How to become a UX designer | 2023 Roadmap

what's up guys welcome back if you're new to my channel hi I'm Morgan I make videos talking about my career change to ux design how you can change your career to ux design as well and the pain of existence so if that kind of content interests you make sure to hit subscribe so I'm trying to just sit down and film videos I feel like I keep waiting for the perfect time to film but I felt like garbage since spring has hit and you know I'm like oh I'll wait till like there's better lighting or I'll wait till I feel better or whatever and I just need to sit down and make these videos because like I'll never post anything otherwise so I feel like garbage today sorry if I'm low energy but like I won't post anything if I wait until I feel good so chugging coffee at 3 P.M for you guys so I thought that it would be helpful to make a 2023 road map to become a ux designer this is not a road map to learn ux design I can make a video about that if you find that helpful let me know in the comments but I just want to make that clear that this is to talk about how to actually transition careers not so much about learning ux design itself so anyway let's just jump right into it I'm going to start with how you actually get started and I've said this before and a lot of people don't want to do this but it's actually a really important step is that you need to understand your why you need to understand why you're switching careers to ux design why ux design specifically because there's so many different design career paths or ux career paths or product career paths you've got to make sure you're going down the right one so take the time to set up meetings with uxers or message them on LinkedIn I get people messaging me on LinkedIn all the time I usually don't have time to have a call with people but I will respond to their questions through chat obviously watch YouTube videos like days in the Life uh I have some videos talking about what it's actually like being a ux designer do what you can to understand what you actually want out of a ux design career because it would suck to be halfway through your journey and realize that you went down the wrong path so do not skip this step before you start learning you also need to sit down with yourself or your family or your significant other whatever and understand what your boundaries are and what you are willing to or not willing to do in order to get a ux design job and what I mean by this is you need to understand are you willing to take a pay cut maybe you're really established in your career and you're technically going to be starting something new and at least for the time being there's a possibility you might need to take a pay cut a lot of people switch careers to ux for a pay increase uh which it has a lot of potential to do but you know you you need to understand that for yourself and your own personal situation something else is a lot of Junior positions are in person now uh are you willing to go into the office at least until a remote role comes along are you willing to relocate these are things that you really need to decide uh for yourself and the people around you you also need to really draw the boundaries and understand what your financial situation is I've seen people quit their full-time jobs when they were not financially prepared to and try to switch careers and it took longer than they expected and that's when the Panic sits in so those are all things that you really really really need to sit down dissect and understand so once you're positive that ux design is the right career path for you you can start determining how you want to learn the most common ways are self-learning boot camps and higher education what's right for you depends on your personal learning style and your personal situation self-learning is obviously ideal because generally it's free and you can do it on your own time so if you want to keep your full-time job you can learn ux by yourself on the side that's great but I personally don't have the discipline to do that I get analysis paralysis really easily and I don't have the ability to really stick to a syllabus and move forward I feel like I need to learn every little thing about a topic so that's why I chose to do a boot camp boot camps are super common nowadays like I said that's how I transition careers the upside is that it's generally cheaper than higher education and it takes a lot less time because it's focused on a single topic in this case ux design but then the problem is that you get the field and Market just flooded with identical applicants because you're all doing the same projects and learning the same thing so you'll have the same answers to the same questions we do decide to go down the boot camp path I do have a one thousand dollar discount for springboard if you use the link in my description and code Morgan ux so if that interests you make sure to check them out higher education is something that I really only recommend to current students or people who are about to become students it's really expensive uh it's like if you're already in the career field you have some years under your belt I would probably just go self-learning or boot camp through whatever learning process you choose you should learn about the following things Discovery so you need to understand what is the problem or opportunity ux research analysis information architecture how to use design tools to start designing low and mid Fidelity designs usability testing refinement High Fidelity designs and developer handoff this is a general outline there are other things that you should be learning about if you're going to do something like a boot camp or higher education that's just generally the base basics of what you should be learning to become a ux designer and the learning does not stop just because you graduate a boot camp or you finish one project you should be continuously working on projects not just to enhance your skills and learn but to set yourself apart so I really recommend that people reach out to local businesses maybe your friend owns a business or they're an independent contractor and they need a website someone you know has a great app idea and so you design for them you've got to know someone you know and if that's not the case you don't have anybody who has any ideas or any businesses or anything like that you can always do solo projects this is something that I did um you can go on uxchallenge.com and they will have problems that need solving you can ask chat gbt you can also go on it's this for that.com which is it'll say something like it's an Airbnb for but for weddings or something like that um and just to come up with ideas if you don't see a problem like in front of you in real life that's what I really like doing is I find problems it's usually like financial problems um and I work on a project to solve whatever problem there is so uh really look around you uh and if you're trying to solve a problem that occurs in your real life that makes for a much more passionate and well thought out project but the key here is to work on the project as if it's actually going to be real like as if you're actually going to hand it off to developers or you're going to develop it yourself that's what's most important don't have it be a fluffy project where all the data is perfect and you don't run into any problems make it real that's really really important I've looked at a lot of Junior ux profiles and I really recommend reading ux strategy by Jamie Levy it'll help you with all of the like non-design parts of ux it talks about Discovery research analysis all of that kind of stuff it's a great book easy read highly recommend it so the last step before you actually start applying for jobs is making sure that you have all of your materials ready you're going to need a resume a portfolio with your case studies a portfolio presentation and I really recommend that you have a LinkedIn profile so don't spend a ton of time working on your portfolio site hiring managers care about your case studies not the actual website they might want to learn a little bit more about you but you can do that on your LinkedIn