Learn 3 takeaways from 3 designers who got a UX design job without a design degree

You’ve probably already heard of the field of UX Design, or User Experience Design. After all, it’s the field responsible for designing the end-to-end experiences of the apps and websites you love.

UX Design has become increasingly important for companies, and the field also pays quite well. However, if you’re like most people (and like me), it’s likely that you didn’t take up a design-related degree in college, and you haven’t had a full-time UX job yet.

But that shouldn’t be a concern for you at all, and it doesn’t mean you can’t land a job in UX design. Many UX designers came from having no background in design as well, yet they were able to make the leap.

How were they able to do it? We can learn from three designers who’ve made the jump. These three are Christine — a young Chemistry graduate and YouTuber, Gemma — a 39-year-old former IT professional, and Kyle — a former property management professional.

They’ve each made the switch to UX design and have written openly about how they did it. Although reading each of their stories and tips are valuable, here are three takeaways I took from their stories that are essential for anyone looking into getting a UX job without a UX background.

1. Know Why You Want to Pursue UX Design

Christine’s most popular video on her YouTube channel

Christine Chun graduated with a degree in Chemistry. Fresh from graduating, she decided to work at a skincare company as a community manager.

After almost a year, she decided to quit her job, even if she didn’t have a job lined up for her. 

“I was certain that retail marketing was not the career path I wanted to invest in further. I wanted to do something creative that involved critical thinking, but was utterly lost as to where to pivot next,” Christine said.

Even if she was lost, she at least knew that she wanted to do creative work that involved critical thinking. So to answer this for herself, she grabbed coffee with numerous professionals, trying to figure out which job she would enjoy the most next. And after talking to multiple designers, and reading a lot of resources about UX, she was “convinced that this was the field I wanted to break into.”

So before you set out to get a job in UX design, make sure you have a strong passion and interest in it first. And make sure to develop it as you go along the way too. Passion is what will allow you to keep learning and persisting, so it’s important to know where your motivation comes from, just like Christine did.

After a lot of hustling and many rejections, Christine was able to land a Product Designer job, and she’s now a Product Designer at Instacart. She’s also built up her YouTube channel along the way, where she makes beauty and career-related videos, and now has over 8,000 subscribers.

2. Build A Good Portfolio of UI/UX Work

A photo from Kyle’s article

Kyle Miller had a job as a Senior Leasing Consultant for a property management company. After a couple of years in the industry though, he wanted to quit. But he was scared. He wasn’t sure what he would do next. Through some soul-searching like Christine though, he figured out the field of UX could be for him.

But first, he had to build a UI/UX portfolio. After all, companies would want to see his work, and he needed to showcase he was good at it even if he hasn’t had a job as a UX designer.

Kyle went through 2 methods to have case studies of his UI/UX design work.

The first was taking General Assembly’s User Experience Design Immersive course, which Christine took as well. The program is a 10-week, full-time program that teaches you UI/UX design and has you build actual designs and prototypes.

However, it will cost $10,000–$15,000 depending on where you live, but they do have a cheaper online version. Nevertheless, Kyle valued how the course gave him a great foundation in UX, and helped him network and find great mentors to help him.

Kyle’s second method, which might be more realistic for others who can’t drop $10–15k, was doing freelance UI/UX work. He put himself out there and got connected with the startup community. Through this, he was able to do usability recommendations and host design studios for his clients.

In the 3+ years since leaving his property management job, Kyle has worked as a UX designer at multiple companies, including the Fortune500 company Capital One. He’s also now the co-founder of a startup called GoodFynd.

“I was scared to quit my job in the property management field to pursue a career in UX design, but it has been one of the most satisfying decisions I’ve made in a long time,” Kyle said.

3. Never Stop Learning, and Be Patient & Persistent

Gemma’s bio from her portfolio

Gemma Sweeney had been working in IT roles for 17 years in the U.K. But like Kyle and Christine, she wanted to do something more creative. And after discovering the field of UX, she made a plan to switch career paths — at 39.

Gemma didn’t want to spend the money or time needed for a 10-week UX bootcamp like General Assembly’s, so she found a cheaper and shorter alternative. She also read as much as she could about UX online.

