If I started UX in 2025, I’d follow this roadmap.

You only need three things to become a UX designer in 2025. Number one, a working computer. Number two, decent internet. And number three, which is the most important, time. In this video, I want to help you become a UX designer in six to nine months. If you're new here, my name is Samuel Fabayo, and I've been a UX designer for eight years. In that time, I've worked with startups in Lagos, Nigeria, and a few high-growth companies in London, including Deliveroo and Monzo Bank. In this video, I'm going to review all the steps that you need to follow to go from someone with zero experience to landing your first job. In 6 to 9 months. You'll be able to apply these steps if you want to be self-taught or if you're more interested in joining a UX bootcamp or taking an online course. But before I get into the content, I need to tell you something. This video is going to be about half an hour long because I want to take you through the full roadmap. So if you don't have the attention span to watch in 5-minute chunks and take notes, you're probably not going to make it. We'll talk about the foundations you need to build, the skills you need to learn, how to choose the right design projects, how to leverage AI in your learning and design process, Things to consider when creating a portfolio, and how to stand out in the job market. That way, you can understand everything I would do differently if I was to start all over to become a UX designer in 2025. By the end of this video, my promise to you is that you'll have every information you need to go from zero experience to UX designer in 2025. Let's get into it. So we'll start with the roadmap and timeline that we're going to follow. We're going to talk about how you're going to go from month 1 with zero experience, zero knowledge about UX, or UI design, or maybe even some knowledge, to month 9 when you land a job as a UX/UI designer. The first phase is learning the foundation, understanding the foundation and learning the skills that you need, which is going to take 3 months. And then the second phase is understanding the kind of projects that you need to work on and leveraging AI to improve your workflow and also leveraging AI to stand out. And that's going to be months 4 to 6. And then phase 3 is landing a job, which is going to be months 7 to 9. To get results from this roadmap and timeline, you need to dedicate at least 2 to 4 hours daily for the first 6 months. This first 6 months is like the most crucial period of everything because that's when you get to do a lot of like the learning and also a lot of the projects that you're going to be working on as well. And to make this really work for you, you need to be able to dedicate at least 2 to 4 hours Um, to this. If you have a lot more time in your hands, I'd advise that you dedicate more time. But this is for someone that probably has like a full-time job and they're trying to transition to UX design and trying to do this by the side. So for phase 1, which is building the foundations and understanding the skills to learn, we'll talk about building the right foundation to set you up for success. But before that, the very first thing that you need to do is to start with a goal. This is really, really important. You need to know exactly why you're doing this. Why do you want to become a UX designer in the first place? When your goal is crystal clear, you'll be able to understand exactly why you started in the first place. Because at any point in time when you feel like giving up, if you don't have a crystal clear goal on why you even started this journey in the first place, it's going to be so hard for you to convince yourself not to give up. Because there's going to be like bumps down the road when you're learning, or even when you're even trying to get a job. Your goal should answer 4 questions: why, when, where, and how. And I'll break that down. So why do you want to be a UX designer? Your goal should answer that question. Then it should answer when you want to achieve that goal of becoming a UX designer. And then where do you see yourself working in? Which industry do you find yourself— do you see yourself working in at the end of this journey? Is it going to be in the fintech industry? Is it going to be in the healthtech industry? Is it going to be in the social media industry or entertainment? Or where do you see yourself working? These are the things that helps you to have really clear goals. And then how do you plan to achieve the goals? What are the objectives that are going to keep you grounded? How do How do you plan to keep yourself accountable? So example of a goal is this: by September 2025, I'll be a UX designer in the fintech industry because I want to build products in the financial services industry. To achieve this, I'll follow the next steps in this video. So let me break down this example goal. The when here is September 2025. The where is the fintech industry. Building products is the why. Your why could be because you want to solve problems. Your why could be because you just enjoy technology or being in a technology company. Your why could be because you want to earn a higher salary, but I don't think that's a good why because it's going to take you a lot of time sometimes before you can start earning really high salaries. So that's not really a good thing to put in your goal. And then your how can now be following the next steps in this video, or your how can be whatever you have planned already alongside every other thing that you get to watch in this video. I would advise that for your wear, you should have a couple of options. So maybe you should have like a primary option for your wear and then have like 2 other options as well. We're going to talk about that later on in