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To become a UX Designer, you must learn the fundamentals of design, user and market research, strategy, and product development, among others. And while many Designers start out in design or development, there is no single path to becoming a UX Designer; virtually everyone working as a UX Designer began in a related field, then acquired the additional skills they needed.
In short, anyone with a passion for UX can find a way to leverage the skills they have and pick up the ones they don’t.
How to become a UX Designer in five steps:
To become a UX Designer, you will need to learn and develop a number of technical skills crucial to the role, including user research and strategy (which involves data collection), wireframing and prototyping, user interface design, and responsive web design, among others. You will also need to have a solid foundation of soft skills, including project management, collaboration, and communication skills.
UX design courses and bootcamps are an increasingly popular way to build these skills and fast-track a career in UX design. Many organizations today value demonstrable skills and experience over mere credentialism, and unsurprisingly, enrollment in UX design bootcamps – which emphasize hands-on, immersive learning – has surged.
Typically, UX design bootcamps cover design research and strategy, prototyping and usability testing, user interface design, and responsive design. You can expect to spend around 40 hours in the classroom, as well as 20 to 25 hours per week to complete projects. At the end of the program, you’ll have not only a new set of UX design skills but an industry-ready portfolio as well.
UX Designers rely on a range of different digital tools to design user experiences. These include a wide variety of wireframing tools – Sketch is the most widely used, but Illustrator, InVision Studio, Adobe XD, Axure, Figma, and Marvel are also common.
For interface design, Photoshop is a popular option, and one any designer should be familiar with. For prototyping, InVision is the most commonly used platform, although Sketch is another popular option.
For advanced prototyping, including testable models that include micro-interactions, there is a range of options available, including Principle, Flinto, Framer, and ProtoPie.
It’s one thing to understand how to execute UX design projects in theory. It’s another to actually do it. Working on your own UX projects will help you practice and refine the skills you have and gain experience as you encounter new challenges, all while generating work that can go into your UX design portfolio.
Leading your own UX projects also gives you the opportunity to apply your new skills to every step of the UX design process – from early market and user research and persona development to crafting a user journey’s overall information architecture, wireframing, prototyping, and user testing, ultimately using the knowledge gained at each step to inform how you execute other steps with subsequent projects.
You’ll also want to practice developing a variety of project types, to strengthen your UX design skills in as many different areas as possible. Look for projects that put to use your knowledge of UX design fundamentals and the design thinking process, user research strategies, design research strategies, and give you the opportunity to practice creating UI design elements and responsive designs.
As you proceed, you’ll strengthen the soft skills you’ll need as a UX Designer as well – skills like project management, collaborating with other team members and project stakeholders, communication, and even empathy – your ability to put yourself into the mind of your product’s users, to better develop designs that respond to the ways they think.
Once you’ve developed your UX skill set; the only thing left is to start building out your portfolio so you can apply to UX design jobs. There’s more strategy involved here than you might think—more variety, and even more pieces, aren’t necessarily better. In fact, you’re better off doing background research on the company you’re applying to, honing your portfolio’s objectives, and selecting roughly five pieces that speak directly to the company’s achievements and the role you’ll be playing in them.
At the same time, your portfolio should be a genuine reflection of who you are. Be personal and authentic. This comes through in your bio and portrait, but also in how you present the work you do. Every piece in your portfolio should tell a story—about the life cycle of the project, but also about your unique skills, your process, and the creativity you bring to the table.
There is a huge diversity in UX design job titles, partly because UX Designers work across so many different industries—too many to list here. Here are a few of the most common UX design job titles you may encounter during a job search:
Yes, you can become a UX Designer without any previous work experience. Our Digital Skills Survey found that 65 percent of UX Designers began their careers in the design field, later specializing in UX design to gain a competitive edge in the job market.
So while experience or education in a design-related field is a great first step toward becoming a UX Designer, it isn’t an absolute necessity. In fact, it’s also quite common to have a background in psychology or the social sciences, which can be leveraged in the user research phase of UX.
Some UX Designers come from completely different industries, like tech consulting. What’s important in these cases is to take the time to understand the tactics used to conduct user research and implement it through experience design.
There are also many transferable skills that can prepare someone for the role. Empathy, for example, is critical to understanding how the users of your product or service think and act in a given situation. Collaboration, too, is key in many roles, but especially for UX Designers. The job requires interaction with various teams, actively listening, accepting feedback, brainstorming, and more. All require a successful team dynamic. If you have these strengths, you’re ready to take the next step and begin your skills training.