“I set aside 10 minutes in the morning to read various articles, and also set myself a goal of sharing one UX related article on Twitter each day,” Gemma said.

Gemma set out a year-long plan on how to transition from IT to UX. And through taking a cheaper UX course, reading as much as she could, building her portfolio, and going to meetups, she immersed herself immensely into UX.

Today, Gemma now works as a UX designer at Ocado Technology, and she has a great-looking portfolio of her UI/UX work. And Gemma shows us that it’s never too late to make a switch in your career.

Will You Make The Leap Too?

All in all, these three UX designers have shown that making the leap into UX is possible. And the three key ways to do this are to know your why, build a great portfolio, and have patience and persistence.

None of them said it was easy, but as they’ve shown and said, it’s definitely possible. Moreover, it can be an extremely rewarding and worthwhile journey.

Connect Deeper

If you have any questions or comments about this article, feel free to comment them below!

I’ve linked the articles in which Christine, Kyle, and Gemma share their journeys and tips to breaking into UX design here:

My co-workers and I at Stampede have more interesting articles and insights to share for you, so if you enjoyed this article, like our Facebook Page or follow us on Medium. Until then, keep dreaming and hustling, and I hope this article was insightful or inspiring for you.

The post Make the Leap —How to Get a UX Design Job without a UX Background appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Me (on the left) with my eventual supervisor, Zo-Ee.

A story on how attending a conference, some serendipity, and writing articles led to me interning remotely for Stampede

Hi there, I’m Brian Tan, a 4th year student from Manila here in the Philippines.

It’s been 4 days of me working as a UI/UX apprentice for Stampede, and it still feels surreal. How did a young student like me get to intern remotely for an awesome foreign company like Stampede?

Let me tell you about the crazy story of how I got this internship.

It starts with some Googling

It all started when I was randomly searching for design conferences online. I had never been to a big design conference abroad yet, so I just went searching on Google.

I eventually found the website to the UXSEA Summit, a 3-day design conference in Singapore held in November 2018.

I got excited. I wanted to see if I could land a UI/UX design job in Singapore to work in after I graduate, mainly because of the higher pay and better quality of life. The design and tech industry is also much more mature there than in Manila.

Getting a Student Discount

I saw too that the price of the conference was quite affordable compared to other international design conferences. But I thought to myself — what if they’re willing to give a discount to students?

So I went ahead and messaged the UXSEA Summit Facebook page, asking if I could be given a student discount. To my surprise, the organizers were willing to give me a 50% discount.

It gave me even more reason to go, and I told my parents about it. They were supportive of me going, with my mom offering to pay for the flight ticket using her miles. I also asked my cousin, who works in Singapore, if I could stay over at her place in the few days I’d be there, and she said I could.

Amazing, I thought. I had my flights and accommodation covered, and I got a huge discount for the conference! I didn’t care anymore about the fact that I had to miss a couple days of classes. I knew this conference could be the key to networking my way into a job there after I graduate.

Finding The Lucky Seat

Fast forward to after flying from Manila to Singapore, I arrived at the first day of the conference a few minutes late. Most of the seats had been filled up already, but I found a vacant seat next to a table in front.

I sat down on that seat, and little did I know that I’d be sitting next to my future supervisor for my internship. Beside me was Zo-Ee Chee, UX Strategist at Stampede.

Me with Zo-Ee and my fellow Filipino tablemates.

She told me about how Stampede was a Malaysian UX design and software agency, and how their founder brought their whole design team there.

I ended up spending the rest of the day talking to Zo-Ee and my tablemates, who were also from Manila surprisingly, and doing the hands-on workshops. Zo-Ee and I even designed a wallet for each other as part of the Design-A-Wallet workshop there, and we got to know each other more through the stories and ideas related to what we wanted in a wallet.

I had a lot of fun getting to know Zo-Ee and my tablemates, and Zo-Ee introduced me to Shaza Hakim, the founder of Stampede. I had no idea that I would be interning for her, and I wasn’t even searching for an internship at the time.