this video. So let's get into like the fundamentals of user experience design. First of all, to really understand the fundamentals of UX design, we need to answer a few questions or find answers to a few questions. First of all, what does a UX designer do exactly? What does that role entail? And what value does the role of UX designer bring to a team? Secondly, what's the difference between UX, UI, and product design? And all of these roles that we're always hearing about. What are all of those titles and which of them should you focus on? Also, you need to understand who are the people that you'll be working with? How does a setup of a tech team actually look like? If you're not going to be within a proper tech team, what, what would that setup likely look like? And then what does the design process look like? Why should you care about the design process? How do you even apply this design process in your work? And then how is industry evolving with AI? How do you plan to stay relevant? As a UX designer in the age of, you know, AI agents and automation and all of this new innovation in the industry? All of these questions, um, would be answered in this free course that I've linked here. I will answer one of the questions, but if you take this free test, you'll find answers to the other questions. So the question I want to answer is, what's the difference between UX/UI and product design? To answer that shortly, UX design is, you know, the overall experience of a user with a product, a website, or a service. Notice that I'm not saying like a mobile app or something specific, a product, a website, or a service. So it is basically how a user feels while using a product and even after using it, their experience with using the product or using the website or using the service. While UI design is the visual elements and pages that a user interacts with in a digital product or a website. So when you think about UI design, you think about like all of the visual elements, all of the graphics and everything that user gets to interact with. While using the product. So in UX, you are talking about things like user research, interaction design, information architecture, user flows, wireframes, and even strategy. But in UI, you're talking about things like visual designs, colors, layouts, typography, and patterns. But one thing I want to get across clearly is the fact that you really shouldn't think about these 2 concepts as separate. You should bring them together as one, as UX/UI. Design. User research, visual design, colors, interaction, information architecture, layout, user flows— everything should be together. The thing is, it doesn't make sense for you to really understand only UX design without really understanding UI design, or without really being a UI designer. And does it make sense for you to only focus on UI design without really understanding the experience? Because you really don't want to be a kind of designer that can only make things look beautiful without really understanding the strategy behind it or how the user actually gets to experience it. And you also don't want to be the kind of designer that would think about all of the strategy but can't actually bring that vision to life. This used to happen in the industry before, that UX and UI designers can be separate and people can have these roles separately, but companies can't even afford this anymore. So they want designers that can have a hybrid of both skills. Now you just need to identify what your strengths are, but you need to find ways to blend that blend everything together. And also, if you think about it again in different layers of abstraction, you can think about UX design as going from like UX design and UI design as going from like an abstract concept to like a real concept or like a concrete concept. So for example, the very foundation of the concept of user experience design is like the strategy. This is basically what a user needs and what the business objectives are to meet those needs. And then the scope of meeting those needs as well. What are the requirements to meet those needs? What are the specifications to meet those needs? And then the third layer of the abstraction is what the structure is. What's the information architecture? And then the skeleton, what the wireframes look like. And then the surface, which is like what the finished design looks like, where you start to put visual design, graphic design, and everything that the user gets to. Actually use. So now if you think about it, right, UI design really is at the surface level, and every other thing that happens beneath the surface level is UX design. So if you are trying to focus on being a UI designer, it means that you, you only have about 20% of the skills and you are ignoring the other 80%. And if you are trying to focus on being a UX designer, you have 80% of the skills, but the final 20% that is the visual part that people actually get to interact with You're leaving that on the table, which is why it is important to have all of these skills and see how you can combine them and identify your strengths. And you're probably asking, how about product design? I think product design is a borrowed role and title from like the industrial design industry, and that is because of all of the products that we now have in tech. But essentially, UX design and product design is the same thing. It's just now thinking about user experience and the user interface. That's what makes the entire product design, including like the business objectives, the user needs, and everything that I've mentioned here. So the industry right now calls a lot of UX designers product designers. So it's fine to brand yourself as a product designer because those are some of the roles that you would see. But don't think about all of