How to Get a UX Design Job: Create a compelling portfolio, submit a stand-out application, and ace the interview to land your user experience dream job
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The CS6 “Design Standard” package came with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. As a UX designer, the only Adobe product I’ve ever needed was Photoshop. And I don’t use it to create a lot of original graphics, I use it to take screenshots, crop graphics and photos (to import into my prototypes), identify colors and fonts on websites, and tweak colors on things like icons.
Sometimes companies narrow things down too much. Tools are easy – you can take some online classes and teach yourself a tool quickly. What’s more important is that you’re a good designer…that’s tool independent. Don’t get discouraged if companies weed you out based on overly-specific skills. Just move on.
Red flags
If companies put things like this into their job description, tread carefully:
“The desire to learn and see obstacles as opportunities is a must. It’s not easy to work here, but it’s never boring.”
“High tolerance for ambiguity matched only by your desire to organize it”
“Collaborate with teams to review and ensure difficult UX features can be executed accurately against design concepts”
The ability to do all of these things (thrive in ambiguity, ensure difficult features are executed accurately, etc.) is critical – the red flag is that they actually included it in their job description. At least they’re being honest, I guess. I’d make a note of anything that rings little warning bells and make sure you investigate it (or ask about it directly) during the interview process.
Also beware of the job description that looks like it’s asking for too much (back to the unicorn again). Even if you have all those skills, it’s probably more work than one person can handle.
How to Get More Experience
This chapter isn’t just geared toward new UXers. If you’re a senior-level UXer who’s ready for a new job challenge, you may feel like your portfolio is a little thin (especially if you’ve been working on the same project for years) and that you’re out of the loop when it comes to some of these new design tools.
Everything changes so fast in our industry, it’s hard to keep up even if you’re trying to stay on top of things.
Speak the Language
If you want to get into UX, you need to be comfortable speaking UXese. And you need to sound like a real UXer, not a poser. I want you to be able to walk into any interview situation and understand the questions they’re asking you and be able to speak to it all naturally and confidently.
You do not need to be a member of some secret club to learn how to do this. You just need to immerse yourself in UX, using some of the suggestions in this chapter. Take a few classes, watch a few videos, read some books and blogs. Go to some Meetups, where you can practice talking to other UXers.
Study the user-centered design process and the different activities and deliverables that fall under each step. Understand what the different UX roles are and what they produce and how they relate to each other.
Educate Yourself
There are so many great resources out there, and most of them are inexpensive and can be done from home.
LYNDA.COM
Lynda.com, which was recently bought by LinkedIn, has been around for 20 years and has thousands of high-quality online classes that focus primarily on technical and creative skills. I just did a search on “UX” and got 1,713 results. They have in-depth classes on tools like Sketch, InVision, and Axure and how-to classes for pretty much any UX topic you can think of (and also peripheral topics like Agile software development).
Although Lynda.com usually costs $19.99 a month (after a free 30-day trial…you could learn a lot in 30 days…just sayin’), many public libraries offer free access to it through their website. Search your library’s website (not the book catalog) for “Lynda.com” – if they offer it, you can log in using your library card # and password (the first time you log in you’ll need to create a profile). It’s a little kluge to access but worth the trouble.
UIE’S ALL YOU CAN LEARN
All You Can Learn (aycl.uie.com), which is part of usability expert Jared Spool’s companies User Interface Engineering (UIE) and Center Centre, is an ongoing series of recorded talks and presentations given by high-profile UXers for other UXers. All You Can Learn includes on-stage talks from UX conferences as well as online presentations ranging from 30-90 minutes long on all sorts of UX-related topics. I enjoy the content because the speakers/presenters know their stuff (most have written UX books and have been in the industry a long time). You feel like an insider when you listen to them.
If you’re new to UX, listening to them can help you internalize a lot of the UX terminology and user-centered design process.
All You Can Learn costs $29 a month so I call it “All You Can Learn in a Month.” I’ve renewed it and canceled it several times over the past few years to get caught up with the latest presentations.
UDEMY
Udemy (udemy.com) is an online learning website similar to Lynda.com. There is a lot of junk on Udemy (anybody can publish anything they want as long as the video/sound quality passes Udemy’s standards) but there are a few good UX classes, including a comprehensive one from UK usability consultant David Travis, called “User Experience (UX): The Ultimate Guide to Usability and UX.” Travis also has a very active Facebook group where past and present students of his class can exchange ideas and ask questions. The class is geared toward beginners and includes some good design exercises.
Don’t ever pay full price for anything on Udemy. They have big sales all the time.
