How I Became a 7-Figure UX Designer (With No Experience or Degree) - Part 1

whoa whoa before you skip this part is very important so here's how it all started i when i was 13 years old aspired to become a shaolin monk yes those kung fu ones that break bricks with their heads and then kick down trees but throughout my teenage years i somehow stumbled into ui and ux design i became a lead designer i freelanced and then ultimately started my own ux design agency and between you and i i've generated just shy of four million dollars in ui and ux design work over the last four years so this video is the part one of the entire series of how i got started and how i've made it to where i am today and most importantly with zero experience and degree and you can also as well so make sure to subscribe because i'll be releasing part two and part three later on this year and that's where we will dive deep into the transition from full-time role into full-time freelancing into scaling out the operation into a seven-figure design agency i'll be sharing with you all the behind the scenes the failures the lessons learned and some the glimpses of the success and i'm also going to summarize into three practical tips that you can implement into your very own journey if you're looking to get into ui and ux design oh and by the way if you are looking to improve your very own design portfolio i've got a series and you click the link up there where i review design portfolios from all around the world to help you guys get practical insights that you can implement into your own design portfolio when you're looking for clients or you're looking to land a job so make sure to check it out i also wanted to start this video off by giving you a little bit of context i did not have any pre-existing connections into the design world i did not have a silver spoon fed to me because i grew up in a chinese migrant family in sydney australia and that meant that we had to build everything from the ground up my dad worked three jobs and my mom has been a travel agent for the last 25 years now growing up in the chinese family was hard but more importantly it meant that my parents were strict and also quite traditional in the way that they were raising my sister and i and that led to me binging and watching jack and chad movies growing up as a teenager and that was also probably why i aspired to become a shaolin monk growing up however that's not the point my point is when you lock an asian dude up in his home what does that equal it either means that they're going to become a doctor they're really good at math or they're going to be spending a lot of time playing games and i was the third category i was an asian dude that just loved playing games so in 2006 when i was 14 years old my sister had introduced me to neopets and gunbound these were two very large and popular online games very quickly i became obsessed and addicted to these games and i became so obsessed that i wanted to create a community where i could bring together designers from all around the world to trade talk about games and also meet like-minded people so with a bit of research and a bit of curiosity i researched online to see what can i use to create a forum that is when i stumbled across envision free which was a platform that allowed anyone in the world to create a fully fleshed out forum after a little bit of research i also found that i could put google ads on the forum to make a little bit of side cash when i was 14 years old and that's what i did and that's how i made my very first dollar oh and by the way if you enjoyed this video make sure to gently smash that like button subscribe because i will be releasing two new videos every single week to help you become a legendary designer alright guys back to the video now it's important that you understand that because this led me down a rabbit hole after trying to figure out how can i make money online and researching it on google i came across another forum called digital point which is a internet marketing forum and it still exists today but it doesn't seem to be well maintained and it doesn't seem like something that's worth investing your time into now because i'm sure there are other forums and other websites that you can learn a lot more from in a nutshell this forum was dedicated to internet marketers this is where internet marketers would come together they'd share and talk about seo marketing how to make money online and more importantly there was a sports section on the forum to request designs and because i knew how to use photoshop i found a little bit of joy in fulfilling those design requests so i would do logo designs for five dollars random website templates for around fifty dollars and i was just curious and spending time in learning how can i improve on my design skills and i just kept striving to become better and better and better now in 2009 i was 17 years old and i stumbled across 99 designs and i thought this was nirvana this was the holy grail i'm going to make logo designs i'm going to become a millionaire working from home however little did i know i spent the next six months competing in 23 design contests and winning zero design contest yes i failed miserably and here are some of the designs that i created and to be honest looking back i can sort of see why they didn't really pick my designs but hey i don't think they were that bad let me know in the comments what you think about my very first designs after constant rejections i finally decided to say i'm giving up on these design contests it just wasn't working out for me so i said to myself i should double down on what worked before which was to create a forum put some ads on it make some money get some people to come to the website i knew i was good at that and i knew i had the experience so i doubled down on that route so when i was 17 i launched a site called voidchat.com through research learning and just discovery i found that i could buy a script that had a database of all these flash games i had also learned how to upload this script by ftp onto a host and my website and then i also used some of the design experience i had to craft and design a compelling website the website didn't look great but people found value in it people returned they kept playing flash games on my website and very soon after once again i put some google ads on it and i realized i could start making money from this website the interesting thing was i was obsessed with optimizing how the website would look i would move where the ads were i would make the ads bigger i'd make the ads look like the games itself some of those gray and black hat tricks but i was just young and i was curious and i realized these design decisions would actually make more money and this was important because this helped me understand that you can utilize design in many different ways to really help a business grow now a second website i generated was from a problem that i experienced myself when i was 17 i was still in high school my space if you don't know what my space was was the facebook of the early 2000s and my school iit department had set up a firewall to block all students from accessing their myspace account now i thought to myself how can i bypass this problem so once again i researched i spent some time to find what are solutions that would i could provide to get by these firewalls and i discovered i could buy a proxy script and