these things too much. They are all just titles. Now, what should you learn first? That's a really important question because all of this is too much. You can't learn everything at once. So if you look back to the chart again, or to that diagram, the ones that I highlighted here, visual design, color, layout, typography, user flows, wireframes, I believe these are the things that you should learn first. And the reason for that is that they are the visual parts of design. They are the things that people can actually see. And I think they're also the things that are the easiest part of the process. When you learn a design tool first, it is easier for you to really start bringing ideas to life. And you start really understanding what it means to be a designer. And it is also enjoyable because it is tangible. That is the exact reason why I would recommend that you learn all of this visual design, all of these things first: visual design, colors, layout, typography, user flows, and wireframes. And then to learn them, you have to learn a design tool first. And like I said, it's the easier— easiest part of the learning process and it's the most enjoyable. So when you think about it, there are a couple of tools that UI and UX designers use. There are a lot of them actually, but to learn a design tool first, these are like the popular tools in the industry. We have Figma, Sketch, Penpot, Framer, Webflow, and ProtoPie. And all of these tools have like similar and different use cases. For example, Figma, Sketch, and Penpot are used for UI design and prototyping. Figma is like the industry standard that most people use. So that's the one I would recommend that you learn. Sketch is an alternative. Penpot is a free alternative and Penpot is just getting popular bit by bit, just because of the fact that it is free and open source and Figma is now getting expensive. But if you're just still learning as a designer and you just need one account, you can still use Figma. And then we also have Framer and Webflow, which is used for website design. Figma, Sketch, Penpot can all do website design really well, but where Framer and Webflow actually shines is the fact that You can design your website, click a button, publish the website, and the website is live. But, um, I wouldn't want you to really bother about learning these 2 tools right now because everything is still based on design language of Figma. So once you learn Figma first, it's going to be easy for you to transfer those knowledge to other tools like Framer and Webflow. And then the last one is ProtoPie, which is for advanced prototyping. And you can do some prototyping in all of these tools, but if you want to go even one step further to actually get into like advanced prototyping to see how how screens link together and how you have micro animations, ProtoPie is a tool for that. But again, I wouldn't want you to focus on that right now, but just have that at the back of your mind that this might be a tool that you might need later, later down the line, maybe 2 years down the line or thereabouts. So yeah, my recommendation is for you to learn Figma first. Learn Figma first. And these are the 2 tutorials that I would recommend if you want to learn Figma. These tutorials really go into how to understand how to use Figma. And they have like end-to-end projects. So all you just need to do is sit down, watch these tutorials, download the resources for the tutorials, and do everything that they are doing in the tutorial. So you can use that to learn, but you have to go beyond tutorials. You have to really create your own things and you have to make sure that you are training that design muscle, muscle, and that Figma design muscle. You have to keep doing that. And that is where this actually comes in. You can visit a website called mobbin.com and choose 3 mobile apps and 3 web apps. Mobbin is a design repository that has like most of the popular mobile apps and web apps. So you can go on mobbin.com, choose 3 mobile apps and 3 web apps, and then pick 3 key user flows from each mobile app and web app. And then you're going to design a clone of each screen on the user flow that you pick in Figma. So for example, if I go on mobbin.com now, If I go on Mobin now, um, currently coming up. So let's say I go to, um, so let's say I go to Instagram, for example. So this is Instagram. I'm on Instagram currently, and if I click Flows I'm going to see like the different flows on Instagram. So when I say you should pick different user flows, you can pick like an onboarding flow and pick the entire onboarding flow. That's one flow. And then you can pick the flow of, um, editing a profile card. This is another flow. And then you can pick another flow for maybe, um, adding favorites. This is a third flow. You can do that for Instagram. With that, you would have about maybe 16 screens for Instagram that you can pick. And then you can do the same thing for like other mobile apps and web apps as well. And the reason why you're doing this is because you want to design a clone of each screen on the user flow that you pick in Figma. And what I mean by designing the clone is you are going to be a copycat here. You're going to have the screen on this side and you're going to try to trace the screen to have the exact same thing. And you're going to do this a lot of time to really build that rep and design muscle to really understand, okay, why is this button this way? Why is this spacing this way? That would really help you to understand how to space things, how to align things in a design. And to make this really work for you, you need to make it a challenge. So to design at least 3 screens per day for 30 days. And if you look at it, if you have Um, 3 mobile apps and 3 web apps, and you pick 3 flows from each of that, that means you