To become a UX Designer, you’ll want to focus on learning user experience fundamentals, user research strategy, user interface design basics, responsive design, and more. Let’s take a closer look at each of these:
User experience design fundamentals
Make sure your training provides experience with design sprint methods, learning to identify problem spaces, and developing solutions. You should leave with an understanding of how to create wireframes and prototypes using design tools like Sketch and InVision.
User research strategy
You should learn how to plan and conduct user research in order to understand users’ behavior, needs, and motivation, and how to translate those findings into relevant project requirements and product designs.
Design research and strategy
User research is essential to UX design. Ensure your training shows you how to conduct user research, and understand users’ behavior, needs, and motivations. With this knowledge, you’ll be able to communicate complex interactions visually through experience maps and personas.
User interface design
Build upon your knowledge of usability to master the nuances of typography, color, illustration, and images. Learn how to use industry tools like Sketch to design professional interfaces, as well as methods for designing and maintaining user interface pattern libraries.
Responsive design
Apply industry-standard design principles to create both low- and high-fidelity applications and websites. Make sure you learn how to utilize grids and breakpoints in the design process to ensure your projects are responsive across various screen sizes, guaranteeing a seamless experience.
It’s important to remember that for a UX Designer, learning never ends. And that’s a good thing: it places you on more equal footing with even the most knowledgeable experts, since you’re all trying to stay on top of evolving trends, emerging techniques, and new tools together. In fact, according to the 2019 BrainStation Digital Skills Survey, 77 percent of UX Designers have participated in workshops, seminars, or industry conferences as a way to keep up with where the field is heading.
So developing these skills is an ongoing process, and one that applies to seasoned and aspiring UX Designers alike. Both can benefit from a combination of certificate courses, industry events, conferences, blogs, books, and more. The fun is in realizing there is always something new to learn; odds are, others are learning right alongside you.
No, most UX Designers are not required to code (at least, not at an advanced level). However, it’s still to their advantage to develop an understanding and appreciation for what Developers do. And if they are able to code? Even better.
Yes, UX Designers should learn to code. While it might not be required, the more programming knowledge a UX Designer has, the better they’ll be able to communicate with the rest of the development team. During the prototyping phase, for example, UX Designers work alongside Web Developers, Mobile App Developers, and others to create a model that will embody all the final product’s main ideas.
End users don’t care how the feel or function of a product was achieved. They only care how it works—and that it works. The first concern (how to use the product) is the UX Designers’ job; the second (that it works properly) is the Front-End Developers’. This essentially describes two complementary imperatives: user requirements and software requirements. It’s to the advantage of everyone for both of these camps to have their champions, focused solely on their own priorities. But that said, the more effectively they communicate and cooperate, the better.
For this reason, UX Designers need to be able to speak the language of both users and Developers. Design often begins with real-world research into the people who will use a product and the environment it’ll be used in, which demands a real ability to listen and place yourself in other people’s shoes. Gaining that insight is the UX Designer’s job, not the Developer’s.
Thus the UX Designer also needs to be able to think like a Developer, to translate user needs into specific design features and communicate those details in the language of development—of deadlines and budgets and what technology can and can’t do. If a Developer tells you a given feature is impossible, how are you going to refute them without first understanding how to make it happen? As UX Designer and Information Architect Ben Shoemate puts it, “Real Designers make their own design work.”
UX Designers who do want to learn to code have plenty of options, with standing as a popular choice to gain coding skills in a relatively short period of time.
It’s also worth noting that, while UX Designers may not be expected to write lines of code, they will be expected to be fully fluent in multiple software platforms.
To be a UX Designer, you will need to develop fundamental skills in user research and persona development, information architecture, wireframing and prototyping, and user testing, among others. A UX Designer’s skill set needs to be broad enough to handle all these tasks—and more.
To become a UX Designer, you will need to have a number of technical skills crucial to the role. These include:
User research and strategy
Research is fundamental in determining users’ needs, and how they’ll interact with and respond to the finished product. For this reason, UX Designers need to be well-versed in research methods, including qualitative and quantitative data collection, and understand how to plan and conduct research and interpret and analyze findings. According to the design team at IBM, user research is key to the early identification of biases that could seriously hamper your product’s success.
Wireframing and prototyping
Obviously, UX Designers need to be very knowledgeable about how users navigate and interact with flows of information. To apply this expertise to the design of products, they also need to be proficient wireframers and prototypers, adept at wielding the industry’s most widely used tools—including Sketch and InVision—to bring their designs to life.
A prototype is not an early version of the final product. It’s a communication tool—the primary communication tool used to convey aspects of the final design’s user-facing elements, both to the Graphic Designers and UI Designers working under the UX Designer, and to the Developers and other team members working alongside them.
