This is awesome information. Thanks a lot, and would love to hear more of that info you mentioned.
So finally getting around to this…
I can cover some obvious topics, such as building a portfolio, what the day-to-day is like, and some tools and tricks of the trade. Also what I DON'T like about the job.
First and foremost, like I mentioned in my earlier post, the field of "UX design" has taken many shapes and forms over the past two decades. If you look at job listings, you will see job titles such as "UX Designer", "Product Designer", "UI Designer", "Web Designer", "Interaction Designer". All of these fields do the same spirit of job, like 80% of the same job. UI Designers might be more screen/wireframe workhouses, and product designers dabble more into the "product" (read: business) side of design. But, effectively, they all have like 80% of the same job functions. Making wireframes and prototypes while utilizing best practices and research. In my last job search, I turned down some second round interviews just because I had a feeling I was going to be a screen monkey. Cranking out design solutions that have already been designed by committee, with little leg room to change or pivot. That's definitely a thing that can happen.
In my last role, my official title was a "UX Designer", where 80% of my time was doing screen related work, and the remaining 20% was other research/product related tasks. I reported up to a design lead, and on our team we had two dedicated researchers, and two dedicated web analytics people. This was the "in-house agency" I described. I think other people ITT have mentioned this in passing, but there are different types of teams that typically employ designers. You might see articles or blogs by people that cover "Where should I work? Startup, agency or enterprise?" Or something like that. They all have different implications but the label themselves is not always a strong indicator of the type of team you might be working in
Startups are small, and you might be one of a handful of designers, depending on the stage of the startup. Chances are you will be doing a lot, and will report up to somebody who's like one or two steps away from a CTO/CIO. These are very much trial-by-fire from what I gather, but I can't give a recommendation cause I've never worked at one.
Agencies are like dedicated web development and/or design firms. They usually solicit work from other companies who need to do something like a major redesign or mobile app and they don't have the internal resources to do such a thing. Agency work is also very fast-paced, because everything is timeline + cost driven. You most likely won't have a lot of time to do any research or testing because of the aforementioned. But like I mentioned before, agencies are a great way to cut your teeth on a lot of projects. I worked at what I described as an "in house agency" and that's because we didn't have traditional product teams, but we functioned like an agency. Our budget came from our internal clients in the business, and they paid for our work and told us what they wanted to build. The difference here is that we had little say on the direction of the various initiatives because the larger company wasn't structured that way (although it was moving towards that when I left). But, we did sit on-site at their headquarters, so we had a lot more proximity to our clients than a typical external agency who might be several states away.
And then there are enterprise environments, where you most likely sit on a product team that supports 1+ products. Enterprise teams usually have larger UX organizations (like I mentioned, there's something like 200 UX folk who work at my company). The structure can vary, while you might be somewhere on the chain of a traditional hierarchal design team. You could potentially have peers or managers that work on the same product, or you might not. It depends. At my current role, the person I report to does not sign off on my designs, although they manage the other UXers who work in the same area as I do. You might run into that sort of situation, you might not. It depends. It's worth noting that I also do both the design and research for my product space, and we don't have anyone here that is a dedicated designer or researcher. We're all expected to conduct the research, design the solutions/screens, and do the testing + feedback gathering. You might find elsewhere that they do have dedicated designers/researchers. This is great for me because there I have autonomy and agency to go figure out how to do shit myself, rather than having to push all of my design and research through a manger to sign off on (which you will find at some places). That doesn't mean that nobody reviews my work, but I'm trusted as the expert in the room when it comes to this so I have to do a lot of justification and evidence gathering to defend my decisions.
I think I always recommend agencies for people getting into the field, as they are the best way for you to get your hands on a lot of different types of work quickly.
So moving on to the portfolio building here.