have 18 user flows. The average user flow probably have about 5 screens or more. So by the end, you should have about 90 screens that you'll have done. So imagine in 30 days you've designed 60 to 90 screens. There's no way you're going to be the same designer that started 30 days ago. So that's what I want you to do— clone those apps and design them in Figma. That is how you're gonna learn. You're not going to learn Figma just by watching a video and leaving that. And then once you are done with that, you're going to pick your favorite social media platform and post your work every day. So your platform could be LinkedIn, your platform could be Twitter, but what you're going to do is just post your work every day. You want people to start associating you with growth because when people start seeing like the first one is going to be horrible, the second one will be horrible, the third one will be less horrible, the fourth one will be less horrible, and then there's going to be constant improvement for everything that you do. And people are going to be observing you because you're going to need this later in the— later in this video, and I'll tell you why this is very, very important. But you need to pick your favorite social media platform. It could be LinkedIn, it could be Twitter, it could be Threads, or anywhere, and start posting your work every day. So what should you learn next? The next thing you need to learn, if you go back to the chart again, is the soft skills and the user research. And there are a number of soft skills that you need to develop as a UX designer. There are lots of them, but these are the most important 6. First one is user research. I think user research is like a blend of soft skills and hard skills. And then communication, storytelling, and presentation is also one. Collaboration is another one. Um, product thinking is another one. And then workshop facilitation is another one as well. But I wouldn't want you to bother too much on all of these skills because honestly, personally, I'm still learning some of these skills right now, and I'm 8 years into my design career already. So you can't learn all of these skills in 6 months. The one that I want you to focus on is user research and then storytelling and presentation. The reason why I want you to focus on this one is because user research is really important because it really helps you to understand how to get into the bottom of a problem, to really understand what that problem is, a problem that the user might be facing, and convert the problem into insights that you want to design for, or convert those problems into ideas that you want to design for. Then storytelling and presentation is important because you really have to show your work. You have to tell the story of your work online, in your portfolio, in your case studies, in your interviews. This is why these are the 2 most important soft skills that you can focus on. The other ones, you would always learn them down the line when you get a job. You will learn collaboration, you will learn product thinking, you learn how to facilitate a workshop. So to learn user research, there's a learning material that I've added here. I will link that learning material in the description. Everything that I link in this video or talk about in this video is going to be added into the description. So you're going to have a long list of things to go through in the description. Aside from that, this is coming to the end of your 3-month learning process. So there are other things that I would recommend that you learn as well and that you pick up as well. One of that is like this book, Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman or Don Norman. And the reason why Design of Everyday Things is important is because this book has actually stood the test of time for designers. Been around for like about 20 years, and if any book has been around for that long, then you know that it's a really good book. The other one is a duo, Show Your Work and Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. These are like some of like the most important books that I've ever read about design. See, I have my own copy of the books here. This is Show Your Work, and then this is Steal Like an Artist. And the reason why these books have been such a huge part of my journey is because These books have taught me why it is so important to share whatever I'm working on and use that to really start to get feedback from people, use that to start to build an audience, use that to build a community, use that to network with people as well. And Steal Like an Artist is really going to teach you how to find inspiration. It's going to let you know that there is no unique idea anywhere. An idea is always inspired by another idea. So it's going to tell you how to find ideas out there in the world and use that as an inspiration because you're going to need that as a designer. What you are— your job as a designer is basically to have ideas and help those ideas, make those ideas come to life. And then the third book— the fourth book is Refactoring UI, which is a book that was written by engineers actually, for engineers that were trying to teach other engineers how to create UI designs. But this book has now become valuable for UI designers as well. And it basically just goes into different kinds of user interfaces and different kinds of components and how to design them and how to think about like visual design elements like spacing, line, how to align things and how to make things look clean as a designer. I'll link all of this. This book has its own website. And I think I can't remember how much the book costs right now for Refactoring UI. I think it's a Quite, it's quite pricey, but if you find your way around the internet, I'm not going to tell