I have classes this semester, and I was unsure if I wanted to juggle that with an internship. I didn’t even know that interning remotely for a foreign company was an option. I was just curious about their team, and I asked Shaza a few questions.

The Power of Writing Articles

After each day of the conference though, I made sure to compile my notes from each session/talk for the day. I knew that I could write articles doing a recap of the Summit, so that’s what I did. I ended up writing one article for each day of the UXSEA Summit, and posted them on Medium and LinkedIn.

My article on UX Collective.

Suddenly, I got a comment from Shaza on my LinkedIn post about the article:

I was so pleasantly surprised. Wow, she’s offering me an internship? But before deciding if I wanted to do this, I did my research first about Stampede.

I ended up being really impressed looking through their website and social media. Stampede has a long list of clients from all over the world, and they have numerous case studies of their work on their site. They’ve also already been around since 2006, and their team works fully remotely, which impressed me.

They also have a blog where they’re so open about their culture and team. I was also impressed reading about Shaza, who is a local leader for the Interaction Design Foundation, and her open posts about Stampede, such as this slideset about how she manages to make remote working great for Stampede.

Landing the Job

I thought to myself that this is a one-of-a-kind company, and I’d be stupid not to try interning for them. So I decided to message Shaza, telling her how I was really interested to intern for Stampede and sent them my UI/UX portfolio.

I also told her though that I could spend only 15 hours a week working remotely for them, since I still would have classes during the internship. Shaza was okay with this and she scheduled a call with me, where Zo-Ee joined, and it ended up becoming an informal job interview.

By the end of the call, Shaza and Zo-Ee were willing to hire me, and I was pleasantly surprised. They were so willing to trust me based on my portfolio and articles, and how I answered their questions in an audiocall.

I started to see there the generosity of Shaza, and the willingness she had to trust and mentor young designers like me.

Within a week, I got sent a paid internship contract, and I accepted and signed it. This was definitely a “Hell Yeah!” opportunity for me.

4 Days of Learning

Shaza sharing some books she recently got in our team-wide videocall.

Fast forward to today, and it’s only been 4 days, but my internship’s already been great so far. Compared to my previous internships, Stampede actually had a more structured and better onboarding process, even if I was being onboarded remotely.

Shaza and I even had a 2-hour videocall where she discussed to me about Stampede’s Why and their core values, and discussed to me about their design process. I’ve already learned a lot from just a few days of talking to my teammates and observing Stampede’s processes as a UX design agency, and I can’t wait to learn more.

Filled with Gratitude

All in all, I don’t expect this high I’m feeling of being able to intern for Stampede to last the whole way. I’m sure that the work Stampede will give me might be difficult to juggle alongside my schoolwork, since I’m still taking a full load of classes this semester.

But I know that if I ever find myself stressed, bored, or not as passionate about working for Stampede, I just have to take a step back and remind myself how grateful I am to have this opportunity.

I’m grateful that I got to attend the UXSEA Summit, that I got to meet Zo-Ee and Shaza, that I get to work with and learn from this whole team, and that I get to learn what it’s like to work at a remote company.

It’s only been 4 days, but I’m already so thankful to be here. And I hope I’ll continue to be until the end of my internship in April.

Connect Deeper

I’ll likely be writing a couple more articles for Stampede, so if you enjoyed this post, like our Facebook Page or follow us on Medium!

My teammates and I have interesting articles and insights to share for you. Until then, keep dreaming and hustling, and I hope this article was insightful or inspiring for you.

The post How I Got the Crazy Opportunity to be a UI/UX Apprentice for Stampede appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

As a UI/UX designer, your responsibility extends more than just pushing pixels behind your screen. The UI/UX discipline encompasses many umbrellas and you could be looking at fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI), usability, visual design, information architecture, interaction design and maybe in the future, more towards conversational design — especially the rise of chatbots and AI. Furthermore, a good UI/UX designer need to also be able to look not only at users’ perspectives, but also from a business’ end goal(s). 

It’s a wonderful time to be alive.