The portfolio is the most stress-inducing piece I think of getting into the field. Especially when you don't have any paid work to show. If you don't have a UX bootcamp or internship/college work to show, it's difficult. Like I mentioned before, if you don't have an entrepreneurial spirit to go out and do maybe some pro-bono work for like your local bookstore or library (or similar), it's gonna be difficult. Some tips:
- Please don't do any Twitter/Youtube/Facebook/Netflix/etc redesign. Aspiring desiginers thinks it's valuable use of your time but its NOT. Those sites/apps have literally millions of users and a bunch of research and analytics you don't have access to. It's quite likely any redesign idea that you have will fly in the face of their wealth of research and data. Just don't do it.
- Show results wherever possible. If you can't show results, talk about what you would expect to be looking for. For example, say you redesigned your local library's website. How do you define and measure success? Visitors to the website? Higher number of checked out material? Mention these things even if you are unable to actually do any measure of success
- Less is more. I had 6 projects on my current portfolio and I wouldn't go above that number. Recruiters really just don't have a lot of time to go through a lot of projects. You definitely want to have 1 or 2 case studies with some meat, that go into your process. But you want to be concise about Problem, Process, Challenges, Result. And make sure you show a variety of screens that address a variety of things.
- Don't be afraid of using WYSIWYG site builders (Wordpress, etc). Some people think its better if you code your portfolio from scratch but that's a bunch of BS IMO. If you're not applying for a designer position that also codes, go ahead and use that word press site. The content is more important than the technology behind it.
- Start content first, then build your site. When you get to the point that you're ready to start applying for positions, you'll want to make sure you just build a word doc or something and just start typing out the content for your portfolio. This will give you time to figure out important stuff like "is it readable, is it concise, what do people walk away with after reading".
Job searching
Okay, so learn to make use of sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, etc (I've gotten most success on LinkedIn). You'll be disappointed to learn that most people get jobs in this field from referrals, but that doesn't mean that you literally have to know somebody who already works there, it just means usually that you weren't hired after finding the job posting on a website and then wading your way through the interview process. I strongly recommend that people entering the field utilize tech recruiters. These recruiters fill jobs for companies and do most of the up-front recruiting work. Typically if you can get a recruiter to vouch for you for a position, its a LOT easier than going it solo and wading through a job posting. Recruiters can typically at least get you a first round interview, which at that point its up to you to close the deal.
What sucks
Working with business partners and hard-to-work with engineers. My journey has been a bit easier, because I have coding and general IT knowledge, so talk with engineers about my designs is easier because I understand 90% of what they're saying. You'll find a lot of people in this field DON'T understand software development which leads to shitty designs and shitty went-to-production solutions. Having a better idea of the technology behind everything will make your working relationship with them much easier.
With business partners/stakeholders, they don't understand the design OR the tech behind what you're doing, so you have to work with them somewhat delicately. They're a "I want it now and I don't care how it works" bunch mostly. Business stakeholders also tend to think they know their users better than anyone (even if they are the users themselves). If you can't rely on a good Product Manager to lean on, it can be a pain working with them.
One Last Thing
90% of the time, you'll be working on something somebody else has already designed in some way. Very rarely, especially early on, will you get to design something that's completely new and not an extension or update of an existing thing. When you go through bootcamp or design school or whatever, you tend to learn the the entire User centered design process from beginning to finish. When I got out there doing full-time work, I quickly discovered that's hardly ever the case. Sometimes you will be able to do such work, but not often. Especially with the increasingly more common design systems, chances are you won't be just creating things out of thin air for every project. You'll be leveraging design systems, if not an already existing product. It sucks, because you get your new job and they tell you they want you to redesign this or build this new thing, and then on day one you find out 40% of the work has already been done and you can't exactly throw it out cause it needs to be handed off to development in 1.5 months and launched in 4.
But, one thing I like about this job/field is that you learn how to be a fast expert in everything. I've done everything from form design, tabular design, e-commerce platforms, design systems, marketing pages, enterprise systems, supply chain systems, data visualization, people lookup tools, etc all in a very short amount of time. Even when you work on the same product for a considerable amount of time, you'll still come across different types of problems you'll have to solve.