you how to find it, but if you find your way around the internet, I'm sure you'll be able to get it somewhere and maybe you might be able to bootleg it. Um, all right. Phase 2, which is portfolio projects and leveraging AI. We're in months 4 to 6 now. So this is the next 3 months, 3 months where we talk about how to understand the kind of projects to work on, how to leverage AI. During your learning process and while you're working on your projects as well. So how do you choose the right design projects to work on? And how do you leverage AI to speed up your workflow and stand out in phase 3? These are the questions that we're going to be answering in this section. How to choose the right design projects. First of all, find problems to solve within the industries that you picked in your goal. Remember that when you set a goal, you set that this is a particular industry that you want to work in. So if you have chosen fintech as an industry or you've chosen health tech, for example, you're going to find problems that you want to solve within that industry, either by observing existing apps within that industry or thinking about problems that you are facing that are within that industry that you want to solve. And then you're going to work on at least 3 design projects. So you have 3 months to work on 3 design projects, and then the design project that you work on should have at least 1 mobile app and 1 web app. So the projects you work on should not just be mobile apps or should not just be web apps. You want to be able to work on a mobile app and a web app so that when you're presenting the works that you've done, you can show that you have some kind of range. So for example, this is what a mobile app would look like. It could be an Android app, it could be an iOS app. And then this is what the web app would look like, an app that is accessed via the web. The dos and don'ts for the project that you're going to work on is, first of all, you should design a new feature for an existing app. Let's say your goal is to be in the health tech industry and there's an existing app in the health tech industry that's already popular. You should design a new feature for that existing app based on maybe any kind of problems that you think people that are using that app might be facing, or maybe anything that you— any problem that you are facing using that app. The same thing for a fintech app as well. What you shouldn't do is that you should not redesign an entire app that already exists. For example, don't say that because you want to find yourself because the industry that you find yourself is in entertainment and streaming. Now you want to redesign the entire Netflix app, or you want to redesign the entire Prime Video app. That just doesn't make sense. Instead, think about a new feature on Prime Video or a new feature on Netflix. Or I think I would get into this point at the, I think at the 4th point of this do's and don'ts, but which is basically avoiding popular apps like food delivery, ride-hailing, or banking apps or Netflix or anything that you feel like it's too popular and a lot of people have decided to redesign it. Just avoid those apps and find something new and different. Also, conduct user research before designing screens in Figma. Don't just go into Figma to design screens because when you're presenting your work and you're talking about how you did your work, you have to be able to show the thinking and the rationale behind it, which is why I shared the user research course with you earlier when I was talking about this video, the course that you can take to really understand user research. It's a free course. Yeah, so it's important to conduct user research before you start designing those screens in Figma because that would really help you to understand the rationale behind your designs, and you can add that as part of the story that you tell when you get to the stage where you're working on your portfolio. And I already mentioned this— avoid popular apps like food delivery apps, ride-hailing apps, or banking apps. Find something new and design a new feature for an existing app. So how do you find real design briefs? You can visit www.uxtools.co. I will put that in the comment, in the description of this video as well. You can also visit www.uxl.com. They have real-world UX design briefs. And you can also use ChatGPT to generate design briefs and UX challenges. You can write a prompt on ChatGPT. I'm not going to go into how to write a prompt. I mean, like, that is not exactly what my strength is in. So I'm not going to go into that, but you can go on ChatGPT and then write a prompt to generate briefs and UX challenges for you, and then that can be what you can use for your design briefs. So how do you leverage AI? There are so many ways to leverage AI as somebody that is learning to become a UX designer, or even somebody that's already in the UX design field, and a lot of them are going to be stuff that you can do with ChatGPT. The reason for that is every other tool that you're seeing out there is also a ChatGPT wrapper. So they are using ChatGPT as like their background model that is helping them with all of the queries that users are inputting there. So you could just go to the source, write your prompts, and use ChatGPT as a brainstorming partner all through the process, like all through your learning process, all through your project development process and all of that. Use ChatGPT as your brainstorming partner, ask it questions and let it brainstorm with you. And then also use it as a research partner as well. Before you start designing in Figma, if you've gone through that free research course, all you just need to do is if you've conducted any kind of user interviews or you've conducted any kind of surveys, you can transcribe the