so i did i bought a proxy script once again uploaded onto my own server and then once again using the design skills i had learnt on my own to create a more compelling and better looking website so then i shared this on reddit i also shared it on dig so d-i-g-dot-com and people started flocking to it i was using the website my friends were using the website at school and then thousands of people were using the website as well to bypass firewalls here's an interesting insight most of the traffic which was hundreds of thousands of people every single month came from russia i don't know what they were doing but it seems like they were trying to bypass and do something cheeky now another little side project that i worked on was when facebook started to rise when facebook started to rise more and more people would use the product and then zynga also appeared zynga was the company that created farmville and mafia wars these were extremely viral games that millions hundreds of millions of people were using and as a gamer myself i realized well gamers love cheats right so what can i do to capitalize on this opportunity so that is when i decided i'm going to create a facebook app i'm going to collect all the cheats for all the zinger games like farmville mafia wars and all the good ones put it behind an app and for anyone that wants to access it they need to complete a survey where i get paid one to two dollars for every entry oh and here are some of the earnings from one month in 2010 for this app and you can see on the 10th i had actually made five thousand dollars in one day it's insane but it didn't happen right away it was all about optimizing and finding clever ways to make this viral app become more viral and more appealing and i was forced to make better design decisions to make it more trustworthy make it more compelling to convince people that hey when you get into this app there are actually cheats and very early on when i was just exploring and building side projects i was forced to make all these design decisions that really helped me build a fundamental understanding that design is not just about the visual aspect it's about how you communicate how do you build trust how to write compelling copywriting how do you social proof it how do i tell farmville players that their fundamental friends have also accessed it so these were the decisions that i had to make and i was only 17 years old so after spending a couple of years in building websites making money from them and advertising them i realized i became a lot more mindful and a lot more conscious about the design decisions that were making i became a lot more strategic and very tactical so that the products that i was designing the websites that i was designing were great and also garnering results in 2011 i was 19 years old and i finally thought to myself i'm getting a little bit tired of just running websites and making a quick dollar i want to build something a little bit more sustainable but then also more meaningful in terms of the work that i was doing so that is when i decided to actually jump out and try to get a full-time role with zero industry experience and degree in design now the journey to landing my first design job it's not revolutionary i didn't do anything special now before i decided to go and apply for jobs i knew for a fact that companies are not stupid enough to just hire someone that they don't know with a crappy profile that's not how the world works businesses that are looking to hire are obviously run by smart people who know how to make money so they need to when they meet me they need to feel confident that if they're gonna pay me let's say forty thousand dollars a year that i'm actually able to help them make forty thousand dollars back and more in the years to come i am an asset and they are investing in me so before i even decided to apply for jobs i spent weeks building and designing my very own design portfolio i didn't know how to code from scratch but i threw myself in the deep end and i just taught myself how to write html css and to this day i still don't know how to write javascript in a very advanced way but i still force myself to learn how to write some jobs now let me actually show you the portfolio that i use to land three full-time roles as a ui and ux designer with zero industry experience or degree in design so here we go here is the design that i had actually designed and built from scratch you can see i learned a little bit of javascript to really create these interactive and interesting concepts and websites to really appeal to the person who was going to hire me it's nothing fancy it is literally two images on top of each other one is blurred with photoshop and one's the original and all i had to i had to learn how to use javascript to hover on this image and make it show the blurred version these things aren't rocket science and this is what i want to express is if you're looking for a job you have to put your best foot forward like you just have to put in the hard work there's no way and no shortcuts around it so i actually put together a portfolio as well you can see not all the projects i worked on were even web or ui design this was a wordpress template this i don't even remember what it was but it's social media branding this was a side project i was working on that never went live but at least i had things to show i also designed a conceptual app for finding parking spots back in 2011 i designed multiple templates like the portfolio that i had wasn't rocket science or it wasn't anything amazing but you can see that i actually had a story to tell when i went into my interviews i told them about the projects that i worked on i was passionate about them i also learned how to design and code and to a business that is compelling they're thinking about okay you're a junior designer and you're gonna probably charge me forty thousand dollars a year i had enough confidence from them that i was able to generate that much that amount of money and more for their business because i had the perseverance i had the grit and i also was able to learn things on my own i didn't need to be hand-holded and didn't need to go out and just be guided on what's the next step what do i need to do i just got myself out there i learned i tried experimented and i was able to create a portfolio that was compelling so when i had the portfolio ready i went to seek.com.eu and i was browsing through jobs and i was pretty excited i didn't really care about what the job was going to be i just wanted to get a full-time role so i could learn from all the smart people around me now the first job i had was a 40 000 salary job at a random it distributing software company to be honest i don't know what i was doing there i was managing random websites so i actually decided to leave fairly quickly i then moved on to an agency at a 60 000 salary and the only way that i was able to position myself into that company was by showing them all the side projects that i've worked on how i turned an idea into a profitable website how i learned how to code learn how to design learn how to create cool little effects on my website all on my own and that is the only way that i was able to get myself in the door because i had no industry experience or even a degree i just had a website and i didn't even have a cv however the culture was a little bit cut throat as most agencies were back in the days and some