Personal attributes — as opposed to core skills — while might seem secondary, they could elevate yourself and your skills as a UI/UX designer, what’s with more and more companies been hiring waves of designers. They can help designers in large aspects of their work, from satisfying users, working with team members and dealing with stakeholders. These attributes can be learned, developed, encouraged and sharpened — provided you are up for them.

Personal attributes

Empathy

Realising empathy Four inter-related yet distinct processes that has to work together to make this process possible. By Seung Chan Lim.

Empathy is more than just a buzzword floating around. Empathy is described as the ability to understand and share feelings of another person — in other words, being able to put yourselves in other people’s shoes, thus being able to understand their feelings, motivations, limitations, biases and many others.

As a UI/UX designer, you need to be able to develop a sense of empathy to get very far in your career, as you need to be able to understand your users, your clients as well as being able to work with your teammates. Having a sense of empathy will lead to an improvement in a lot of areas. The book Design Collaboration for the Enterprise mentions that by having empathy, you can also improve collaboration.

Seung Chan Lim wrote a wonderful article on a thoughtful examination of empathy in life and in the context of design.

If you want to learn to become more empathetic, here are eight tips to do so.

Critical thinking

Connecting the dots The stage of critical thinking, from data accumulation all the way till wisdom formation. Photo from Gapingvoid.

The best designers are often thinking. More than just that, they know how to think effectively.

We now live among unprecedented abundance of information. The Internet offers us more than we could ever consume and shops offer us more choices than we could ever process. This information glut, coupled with our fast-paced lifestyle, contributes to our inability to filter information effectively, leading to lack of value in the work that we present ourselves in — because we tend to include everything in!

While this skill takes time to develop, there are some small steps you can take to sharpen it. For example, you may start to distinguish between user complaints or feedback during UX testing. During initial project briefing, start making small notes about the nature of the project, and why it would be different from the previous or current ones you are working on. For example, if the new project would require a new interface for a ridesharing app, you may start to think of why the UX would be different from the UX for a recipe sharing app you are currently working on.

Critical thinking is more than just filtering information. Two more subskills of critical thinking you could start to practice are being perceptive and having an eye for details. Technically, if you begin to start questioning “why?” to a lot of things, it is a good start. While surfing the web, you may also start to question why a certain website behaves the way it does, and how they do it. You can start by noticing microinteractions and compiling them, as the folks at Little Big Details do.

Lynda has a good short, one-hour course for critical thinking you could start on.

Hunger for knowledge

There is no prescribed path to becoming a good UI/UX designer. Some people we know do have the qualifications for them, some don’t — but what sets them apart is their willingness to always learn and improve themselves. The industry is constantly evolving and revolutionising. What’s good is that with Internet at the tip of our fingers these days, it is very easy to keep up with the trends.

One tip we often tell budding designers is just a one word mantra: read. There are many books out there offering UI/UX lessons from basic, technical all the way to the psychology of users. The only thing you have to do is keep looking.

Here are some good UI/UX books to start with:

• The Design of Everyday Things – Donald A. Norman
• Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
• The Elements of User Experience – Jesse James Garrett
• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design – Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel
• The UX Book – Rex Hartson and Pardha Pyla
• Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience – Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
• The User Experience Team of One – Leah Buley

Patience

The initial section was to be called ‘passion’ — but I changed my mind. Very often we emphasise on the importance on passion for us to pursue what we want, without realising that like supernova, passion burns brightly and full of energy, only to burst and fade slowly. 

If you are a new UI/UX designer, there will be many occasions where the learning curve might get too steep you feel like quitting. Having the patience to know that any worthy skills take time to master will keep you grounded and put you back on track on your endeavour to become an excellent UI/UX designer.

Having the patience will also help you to be more grounded. In return, you will be more open to learn more (hunger for knowledge), understand others (empathy) and being able to fill in the gaps (perceptive) while constructing your solutions (critical thinking).

Don’t forget to also check out: So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer: Part 1 – Core Skills.

The post So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer: Part 2 appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

It has also been one of the biggest contributors to many success stories, for example — Jeff Bezos invested 100 times more into customer experience than advertising during the first year of Amazon, and AirBnB’s Mike Gebbia credits UX with taking the company to $10 billion.

