Five things to know when starting off a career in UX
So it’s been nearly 18 months since I took the plunge and decided I wanted to retrain from Marketing to UX. And what an amazing time it has been! Not only have I managed to get a role as a UX Product Manager, but I’ve also been able to speak about and reflect on my experiences through this blog series and 3 international conferences. However, since entering my first role in UX, there have been a few realisations that I didn’t expect and have made a note of them within this blog.
Here are five of them:
- Always make time to keep honing in on your UX skills
Ok, I’m going to put my hands up and make a confession; this is something I haven’t committed to recently due to personal reasons. Nevertheless, it is incredibly important to make time to hone up and learn more about key trends in UX and UI every week, as this field is ever-growing and some things can become redundant quickly.
Even if it's half an hour a day or setting aside one time a week to learn, make sure you set time to do so. Also, stagger and plan out what skills you want to make incremental improvements on. This can be done through a personal development plan in order to create consistency in improving your UX skills.
2. Its not just about fancy designs
WhenI I have mentored a few people who have wanted to start a career in UX recently, they have been slightly cautious about entering the field as they haven’t come from a graphic based background and have felt demoralised through posts on social media.
It's interesting to see on Linked in and Facebook groups based on UX how many posts focus on “Rate my design”, focusing on graphic interfaces. However, this is one of my pet-peeves since entering this role for the following 3 reasons:
i. It creates a disillusion of what UX really is, particularly to non-UXers! When I talk to people about what I do for a job role, they immediately think I’m some sort of graphic designer, which is not the case!
ii. It doesn’t take into account the styling and brand guidelines of organisations they are looking to design for. Yes, redesign ideas are good for creating a new product; however when you are looking to alter a few features for a product, a fancy redesign will more than likely put users off from using your site. Remember, users, don’t like major changes as they have to re-learn how to use your site.
iii. It doesn’t take into account what the user actually needs and how the design guides them. No matter how amazing a design is, if it doesn’t help the user towards the goal they are looking to achieve on your site, then it’s useless!
For those of you looking to enter UX, don’t worry if your design skills are not your main forte. Its more important to focus on skills such as research, analysis and communication skills, as these will be the day to day skills you will need for the roles.
3. Learn to build up your own personal brand
A personal brand has been defined as, “…perception of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.” Yes, there is a resounding emphasis to keep up to date with your portfolio, but what is not talked about is to create your own brand within UX.
With UX roles looking to grow by 18% by 2025, the need to stand out in this field is growing ever important. Employers and other UXer’s don’t just want to see your portfolio of previous work; they also want to see your personality and understand what interests you about UX, as well as interests outside of work.
Elements in your personal brand could be:
- Writing books, blogs or vlogs
- Mentoring and teaching
- Doing some freelancing work
- Public speaking
- Combining UX with your other hobbies.
4. Projects will not always be straightforward
Before I was employed, most of the projects I did for UX followed the traditional double-diamond. Although it helps to understand the end-to-end UX process, in an employment scenario, you are more likely to face a non-linear approach with your design projects. Day to day, you will be dealt with other more priority tasks and some of the projects may go back to do further research before moving forward with creating ideas, or even delayed or scrapped. Therefore time priorities are key when working on UX projects and defining what changes will have the biggest improvement to the user experience for your product.
5. Understand how to work in a cross-functional team
Again referring back to the project’s point, most of the UX projects I did before employment were done independently. Now I work with a cross-functional team of front end and back end engineers and have to understand how my research and findings can be interpreted for them. The majority of the time, a change won’t just involve a change in colour for buttons; rather the feature changes will have a consequence on other parts of the system. Therefore, it is important to have empathy for those who are involved with the changes and how it affects the ecosystem. You need to create regular meetings with people involved with your projects and define priorities to work on.
Fancy a chat about all things UX and personal development? Feel free to book in a 30 minute chat with me with Calendly.
