a job so remember the personas as you meet each of these people their objective is slightly different their knowledge of design is slightly different and what they do and what they want from you is slightly different so a few quick tips sources they don't understand design they want to pretend that they do because they don't like to be made a fool of they're itching to reject you they want to hear those buzzwords and they want to say that you are a viable candidate to the recruiter when they pass you on recruiter tips internal recruiters they don't necessarily understand design either they're a little bit more versed with the buzzwords but they try they act nice and friendly but really they're squinting at you trying to figure out how to measure you to see if you will be successful or not because they don't want to pass you forward if you're going to be a dad or embarrass them they want to assess your experience level but it doesn't necessarily need to match up in years it needs to match up in capability their reputation is on the line if they recommend you as a dud because you're wasting all of those interviewers time for nothing and you want to make them an ally because they will remember you and they won't stay at that company for long so you might be rejected now for reasons outside of your control somebody else was a shoe-in or the the boss's son was getting the job and you were rejected and the recruiter might think man andrew was great i really liked him i want him to get a job and then next time they find out that there's a position open for a ux designer they're like i know just the person and then they reach out to you on linkedin from their new company and you're in because although you were rejected you made them an ally you treated them with respect so just quickly on interviewers interviewers technically do understand design not necessarily at your level but they probably do because they're there to measure your capabilities really and they care about design they're busy and maybe tired and they're losing critical time by sitting with you so be respectful of that they care about the company they want cool colleagues they can make a tough call they can say no i really want andrew he's great i know he didn't interview well on that day but it was his birthday or whatever it is and they will fight for you if they can if they have a gut feeling that you're the one they will fight for you if you make that warm connection with them in the meeting or the room they can be on your side or they are on your side okay just lastly i'm gonna quickly power through design challenges so we don't run out of too much time real world design challenges could be a trap so if they ask you to work on their real product they're probably just getting you to do ux design work for free so if they ask you upfront to do this just don't go for the job it's probably a dud they want to measure not how good you are drawing a box on a whiteboard they want to measure how you think they want to see how your brain decouples a problem and puts it into pieces in front of them pieces that can be resolved individually so that you can solve the problem so make sure you clarify details before jumping into solutions mode and you can spend half the design challenge time just nailing down assumptions doing some clustering exercises getting the words from them that matter about the problem so that the last step of solving the problem could actually be super easy and they want to have fun so like you're playing make believe here like kids in in preschool you can have fun with them you can make a crazy hypotheticals start drawing immediately you're a designer after all they want to see that your bias to action is to draw set expectations look i'm not a very good artist but i'm really good at solving problems under the hood so let's draw some diagrams rather than interfaces confirm with them the knowns and unknowns like how much time do we have how many customers are already in this product world process is more important than making it pretty if you make a beautiful little wireframe on the whiteboard that doesn't solve any problems you will fail the design challenge if you create a diagram that explains the nature of the problem so much so that you can solve the problem with a sentence that would then lead to an interface you're much more likely to succeed think out loud tell them what you're thinking you're allowed to they want to hear what you're thinking if you say nothing they'll think you're thinking nothing try not to jump into the interface straight away and i want to just show you an example i didn't draw this but my design challenge of amazon was to create a hoverboard company and i pretty much did this i made a whiteboard filled with diagrams of arrows point mine was a little bit more structured but it was essentially a big diagram of the flow of the product and at the end we had 10 minutes left and the interviewer said andrew i'm really worried we've run out of time you haven't yet drawn the interface and it was a hoverboard company so hypothetical right there's no hoverboards in the world and i had to come up with the interface and the name in the last 10 minutes and because i had nailed down the api structure the way that it solves the problem the way the customers interact with it the interface was super easy so i just drew a circle on the board and she said what is that and i said it's like a ring you just put it on your finger and i'm gonna name the company hoverring and you wave the ring on the hoverboard and that's how you unlock it from the base station to you know ride the hoverboard and it kind of blew her mind because she was used to designers creating interfaces mobile versions of interfaces it's not necessarily what needed to happen what needed to happen is they needed to see that i understood the nature of the problem and that the interface was actually not the biggest part of the problem clean the board when you're done that's super important even if they tell you not to lean in to do it and then get told not to do it but if you don't do it they're going to think lazy so just grab the eraser if it's paper and you've done it stack the paper in hand but paper to them and then thank them for their time remember they're taking their time away from their real work to sit with some stranger so mean it when you thank them thank them for their time and for spending the time and having so much fun with me while we play make believe okay i'm gonna power through to quickly get to retrospective so we've delivered in that we've done our application we've interviewed and we've done our design challenge the retrospective is super critical when you're done go to the movies self reflect it's it doesn't matter if you screwed up just try to be grateful for the experience that you had sitting in a room with people who were judging you and this is your moment to really iterate on your own design of yourself of your product to improve it for the next time you'll probably never nail it first go so if you don't do this retrospective and this evolution on yourself you're wasting the opportunity and it was not just a waste of their time but a waste of yours so spend some time to reflect and look at yourself