LOCAL MEETUPS
We have an active UX Meetup community in the Denver/Boulder area, including several groups with over 1,500 members each. Most of the groups have monthly happy hours, plus regular meetings held at local UX agencies or schools like General Assembly. Most meetings are built around a group design exercise or a presentation, and they get lots of good guest speakers.
Some recent presentations from Meetups near me included:
UX Portfolio Review
Sketch Advanced Tips & Tricks Workshop
Building a Seat at the Table: Promoting User-centered Designs with Stakeholders
Panel Discussion: Hiring for UX
Usability Testing Workshop
Design Studio Workshop w/Boulder County
UX Portfolios: Design for Your User (the Hiring Manager and Recruiter)
Meetups are a good place to learn, network, and meet other local UXers. It’s also a great way to find out about local job openings. And who knows, maybe you’ll sit next to the hiring manager at one of the happy hours.
LOCAL DESIGN SCHOOLS
Some people (myself included) like to learn in person. For me, it’s the ultimate accountability. If I’m shelling out some money and driving somewhere to spend all day in a classroom, I’m going to get everything I can out of it and leave brain-dead with pages of notes.
Going somewhere in person also means that I can’t distract myself at home with other things like housework, Facebook, dogs, etc. That day is set aside to learn and that’s it.
Use Google to search for UX classes in your area. You’ll probably find day-long workshops, week-long certificate classes, and longer “bootcamp” classes that can span several weeks or months (many schools offer part-time hours and/or evening and weekend hours so you can take these classes while working a full-time job). You might even be able to talk your current company into paying for the class.
Most in-person certificate courses and bootcamps focus on creating a UX project that you can include in your portfolio. These classes are usually very collaborative, allowing you to leverage the experience of your instructor and the skills of all the other students (visual designers, writers, programmers, marketing people, business people, etc.) to help you with your project.
BOOKS
There are so many great UX books out there. I’ll include a list of my favorites in the Resources section at the end of this book (and on my website at lisamurnan.com/resources).
In general, most of the O’Reilly books (the ones with the animal illustrations and purple accent colors on the cover) are great, and so are the Rosenfeld Media books. The authors are all very experienced solid UXers writing for other UXers.
Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think is a must-read classic. Start with that.
ARTICLES/BLOGS
My favorite place to read articles about UX is on Medium. It’s like a blog, but with lots of authors gathered in one place. There are so many current UX-related topics featured on there and the comments sections are often as thought-provoking and entertaining as the articles themselves.
I also subscribe to Nielsen Norman Group’s email newsletter. They publish an article or two a week about usability-related issues and the articles are always full of great statistics and examples. You can subscribe (or just read the articles online) at nngroup.com.
OTHER UX DESIGNERS’ DELIVERABLES
A Google search for “UX Deliverables” will yield over a million results – of course, you’ll have to separate the wheat from the chaff, but studying other designers’ deliverables (both good and bad) will teach you a lot.
First, you’ll see that everybody creates their deliverables a little differently and that’s okay, as long as the deliverable conveys what it needs to for its target user. Second, you can see how other designers think, and learn from their thought processes. Third, you can identify aspects of their deliverables that you like and borrow them to use in your own deliverables.
You can do the same thing with other designers’ online portfolios. Why did they make the design decisions they made? What types of deliverables did they use in each of their projects, and what did they do to understand their users’ goals/needs?
One online portfolio I am fascinated with is interaction designer Simon Pan’s (simonpan.com). Although his case studies are very long (his Uber case study was 65 screens long on my 1920 x 1080 display), they are interesting as hell to read and full of insights, user research photos, screenshots, and UX strategy. He discusses his process in exquisite detail – if you want to learn about how to apply the user-centered design process to real projects, read his case studies.
Get Hands-On Experience
This is often the big Catch-22. You need more experience to be considered for the jobs you want, but you can’t get the experience without experience.
Here are a few ways to work more UX into your life so that you can acquire the skills you need and add more projects to your portfolio.
START INCORPORATING UX-RELATED TASKS AT YOUR CURRENT JOB
Many of you are stuck in jobs that don’t make you happy. You want to get out of that job ASAP. I get it. But you can use your current job to get resume-worthy UX experience in the meantime.
You don’t even need to get your manager’s permission to do it, and you’ll probably end up making whatever project you’re working on better at the same time.
You can:
Do lots and lots of user research for your current project/product and its target audience.
Create personas and user scenarios based on this research.
Conduct contextual interviews (basically talking to people 1-on-1, either on the phone while you’re screen sharing or at their desk where you can watch them work) as part of your research.
Map out some task flows or user flows to help define how a user will move through the screens of your product to accomplish something.
Create a customer journey map by figuring out the different touchpoints a customer has with your company/product (from sales to onboarding to support, etc.), identifying areas of friction, then coming up with recommendations for how to remove that friction from the user experience.