interviews, you can upload that into ChatGPT and then ask it to generate themes out of it. When you are writing a prompt for ChatGPT, ask it to act like a user researcher and then ask it to help you get themes and guide you as that. So that's going to be like your research body. And then you can also take screenshots of your designs and upload it on ChatGPT and then ask it to critique the designs and tell you how it thinks, what it thinks about it, how it feels about it. Don't just ask it to critique the design like that. Make it be like you're talking to your colleague or talking to your mate, and you guys can have an argument so you understand how to make the design better. But the highest level thing that you can actually do is to build one of the projects you've designed. Using AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and Veo. And I think there's another tool called Bolt as well. That's the highest leverage thing you can do. That is what can actually make you stand out. Imagine designing a tool and then also saying that this is how it actually works in production. And with AI today, that is possible. This is something that you can do on a weekend without having any coding knowledge. So how can you do this? Just think about like a simple tool that you would use every day. Don't make it complex at all. Think about a very simple tool, maybe like a to-do list app or some kind of calendar app, something simple that you use every day, and then design that and then build it with AI. You don't need to do any research for this because you're building the tool for yourself, so you can think about your own needs. And the reason why you want to do this is that you want to show anybody that you're going to have interviews with later, any company that you're going to have interviews with later, that you actually can think about a solution, you can think about a design, and you can even go one step further to build it because then they start to see you as a resourceful person that actually wants to build their ideas. And one of the best traits that any designer can have is being able to think about how they can actually build their ideas and not just think about, okay, this is design and then I've handed it over to engineers. And where AI is going right now, where the entire industry is going right now, is that designers that ship are going to be a lot more valuable. Designers would have to have more skills. They have to stack more skills. So for example, designers might have to start thinking more about how they can ship changes, ship changes to development. They might have to start thinking about how they can add more skills to the skills that they have already and not just be pixel pushers, right? So these videos are going to help you to understand how you can use one weekend to build one of the ideas that you worked on. Now, once you have at least 2 projects, it's time to start putting a portfolio together. You should be 6 months into your journey now. I want you to have more than 2 projects. I want you to have about 4 projects. But once you have at least 2 projects, you need to start thinking about how you want to put your portfolio together and how you want to start telling the story of your work in your portfolio. So We are in phase 3 now. So you've 6 months into your journey now. You've gone through the first 1 to 3 months where you've learned the skills that you need to develop and you've understood the foundations. And then you've gone from months 3 to 6 where you understood the projects that you need to work on. You've worked on those projects. You've understood how to leverage AI in your workflow. Now you're in months 7 to 9. This is where you now start to understand the job market and understand how you can land a job. As a UX designer, which is your phase 3. And what do you need to do to really increase your chances of landing a job? First, you need to grow your network. Second, you need to create your portfolio. And then thirdly, you need to understand the job market. So how do you grow your network? I believe that there are 3— there are 2 kinds of networking. The first one is horizontal networking, which is finding people that are on the same journey with you by joining the design community. And then the second one is vertical networking where you're networking with mentors that can guide you along the way. A lot of times when people think about networking, they just think about networking as something that you do where you find mentors that are maybe 3, 4 steps above you. They don't think about networking as also being part of a community or trying to network with like your peers, people that are like on the same horizontal path as you, or people that are trying to do the same thing that you're trying to do. You need both of these. You need your horizontal network and you need your vertical network. Your horizontal network is going to be the people that are on the same journey with you that can really help you to understand where you stand and the people that you can really compare yourself to so that you can know where you are in the journey. And then it can also be like your accountability partner as well. They can keep you accountable. You can really understand where they are on the journey and how you measure with them. And you can also understand how you can compete with them as well. Then people in your vertical network are people that are like 3, 4 steps ahead of you that can be your mentors, that can guide you along the way. I think both are important. Then lastly, you need to volunteer if you want to grow your network. You need to offer a lot of free work to a lot of people that you want to network with vertically, or companies that you feel like you have something to offer. You need to offer a lot of free work