closely be honest with yourself if you failed in certain areas that's completely fine you can work on them so that you won't fail again don't post anything to social media like just interviewed with google and they were so mean to me i hate them you know because then that's over you're never gonna get another job with them or possibly anyone else again because they the next place is going to think that you'll do the same about them if they reject you and don't also put the positive stuff either because it's just no news is good news and try to make peace with it so go to the movies practice mindfulness meditation i really like this lady pema children listen to her one of her audio tapes she's amazing and she always calms me down and makes me feel like the world's not gonna end rejection happens it doesn't matter that you were rejected there is another ux job out there there are many there will be many more the number is increasing and you might actually be dodging a bullet it might have been a shitty job that you didn't like it could have been bad for your career it could have been a horrible manager if they rejected you at that stage after all of those interviews it's highly likely that you weren't actually a right fit for that organization that they could tell that you were too nice or that they could tell that you were too focused on the thing that you did care about and not the thing that they cared about and why would you want to work for some company that makes you feel that way on a day-to-day basis so consider the rejection as a bit of a gift too it's not it's not all bad news and like i said no doesn't mean no forever so the way you handle the rejection gracefully graciously matters because it could mean that later a door would open either with that company again or with somebody who was on that hiring committee who loved you and moves on to a better company that can now recruit you success so the successful steps if you are going to get through to success is money um they want to talk to you about money if anyone asks you about money early do your best not to answer the question say something like look i'm really open to the salary range based on experience i'm not necessarily prepared to lock myself down to an amount now but i can tell you that i'm not the kind of candidate who will go through this whole process only to then pull the plug because of some money so for me what's most important is the project the people the product and the money is the bit that is the least important now that's not true right because money matters but it's one of those things you it's like you can't talk about it without freaking everyone out they will still keep asking you about the money because they they do want to worry about it but just be gracious and say look you know what what do you think's fair what's this fair salary range and then just try to try to be permeable and not too black and white about the money offer letters will come if you're successful and you've gotten through this process the offer letter will have the salary range or the amount that's how i found out how much money i was going to earn at google which was it was in a letter when i finally got offered the job that was the first moment i found out what my salary would be that's not necessarily representative of all companies but it's it's heading in that direction which is if you're too hard and fast about the money up front they might think that that's the only thing you care about which is sad but unfortunately it's true background checks is a big thing don't lie about your date ranges because they will come back to bite you and the whole thing could be broken down because of a silly mistake so before you go through make sure in part of your design your cv and design your folio you get all your dates lined up because they will depending on the company want to verify that it's true it is better to be truthful and have worked for a company less time than to pad it out and then have them find out that you lied after all of this work because you will probably be rejected for lying more than being rejected for having one month too few you know work hours assigned to a company so just be honest to the day if you can and then lastly onboarding yeah same thing applies in the first week of work so all of the tips that i've just described to you the interview sort of bleeds into that first week a bit because that's their moment to check is this person actually who we thought they were from the interview so i want you to be able to be yourselves in the office but just be careful that first week or first four weeks try to not ruffle too many feathers and try to be a bit more like you're in the interview open honest maybe but uh bright and warm rather than angry about the you know inhumanity of it all that the product is so crap and that the the engineering team keeps letting you know don't don't be too quick to turn into an angry uxl like like me um okay now just with success i just want to quickly show you something really troubled me today so for my rejection slide i found neo dodging a bullet and then for success i was like i want a woman to be my success image so i googled women success and this is what came up so i mean it for fun go to google and try to find an image of success and women that is not sexist with somebody riding a very phallic looking arrow or a woman pretending to be a man i'm so sorry that there are no amazing images of successful women okay remember your career is your own project it is a ux project you can apply a formula to it to get through what seems like an impossible set of tasks the formula will save you and don't wait for permission to get started don't wait for an email back from me telling you that you're on the right track you can make your own mind up get the feedback that you need from your peers and customers and users but don't wait for permission to get started because it is entirely in your hands if i can do it as that little farm boy with no education who failed maths and art then you absolutely can especially with the tools available to you today tools that are free and tools that are paid that are amazing so i just want to say thank you so much for your time i'm going to post this on youtube but there'll be other content coming up soon and if you have any questions as always feel free to reach out to me on linkedin or email me and i i do do my best to reply and i'm really grateful for your time hey it's editing andrew again i wanted to just say thanks one more time for getting all the way to the end of this video i'm sorry it cut off so abruptly but that's because we made another video for all of the questions and answers again that link is in the description below thanks so much let me know if you want more content like this ux videos videos about jobs just like and subscribe and leave a comment i read them all thanks bye

Channel: Andrew Doherty

Views: 107,411

Keywords: ux, design, ux interview, design interview, google, google interview, amazon interview, product design, interview tips, interview steps, design challenge, google ux design interview, ux design interview tips

Id: ccQJZcTaRyE

Length: 63min 57sec (3837 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020