of the agencies still are so i actually decided to move on and try to find a different role at this time i had only three months of industry experience i didn't stay long at these companies because i just didn't feel like i fit in then the third role that i stayed for a year and a half was freelancer.com no i was not a freelancer on the platform i was actually a designer an in-house designer for the business that would design the features and the platform for one of the world's largest freelancing marketplaces now at the time freelancer.com had millions of users that were making millions of revenue every single year and you might be thinking how did someone with no degree or no industry experience actually get their foot in the door at a 70 000 salary well once again i used the side projects that i had worked on to leverage my way in i was able to walk them through with passion and with clarity and confidence that i was able to turn just an idea into a website i designed and built and not only that i was able to get it out into the world i was able to get people to the website and more importantly and ultimately i was able to generate revenue and that is what businesses want even when you're a junior designer senior designer or whatever it might be businesses will see you as an asset and they will see that if we pay you x amount every single year let's say 70 000 can you make us a hundred thousand dollars back with the work that you produce can you make us a hundred and forty 000 and if they can assess on how much more money you can make than your salary then you become highly demanded so if i had to summarize everything into three tips practical tips that you can implement into your own journey and if you're looking for a ui ux design role what can you do is first i had a very clear goal i wasn't a graphic designer logo designer visual designer illustrator ui ux web design i wasn't the more i was a ui ux designer that had a passion for building websites and apps that made money and a lot of businesses resonate with that because they're in business because they want to make more money so if i am a ui ux designer and i also have a passion in making money with the websites that i build then it resonates with exactly what they want if i was compared to another ui ux designer who didn't really have experience in making money through websites then they're just a designer i was just lucky that the passions and my interest aligned with businesses but i also niched down i knew exactly what i wanted and businesses love it when their employees and their team members know exactly what they want and they're actually good at it and they have the experience and the work to back their claim so your very first thing is niche down and know exactly what you want the second thing is i put effort into my portfolio just like everyone else just like you just like any other designer in this world we all start from nothing when all of us know nothing about design and we know nothing about code but i spent weeks and months learning how to code and learning how to design my very own design portfolio and then if i and when i didn't have enough work to put into the actual portfolio i created work i made websites and then i launched it and i would actually get some traction from it so when i walked into an interview i actually had something to say trust me i burnt the midnight oil i spent weeks sleepless nights just trying to figure out how to create that parallax blurry effect with jquery it was not easy and i was just in the same boat as you not knowing anything as well so you need to put in the extra work and don't go applying for jobs if your portfolio looks sloppy because you're just gonna make yourself feel demotivated you're just gonna get rejected and you need to make sure that you're putting your best foot forward i also want to reiterate that when i applied for these jobs back in those days which sounds very long ago which was actually 10 years ago there was no one teaching ui in ux design no one taught you how to build a portfolio everything was all from trial and error nowadays you are overwhelmed with information websites guides tutorials you can learn everything that you need to learn with a click of a button so there is no excuse that the work that you're producing and the portfolio that you're put forwarding to companies is sloppy because you have all the answers around you i'm creating this video to help you get there as well so hopefully this gives you no excuse no more excuses double down work hard and put in the effort so you can achieve the job or the client that you want to achieve and the third and most important thing is you have to be passionate about what you do seriously people can see it right through you and your portfolio if you are just trying to get into ui ux design because you've heard about it and it's a quick way to make some money you're not going to get quite far you need to be genuinely passionate about what you do you need to be able to showcase that when i went into the interviews i could sit there for hours talking about the failures the lessons learned what did i do when something didn't work how did i learn how to build a website i was so passionate about what i did that people could see right into that and even though i didn't have any industry experience or even a degree people were highly demanding my skill sets they wanted me to work for their companies because i was a variable asset and that is how you need to see this as well ui ux design is not just a job it's like a lifestyle like there are designers all over twitter and turning ui and ux design into like an absolute lifestyle it's a train of thought it's a mindset it's a movement it's a care for the customer it's all this good stuff and you need to live and breathe so hopefully in this video you found inspiration guidance or even practical tips that you can implement into your very own process to really elevate yourself moving forward because this entire youtube channel i'll be releasing two videos every single week to help you become a legendary designer also if you are new to ui and ux design or you want to get into it if you want to learn one of the most popular ui design tools i've got a free crash course right up there smash that button and i'll take you to a series of videos about how to use figma and if you have any sort of questions about ui and ux could be your career could be tactical processes whatever it might be let me know in the comments below and i will read every single comment and i will also reply to every single comment that's it for this video guys hope you enjoyed this video and make sure if you enjoyed it gently smash that like button and subscribe to get all the updates of new videos coming out every single week i will see you in another video very soon [Music] you

Channel: Mizko

Views: 42,172

Keywords: how to become a ux designer with no experience, how to become a ui designer with no experience, become a ux designer from scratch, how long does it take to become a ux designer, how to become a ux designer, how to become a ux designer from scratch for beginners, ux designer for beginners, become a ui/ux designer everything you need to know, become ux designer, how to become a freelance ux designer, how to become a ui ux designer, how to become a ui designer

Id: AAWFbwzV7Zk

Length: 21min 11sec (1271 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021