profile or something like that you can put it on your or behance profile I really recommend just not doing a portfolio site altogether when you're first starting out because it's just so easy to get lost in the details it's something unnecessary that I wasted so much time on when I should have been applying for jobs I probably would have found the jobs sooner if I hadn't done that I'm really happy with where I am now so no regrets I would recommend to you to do like a behance profile where it's just your case studies you can have a little about you section and it's your profile picture and everything it'll save you a lot of time it'll take a lot of stress off so I really recommend doing that unless you know you're unlike me and you don't overthink and you're able to just throw something together really quickly the same thing goes for resumes I find that designers including myself uh in the past we really over design our resumes and that can be a problem people will often make resumes in figma and make them super fancy if you're just starting out I really recommend just go into word or Google Docs make a simple resume you know you can put a little color in there and make it look nice but if you over design not only is that a huge chunk of your time and something that you might be using as an excuse to procrastinate um which is what I did and still kind of do but you could actually be negatively impacting your ability to make it through ATS uh I think it stands for applicant tracking system it's something that recruiters and HR people use to scan resumes and they look for like keywords and stuff you could be messing things up because the layout is weird because you know you try to be all creative with it maybe you added like icons and stuff like that so uh just avoid over designing your resume it's not a great use of your time if you don't have any uh design experience you can always put down that you're a freelancer if you had the ability to work with small businesses or bring your friends app idea to life or whatever it might be because regardless of if that business or person used your designs you still did the work so just describe what you did and how it impacted the business or the person you could also do a design project section that's what I did and that just puts a little bit more like design experience on your resume if you don't have any official in-house experience for your portfolio presentation select two to three projects that you're proud of make a general presentation highlighting key moments and you know talking about the story of those projects and then when you actually start going through the interview process and they say hey we want to see some of your work make sure to ask them or the recruiter or whoever like what are you trying to get out of the portfolio presentation just so I know how to tailor it and then you edit make a copy of the presentation and then edit it specifically for that company and those people so like for example for my interview they wanted to see how I worked in a team and how I affected outcomes which made me panic because I didn't ever work in a team or have a real design job so I had to really work to tailor my story to show my skills and like what outcomes I would look for and things like that I have a whole video on my portfolio presentation if you want to watch that please don't forget about LinkedIn it is really important to have a digital footprint nowadays recruiters live on LinkedIn it's really a good idea to be active on LinkedIn have your portfolio site or behance profile connected to your profile make sure to interact with other designers recruiters companies that you want to work with really take advantage of LinkedIn once you have some projects under your belt you can start applying I would take any interview that you can get just because it's really good to get the interviewing experience because if you're coming from a different field questions are going to be different and it's going to be difficult I had a lot of problems with memorizing answers like they would ask me what my design process is and I would memorize it and it's so embarrassing when you forget yeah it was really bad so it's important to get that interviewing experience stay calm treat things like a conversation please don't memorize answers and throughout this process you might find that you're drawn to a certain industry took a few months for me to realize that I was really drawn to the fintech industry and so I started working on a solo project solving a financial problem in my life and my friends lives and I worked really really hard on that because it was an issue that I cared about I treated it like it was going to be developed I put money into it and now I work for a financial services company one of the biggest in the world so worked out if you find an industry that you're drawn to or a certain part of ux that you're drawn to start to focus on that in your solo projects treat the job hunting process like you're a ux designer everything is a learning opportunity learn iterate revise get feedback you know don't just stay idle and do the same thing over and over again follow up see what you could have done differently if you don't get a job offer revise your resume revise your portfolio continue to add projects like don't stop For the Love of All That is Holy do not stop doing projects just because you started applying for jobs also please don't get analysis paralysis don't fall down the course rabbit hole if you're idle while you're job hunting work on projects recruiters and hiring managers do not care about the certifications that you get work on projects that is what they care about it's all about applied knowledge ideally as you're going through the job hunting process you'd see an uptick in your skills or the Fidelity of your projects it's not the same thing over and over again you're learning from your mistakes um it would even I would honestly even like to see that in somebody's case study if they don't have any working experience being like well in a previous project say you decided to do a second version of a previous case study like the portfolio review that I did for Mel she had a great idea and I would love to see a second case study of her second iteration of that project shout out to you Mel so something to think about like really try and continuously improve your skills not your certifications so that is my 2023 roadmap on how to become a ux designer I'm not gonna lie the the Market's really saturated right now and it's going to be difficult to get a junior ux position not only are they pretty scarce anybody looking for less than like three years of experience but there's like no remote ones that I've seen recently it's very rare to find a remote Junior ux position a lot of them are in major cities for bigger companies um and I'm watching a lot of people struggle to find the job one because of the back to office thing where people aren't willing to go in they want remote jobs only but the pandemic really spawned a lot of hopeful uxers I'm not saying that you can't get a job obviously I believe that you can get a job I'm just saying that it's going to be really difficult it took me six months during a much less saturated time when there were a lot of remote roles so I don't know how I would do today if I was just getting into ux so I'm not trying to tell you that with this road map you'll get a job in two weeks I am going to tell you that if you sit idle and just keep applying with the same resume don't continuously work on your projects you're more than likely not going to get a job work on projects practice your interviewing skills treat the process like a ux designer do not get caught up in the little things like designing your portfolio or your resume or taking a bunch of courses I wish you the best of luck you've got this thank you guys so much for watching don't forget about the thousand dollars off of a springboard boot camp that is in the description use code Morgan ux and I will see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: Morgan UX

Views: 2,172

Keywords:

Id: o8BPsCOXd4k

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023