to people that you want to network with vertically. You need to attend design events, and volunteer to maybe help organize the next one. And this is something that I think a lot of people are actually missing out on. Like, when you are looking for a job as a UX designer, you need to go to where people that have that job actually hang out. So, which is why it's important to attend design events. Now, when you attend a design event, one thing that I will always advise you to do is to make sure that you look for the organizers of those events So when you meet the organizers of those events, you go there and you tell them that, hey, I'd love to volunteer. Find one skill that you have that can benefit them. If you can take photographs, maybe you can volunteer and say that you want to be the photographer at their next event. If you can write or if you can do social media, maybe you can volunteer and say you want to handle their social media page. If you can organize events or you can bring people together, just volunteer and offer something. You can also volunteer to redesign the websites of like NGOs or any kind of organizations that might not have the funds to pay for a website design, but they need that service. So you want to find places where you can do a lot of free work to people that you want to network with vertically, or places that you can do a lot of free work that you can put in your portfolio that you can take it— this is the real work that I've done. And all of this is going to help you grow your network. Next, creating your portfolio. The most important thing that I would advise for when you are creating your portfolio is, first of all, make sure that you have a personal website. You should avoid using any tools like Behance, Notion, or anything that is not a personal website. A website is the best way to show that you can actually organize information on a digital interface, and that's like the basic skill that you need to have as a designer. It is like the basic skill that anybody that wants to hire a UX designer would look out for. Can this person organize information on the user interface? Can they help me navigate through this app easily? Then you need to have at least 3 case studies on your portfolio. You need to write case studies on the project that you did in phase 2 and add them in your portfolio. So this is where you start to write the narrative of the projects that you did, um, the problems you solved, the research you conducted and how you solved that problem. But make sure that you're not just writing everything that comes to mind. You need to make sure that here you're very, very strategic about what you write and make sure that your writing is concise with your case studies. I have videos on case studies and other videos on portfolio on my YouTube channel, so you can just go through that and check all of that. The third thing you need to do is now you need to get feedback. So this is where you need people in your vertical network. You need to show your portfolio to people in your vertical network so you can get feedback. But beyond showing your portfolio to people in your vertical network, you also need to know what people in your horizontal network are doing. How does their own portfolios look? Does it look better than yours? If you can see, you can tell. If you see their portfolio, you can tell if this person's portfolio looks better than yours. So you know that you need to do better if that person's portfolio looks better than yours. So that is why your horizontal network is important. Your horizontal network is how you understand where you stand in the competition. Now, the portfolio website builders that you can use to build your portfolio is Squarespace, Wix, Framer, and then Webflow. I already spoke about Framer and Webflow. It is very easy to design a website on them and publish them to life. And then you have Squarespace and you have Wix. Now, these tools are good for As portfolio website builders, but they have like their different strengths and weaknesses. I believe that the further up you go in the tools, the more complex it becomes. So Squarespace and Wix are easier to use. Framer and Webflow are more complex, but at the same time, Squarespace and Wix will give you generic portfolios because they have templates. So your portfolio can look like the hundred other portfolios out there. Framer and Webflow can give you really unique portfolios if you're able to. Maneuver your way around it. So this is where you find what is important to you and try to make sure that if you're using Squarespace and Wix, you still try to customize it so that it doesn't look like every other portfolio out there, because it's going to help you get your portfolio out there faster. If you want to use Framer and Webflow, make sure that you're not spending the entire time to make your portfolio look unique, but then you don't have a portfolio at the end of the whole thing. So Balance is very, very important here. Next, understanding the job markets. The most important thing about understanding job markets is to know that to beat the job market, you need to understand the hiring process and identify how you will compete at every step of the hiring process. If you think about the hiring process and the process that it takes to get a job, you have the typical UX hiring process has like the application review, which is after you submitted an application. You have the portfolio review, and then you have the interview process where you could have like a recruiter interview, portfolio presentation, a task, and a final interview before you then get an offer. You need to really understand all these steps of the process and see how you can increase your odds at every step of the hiring process. That's the question you need to ask yourself. How