Clearly, good user experience is good for business.

More so than ever, we are in need of more UI/UX designers to carry on this challenge. Undoubtedly not an easy role, UI/UX designers need to equip themselves with a certain sets of skills. Which brings to the next question— what sort of skills?

From our experiences, we could list down these skills in two categories — core skills (technical skills needed to excel as a UI/UX designer) and personal attributes (might seem secondary, but they are actually important to level yourself up to be a better UI/UX designer each day).

This week, let’s talk about core skills needed to become a UI/UX designer. Onward!

Core skills

User research

Bigger companies might have a dedicated team to perform user research, but it is important for a UI/UX designer to get herself involved in the research from the beginning. This could give her more insight into the nature of the business, get herself acquainted with the clients & their problems and how they behave — which actually could help with the direction of the design later.

Wireframing

Wireframing is the step which allows you to define the information hierarchy of your design, making it easier for you to plan the layout. It is as MVP as it can be in the design process, especially if you want to start designing and you want to confirm with the client or the team on the layout.  Once it is confirmed, it is actually faster to start designing since you already have the structure.

This beginner’s guide to wireframing is very helpful for you to start building your own guidelines.

Visual design

In order to transform the wireframes into mock ups, suffice to say you will need to have basic visual design skills. Our designers use Photoshop for this before getting the designs signed off and handed over to the development team, but best to check with the team you are working with on their preferences.

You might be thinking — “but I started with print design and I wanted to get into UI/UX, is it too late?” Absolutely not! There is an abundance of free UI/UX courses online you may find on Coursera, Hackdesign and many more. You may only need to start adapting your existing design practices to UI/UX. 

Prototyping

Prototyping can be defined as ‘a simulation or sample version of a final product, used for testing prior to launch.’ Prototypes are used to test products, fix issues and confirm requirements before sinking further into development. Prototype testing can save time and money since it can be used to identify earlier usability issues and reveal areas to be improved.

A lot of apps can be used to develop faster prototypes. Our team swears by InVision, but there are many others such as UXPin, Atomic and Sketch.

If you’d like to read more, UXPin here has a good article on a guide to prototyping.

Basic coding

We all hear of all these arguments floating about — “should designers learn how to code?”. The answer would be, “yes, but as much as possible to understand how development would work later.”

The designs done by UI/UX designers are eventually going to be translated into code, so it is helpful for UI/UX designers to know basic front end and programming knowledge. This is so that you could know what’s possible to be done before sending your design files to the developers without risking on their timelines or resources. It is vitally important, according to this discussion, that “UX folks have (at least) a theoretical understanding of “FE-related things”, including semantic page structure, optimization techniques, impact of JavaScript, graceful degradation/progressive enhancement, accessibility etc.”

Metrics and analytics

There is a possibility that user research will not be included in the scope of a project, so how do you start designing? First off, UI/UX designers do not design blindly. Your design decisions should be informed from experiential and data-driven decision.

UI/UX designers need to have some basic understanding on translating data so that we can use them to accomplish goals and achieve customer’s satisfactions. InVision has this good article on how to design with data.

Writing

In his annual Design in Tech report lead by John Maeda, he suggests that besides coding, the other one “unicorn” skill a designer should have would be writing. While many designers have noted the value of leading design with content, there are some others who are still persistent to start writing more due to many reasons. Well, we should not have.

Writing could also help immensely in articulating your design justifications to clients, or your team members. Furthermore, when you write, we empty up our mental estate in order to make way for more information to come through. We also remember better!

There is no magic to writing, and if you would like to start, here are some simple but powerful UX writing tips for designers.

Moving forward

Evidently, there is no shortcut to become a good UI/UX designer. Depends on your organisations or whether you work alone, sometimes not all of these skills are needed but it would be helpful to branch into all of these core skills as much possible.

After all, user advocation doesn’t take a day!

Next in Part 2: So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer : Personal Attributes.

(Thank you WOCinTech Chat for photos!)

The post So You Wanna Be a UI/UX Designer appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.