I Became a UI/UX Designer in 8 Months! (self-taught, no degree, no bootcamps)

i can finally say i found my dream job hi they call me blaze and i'm a ui ux designer at a top consulting firm and i love every second of it but before i got here i didn't have any real experience with it and i couldn't afford to go to school i was mostly a self-taught guy who liked to learn a lot of different skills but i wasn't really sure what i wanted to do and then i discovered ui ux design if you're like me and i suspect that many of you are i'm going to share with you how i did it no tricks no gimmicks no student loans all of it step by step now i do want to keep this on the shorter side for your sake but i also want to tell you about the mistakes i made on my journey so i'm going to keep it to only the essentials in this video because i don't want to waste your time and i want you to get started so let me share a little bit with you about my background so you have some context for my skill level when i did this i have an associate's degree in general studies when i was going to learn some things about graphic design that was very long time ago like 10 years ago and to be honest it didn't really help me all that much but still i'm sure seeing an associate's degree on any job application was probably pretty helpful i spent the next many years trying to figure out exactly what i wanted to do i taught myself a lot of different skills um countless personal projects most of which never got finished i'm pretty good with photoshop and programs like that i wouldn't say i'm like a true expert but you know i could hold my own i know how to google things for complex things but you know i was still looking for what i could do long term so i could stop jumping from job to job of course eventually i found out about uyux design and that stuck with me so you know that's my experience that's my background um again i don't have a degree you know if this is you know sounds like you i want to show you exactly what i did to get there okay so the first step that i'm going to recommend to you is to learn the software it's going to be your primary design tool it's how you're going to take your research and your ideas and turn them into you know visual projects so the first thing that i did was i bought a course on udemy about uiux design and i thought it would teach me everything about it but all it actually did was teach me the software which was adobe xd um to be perfectly honest i could have learned all of that from youtube and probably a whole lot more you know and after all you're gonna learn how the software works so you know not a total waste you could do what i did buy a course on udemy they tend to be more structured and sometimes a little more reliable otherwise youtube would probably be perfectly fine and especially watch the videos that the software companies put out speaking from a professional standpoint adobe xd is where i started and then i taught myself figma which i like a whole lot better but we use adobe xd at my job it's really not that big of a deal just choose the one that you like they all work very similar to each other so like in the future if you had to learn a new one it wouldn't be that difficult okay so again that the first step that i recommend to you is to learn the software you got to get to know uh how to use the tool and you'll be able to start building a portfolio for yourself which is very very important and we're going to talk about that a little bit later okay so before i tell you the second step there here is a very important lesson for you that's going to help you long after you started your career there are two sides to ui ux design there's their user experience research side and then there's the design you know software side of it okay you're gonna meet many people you're gonna meet designers and you're gonna meet employers who only know the software design side of it but you need to learn both if you want to be a great ux designer so my next step for you is this i want you to take these two courses on coursera the first one is the user experience research and design specialization with the university of michigan and if you don't have experience with actual design take the ui ux design specialization with the california institute of the arts going back to my story i'm learning the software right so i'm learning that one side of it but now i need to learn the user experience research side of it i did a ton of research i read tons of articles looked all over youtube watched so many videos looked all over reddit for recommendations i looked at every option i looked at udemy courses youtube courses um college courses and of course boot camps i have a lot to say about this um but i'm going to save it for another day the problem was is that most of these options only seem to teach you the software side of it and again you need to know the user experience research side in my research i found that really a college course was the only way that was going to happen but again college is expensive and then i discovered coursera and this was the best decision i have ever made so to explain corsair is only like 50 a month but they have some kind of i don't know like sort of like scholarship thing where they give it to people for free and it seems like pretty much everybody gets it but the quality of teaching at least in my experience is college level and everything i learned was 100 percent spot on so you know jump on coursera open up an account take those courses get the scholarship so you get it for free do the assignments review your peers put in that work and you'll be well on your way so speaking from a