Sketch design ideas and even mock them up in something non-threatening (to others) like Balsamiq. (Balsamiq’s output looks very sketch-like, versus some of the other design tools that can look pixel-perfect). The product managers at my company recently started using Balsamiq to help them think through business requirements for their products. They use their wireframes to get everybody on the same page with their vision. Then they work with the UX team to take their design ideas to the next level.
Conduct guerilla usability testing (which might mean walking over to somebody’s desk with your laptop or a few printouts and asking them what they think about something you’re working on).
Learn Google Analytics or some other tool that will come in handy for your next job.
And boom, now you’re able to add bullet points to your resume for each of these skills. Maybe your company will even pay for you to attend a UX class or conference.
TAKE A “STEPPING STONE” JOB
If your current job offers no opportunity for learning/experimenting, another approach is to take a job that’s somewhere in between your current job and your UX dream job and use that in-between job to get the skills, experience, and perhaps even job title you need to actually land your dream job.
When I mention this option to my students I’m usually met with several rows of sour faces staring back at me. Again, I get it. You want to get into your UX dream job as soon as possible and the idea of putting it off for another year or two for some in-between job is excruciating and unacceptable (and to be honest, that would be my reaction as well). But for some people, it’s the perfect solution.
FIND FREELANCE PROJECTS TO WORK ON
Look for websites you can redesign or create from scratch. Friends and family members may have businesses or hobbies that need a website. Organizations you’re associated with (clubs, church, PTA, etc.), and local nonprofits may need your UX help as well.
Don’t get hung up on making money at this point. Your goal is to get more experience and build up your portfolio. If people are willing to pay you, great, but don’t walk away from a project if it can provide you with crucial experience. Another option is to trade time or services. Once I helped a friend design a website for her hair salon and for every hour I put in on her website she credited me an hour of her time at the salon.
When you work on small websites for family and friends you’ll often get the opportunity to use tools like WordPress and Google Analytics, and to consult with visual designers or developers. This is all great experience.
Another place to look for design work is in programmer Meetup groups. They often participate in group projects or Hackathons and love to have UX help on their projects.
Document everything you do along the way. It’s easy to discard your sketches or whiteboard drawings or Post-it Note process flows and move right into prototyping and designing, but take photos and screenshots as you go so that you can add this documentation to your portfolio.
Also, create deliverables even when nobody asks for them. If your uncle has a business and wants your help with a website, he’s not going to be asking you for things like personas, user scenarios, task flows, etc., but take the time to create these for your own experience and to add to your portfolio. If you’re redesigning your dog club’s website from 2004, run your own card sorting exercise with several target users (club members) and document the results.
Solve your own problem. Is there something that drives you crazy and you have an idea for an app or website that would fix it?
Is there an existing website or app out there with serious usability issues that you’d love to fix (*cough* Snapchat *cough, cough*)? Design it and document it. However, I want to go on the record to say that this approach is my least favorite of all the ideas I’ve mentioned so far, because you don’t have access to the same business goals, user research, constraints, etc. that the product’s original designers had. You can’t tell a story about redesigning a website/app like this the way you could with a project where you’re actually interacting with a client, end users, stakeholders, etc., and coming up with a design solution from scratch.
Any freelance or personal project can be used in a portfolio if you use it to show how you understand and embrace the UX process, and include high-quality examples of your wor
k. (And let’s be honest…a lot of the UX job postings try to sound glamorous but they’re really looking for someone to design a customer service website for a phone company, or software for roofing/gutter manufacturers, or a life insurance website…so don’t let them make you feel stupid about anything in your portfolio. We can’t all work for Google or Facebook.)
LAND AN INTERNSHIP
I’m including internships because it would be remiss of me not to, but they are hard to come by and often require candidates to be currently enrolled in college and working toward a UX-related degree. Most of the internship opportunities are located in San Francisco or one of the other big tech hubs.
Interns generally don’t work for free – the salaries I saw during my research were on the low end of the junior designer range.
Test other people’s websites
You can sign up to be a usability tester with UserTesting (usertesting.com) and earn money while getting the inside scoop on what companies are doing from a UX standpoint.
UserTesting is basically the middle man between companies who want something tested (like their existing website/app, a work in progress, or even a competitor’s website) and pre-screened usability test participants.
As a tester, you get to click around on websites or apps, complete a set of tasks while thinking out loud, and get paid for it. You provide feedback in the form of a 20-minute screen-capture video (your face won’t be on video, so you can drink wine in your pajamas during the test if you want), and you make $10 per test, which UserTesting deposits right into your PayPal account. Starbucks money!