User interface (UI) design
According to an InVision survey, 66 percent of UX job postings require UI skills. Visual interface elements like layout, typography, graphics, images, and animated motion are key to the user’s overall experience. While UX Designers may not be the ones putting the pieces together (this work is often done by their user interface or interaction design colleagues), they should have a strong sense of what design elements will optimize user interactions.
Responsive web design
UX Designers should be familiar with the concept of responsive design, which ensures that designs display differently across different screens. This is becoming more important with time, as well over half of all website traffic worldwide is now generated by mobile phones.
UX Designers also need to develop skills that serve the business side of product design, to effectively manage relationships and streamline a design process that comprises multiple departments.
Knowing how to take a project or design from ideation to delivery is important. As a UX Designer, you aren’t solely responsible for the product’s development, but the ability to lead, coordinate, and stay on schedule and on budget will result in a more efficient product development process for all.
UX Designers collaborate with a diverse group of individuals within an organization, including Graphic Designers, technology and development teams, Product Managers, and senior management, to create products with optimal user function. When creating a product or service for a client, UX Designers need to be able to consider, address, and manage the expectations of stakeholders within and outside of the organization.
Because UX Designers work closely and liaise with so many groups of people, both inside and outside an organization, several soft skills also come into play—all of which factor into better teamwork and more effective integration of user input.
One of the biggest challenges to user-centered design is comprehending how users think and act in a given situation; the assumption that users will approach and solve problems in the same way Designers and Developers do is a major pitfall, even leading to the assumption that interaction problems are the fault of users, or the failure of users to follow instructions. UX design means working for users—not the other way around. Understanding how users think and feel is the first step.
Given that UX Designers interact with many groups on a regular basis, the ability to effectively collaborate is essential. Active listening, taking initiative, including and eliciting views from others, and brainstorming are all effective skills that enable successful teamwork. It’s also crucial that UX Designers collaborate with the right people at the right time.
Developing communication skills is fundamental for UX Designers, as they will need to rely on these skills in almost every aspect of the job. Whether presenting to clients and project stakeholders, interviewing users, or collaborating with teammates, UX Designers need to be able to articulate ideas and listen to feedback.
This list may seem daunting—and it’s certainly true that UX design can be a complex process—but someone who has spent time working in development or other collaborative environments will likely have picked up many of these business and soft skills already.
According to InVision’s Product Design Industry Report, design teams are no longer composed of just traditional Designers, but rather a diverse group of individuals from different experiential backgrounds with the skills to design great products.
This means there are plenty of opportunities for professionals to transfer the skills acquired from their previous career and apply them to a future role as a UX Designer.
We’ve laid out a range of skills, both soft and technical, that are transferable to the field of UX design.
Whether you’re a Designer, Photographer, Architect, or an Artist – understanding the power of visuals and how they can be used to communicate is crucial. UX design requires creative thinking and strong design sense, skills that many creative professionals already possess. Visual design can greatly assist usability by drawing the user’s attention to the right place on a web page.
So, having an eye for colour, typography, and core visual design elements is a bonus when transitioning into UX design, especially if you don’t have a traditional design background or education.
Technical skills
Skills like programming, experience with wireframing, prototyping, or industry design tools are excellent additions to a UX skill set.
“Concept sketching and design iteration was another skill that helped in my transition to UX Design. I implement the same concept sketching and design iteration flow when designing for UX,” says Li. “Once I’m satisfied with a concept, I’ll bring my wireframes onto the computer with software such as Sketch to further develop them in higher fidelity. Once the designs reach a certain point, I create a clickable prototype to test and get feedback.”
Familiarity with industry standard design tools like Sketch, InVision, or the Adobe creative cloud can reduce the learning curve when starting out as a UX Designer, and help you master the wireframing and prototyping process.
Research skills
User research is integral to the design process, so any experience with research, whether it comes from a science, marketing, or data background, is valuable. Many careers involve research in some capacity, and these skills can be put into action in the early stages of the UX design process.
“The design process in architecture begins with research. Identifying the goal of the project, understanding the problem, identifying constraints and limitations, and imagining how the occupant will utilize the space in their daily lives,” explains Li.
“The research phase in UX design is very similar to architecture, with the main difference being the end product; physical building versus a website/app, and how the end user will use the product, occupying versus interacting.”
Moving forward in UX design
Recognizing which skills you possess, and which you need to develop further is the first step in making a career transition.
“Start by taking an introspective look at the skills you currently possess, then research different roles within UX that would best utilize them,” says Li. “You just need to learn new skills to supplement the ones you already have and pick the path in UX that makes the most sense for you.”
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