professional standpoint now i credit all of my success to taking those two courses uh the things that i learned enabled me to beat out other job candidates who had degrees and even to this day it's put me ahead of many of the designers that i work with who have more experience than i do in fact i got my first ux job when i was just halfway through the michigan course i'm serious it is that good okay so that's your second step again take those two courses on coursera you've already been learning the software now you'll be learning the other side of the equation so now you'll be learning a way that will make you a very well-rounded designer this is the third step that i recommend for you triple your assignments so for every assignment that you get at the very least in the university of michigan course add two more so going back to my story for a quick second i've always been a self-taught person okay and i've always realized this if i'm going to do it without a degree then i need to work twice as hard to prove that i know what i'm doing and that's the mindset that you need to have while you're taking these two courses and you'll prove your stuff by building a portfolio but with this recommendation you'll be building your portfolio at the same time that you're taking the course so you'll be saving yourself a lot of time and you'll be cutting down on procrastination for example you'll be doing the elevator assignment so then pick two more design projects to do with those techniques but don't turn them in instead you want to save them and hold on to them and you're going to develop those as you go through the course now some of the assignments in the course may take you an hour or even more than that don't get lazy trust me the experience that you'll get from it will be well worth it so personally what i did is i chose um the elevator assignment i wanted to come up with an interface for a smart mirror and i wanted to develop an app for an electric car and those were the three things that i had in my portfolio when i landed my job so again the step that i recommend to you is to triple your assignments you'll be accomplishing a whole lot in a little you'll be building your portfolio which will allow you to apply for jobs later on you'll be tripling your understanding and your experience and you'll start getting down your own sort of design process so the next thing i want to talk to you about is supplementing your knowledge for each step of the process and you'll know what i mean when you go through the course look up that process online and especially with the nielsen norman group so i was loving everything that i was getting from the course throughout the course they have references from other sources especially the nielsen norman group so i start up looking articles for them too and i realized that i found like like the gold among the silver so to explain these courses are not full-fledged college courses not for 50 a month they're simplified and they're a little bit shortened so if you want the real meat that will boost you from being a good designer to a great designer you need to add on to your knowledge it won't add a lot of time but it will refine what you are learning speaking from my you know professional experience now the articles from places like the nielsen norman group are not just random opinions they're studies that have been done that follow scientific process and so many many times i have used the articles that i found there to improve projects they're working on and in many cases save the projects from failing so that's my recommendation to you supplement your knowledge the course is building a foundation that extra knowledge is building on top of it and you'll be getting the knowledge you'd get probably from a full-fledged college course this is the next step i highly highly recommend to you when you're ready to apply for a job you use a recruiter and if everything goes well your resume will get pushed to the top and this is probably the second best choice i made in my journey so sidebar for a second so you may have been already told that there's ui ux designers flooding the market some might even use this idea to discourage you from becoming a ui ux designer in my opinion yes there are more ui ux designers now but there's also a lot of new ux designer jobs so i think it balances out but the problem is as with i think all job searching how do you get seen how do you get a chance to prove that you know what you're doing alright so to explain usually what you do is you look for a job posting on linkedin you apply for it you fill everything out you fill everything else out again you you know put in your application you wait and then you hope that they call you sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't instead here's what you do you see a job opening on linkedin and then you go look for a company recruiter so what you do is you search the company name and you add the word recruiter and hopefully some recruiters pop up next if you're able to you send them a message you say hi i see that you have job openings at your company for ui ux designers would you mind looking at my resume and my portfolio if everything goes well they'll give their opinion on your resume or even better they'll push it along in the process so this is actually what happened to me a recruiter reached out to me asking me about a different position that i really wasn't a good fit for but i saw they had openings for ux designers so i said you know hey would you mind looking at my resume and lo and behold it worked he got me an interview so this is the next big recommendation i have for you to use a company recruiter