can I increase my chances at every step of the hiring process? And that's your job as a UX designer as well, because as a UX designer, you always need to think in journeys. You need to think about the user journey and see how you can optimize every phase of the user journey. So when you think about trying to get a job as a UX designer, it's going to help you to think about everything in like different steps and say, what can I do to stand out here? How can I be 10% better here? How can I be 10% better here? How can I be 10% better here? So this is an example. About 2 to 10% of candidates who submit their applications get a job interview. It's important to note this stat— statistics because I want to use this for an example. So let's say that for every job that you apply for, if 100 other people apply to that job with you, about 10 people are only going to be called for the interview and then 1 person is going to be hired. So knowing that we have the statistics now, let's look at this scenario. So let's say 100 people have applied for a job. Now, to be the person that gets into the next phase of this, which is being able to get into the portfolio review stage, what you really need is a decent resume and a catchy portfolio. Your resume needs to be able to communicate how you can solve problems or what you've done in your past roles, or if you haven't had any kind of experience before, any experience that you can adding to it that you've done. Just show how you've been able to solve problems before in a previous role, in a previous experience, even if it is not like a real full-time experience, because you're going to have to start from somewhere anyways. But what you need to be able to communicate with in your resume is how have you been able to solve problems in the past, because that is what your role as a UX designer is. But beyond that, you also need to have a catchy portfolio, because in most cases they might not even look at that resume because if you're applying for an entry-level role, they might understand that you might not have prior experience. So they just want to see what your portfolio looks like. So you have to make sure that your portfolio looks catchy, at least at a first glance. It needs to look catchy. Again, this is where your horizontal network matters because when you understand what your horizontal network is doing in their own portfolios, you can see that, okay, I need to way better than this. And then you also need to see portfolios of people that are ahead of you and understand what it actually looks like. Then once you get to like the portfolio review stage as well, all you need to do at this stage is then have an interesting portfolio. Because now you've passed 100 people and then they are reviewing portfolios of 20 people. How do you stand out here? How does your portfolio get interesting? So that's where your case studies then come into play. Your case studies need to be really good, and your portfolio just needs to be interesting generally. And I have, I have a lot of other videos on like portfolios and how you can really make sure that your portfolio is interesting and how your portfolio can have some personality. And also beyond your portfolio or beyond your case studies, a lot of times recruiters also want to understand the person behind the portfolio as well. So talk about yourself, talk about like your journey, talk about the things that you enjoy doing, inject some personality into the portfolio. Don't just make it look like some template that you ripped up online and then added projects to it. So the next one is you get interview invites. So let's say you're part of the 8 people that have gotten invites for an interview. Now at this point, at this point, once you get like 8 people, it means that you can actually get the job. You can actually get the job at this point. And what you need to do here is to really understand the interview process. Like, if you understand like the interview process and make sure that you're confident, you're coherent, and you're concise. And when you think about the interview process for this, they're really— they've gone through your portfolio already, they've gone through your resume, and they probably think that you have the skills. So they just want to confirm if you have the skills by asking you a bunch of questions, by asking you to present, by asking you to describe things, by asking you to talk about how you're going to provide value to the company that you are applying for. And the 3 things that they just want to see is, is this person confident? Can they really talk about their work or can they defend their ideas? Is this person coherent? Can they talk and carry people along in what they are saying? And is this person concise? Are they rambling around and going around their circles in what they are saying, or can they pass across a point and make us understand it? Once you nail confidence, coherence, and conciseness in your interview, you've done like 80% of the job of passing an interview. And the way to nail confidence, coherence, and conciseness is practicing. Practice again and again. Practice your portfolio presentation again and again. Practice the questions, practice the answers. And then once you do all of this, you're going to be a lot more confident and then you're going to get the offer. Yeah, that's it. The slides I went through is available in the description of this video for free. It will have links to all the resources I mentioned in this video. All you need to do is click the link in the description to subscribe to my newsletter and I'll send you a personal copy. If you're already in phase 3 of your journey to becoming a UX designer and you want to write the perfect case study for your portfolio, then watch this video next and I'll see you there.