you'll be improving your chances of being seen and you're already doing everything the right way you're taking a course while you're learning the software so you're more well-rounded you've been tripping up on your assignments so you're getting more experience more understanding and you're building a decent portfolio so you have something to show off i mean you're ready which brings me to the last step of the journey and that's the interview if you've ever done any research on interviewing for ux jobs no doubt you've heard about the technical nature of the interviews so you've heard about the whiteboard challenges uh explaining your design process you know choosing something from your portfolio it can all sound really intimidating they're gonna test your knowledge and your experience so how do you know when you're ready well this is the point when you know that you could ace that interview and this is the final step uh it really i think it's probably the overarching philosophy of this whole thing don't just know your stuff own it own everything that you learn and you'll have no problem knocking out that interview and starting your career so to explain everything you're doing here is self-taught nobody is forcing you to do this you're going to get out of this process what you put into it if you just run through this course and you do the minimum you'll finish the course but you'll get nowhere and at that interview they will see right through you so you want to make sure that you follow these recommendations and that for each piece in your portfolio you've run through the whole design process if you do this you will have no problem with that interview except for maybe some nerves so in my experience i actually interviewed at two consulting firms and both interview processes were very similar so first there was the screening interview this is just where they want to make sure that you have the job skills that are listed on the job posting so without getting too technical tell about all the skills you have all the processes that you know and you'll do perfectly fine the second time i had an interview with a recruiter which you know was the recruiter i was talking to so they will ask you some more in-depth questions and test your knowledge a little bit they may not be designers themselves but they do have some experience and knowledge of the field that you're going into also your recruiter is there to help you and to be your friend the next order of these two might switch my third interview was with a project manager who was not a designer so he's just there to make sure that you know what you're doing so treat him as if he's a designer explain your process you know feel free to get technical and fourth you'll interview with typically a senior level experience designer so this is when they asked me about my portfolio so i personally i talked about the electric car app that i was working on explained the reason why i did things the way i did them explain my design process and the research i had done beforehand so the first time that i interview with a company i didn't get the job the second time i did get the job so what was the difference so for my first interview i did a lot of research on how to do the interview the advice was good but i relied on that advice way too much the problem was is i wasn't speaking from experience because i hadn't done it yet i had the knowledge but i hadn't owned it yet the second time i'm halfway through the course i've already done three projects i knew exactly what i was doing i had no nerves so that is my final and probably biggest piece of advice to you as you go through this journey don't just know your stuff own it don't treat this process like a checklist i finished the course so i must be a ux designer now own it put into practice triple up your assignments go through the processes if you own it you will have no problem beating that interview because at that moment you will be a ui ux designer okay so let's summarize everything that we talked about again my recommendations from my own experience are number one learn the software number two take those two courses on coursera number three triple your assignments number four supplement your education number five when you're ready to apply use recruiters and number six own the knowledge you'll see with this process very little time and effort is wasted that's because you're capitalizing on momentum that you set you're multitasking but it doesn't feel like multitasking i personally did it in eight months but to be honest you could probably do it in less or it may take you longer which is perfectly fine i also realize this may not work out for everybody but i just know how frustrating it is to want to get somewhere but you have no direction so i'm hoping that at the very least this provides some direction for you if you have any questions or comments or concerns please leave them below in the comments section or you can shoot me an email i am more than happy to assist you with any questions that you have if there's any part of this process that you'd like me to expand a little bit more on let me know i can you know put out a quick video explaining a little bit more otherwise thank you so much for tuning in i am blaze and i hope you well on your ui ux design journey

Channel: Always Calling Me Blaze

Views: 34,667

Keywords: ui, ux, ui design, ui ux design, ux design, user experience, user experience designer, designer, figma, adobe xd, how to, ux interview, ux school, ux college, ui ux design salary, ui ux bootcamp, ui ux jobs, ui ux course, ui ux meaning

Id: x1EBrNY-bqQ

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022