If I wanted to become a UX designer in 2024, I’d do this!

The UX design industry has changed so much in the last couple of years because of how fast-paced it is. And if I knew then what I know now, I'll definitely do a couple of things differently. So what would I do differently if I was to start all over? How would I stand out in this fiercely competitive and saturated job market? What are the strategies that I would use to ensure that I land my first job or internship in the shortest possible time? In this video, I'll be answering this question using 7 practical steps that I would take. if I was to start all over. My name is Samuel Fabayo. I'm a senior product designer helping designers reach their highest potential fast. With that being said, let's get into it. The first thing I would do differently if I was to start all over is to start with a clear goal. It took me about 2 years to transition into a UX designer because at the time when I was transitioning, I didn't have a clear goal. I wasn't sure why I wanted to become a UX designer, but I knew that I enjoyed working in the tech industry, and I also knew that I enjoyed solving problems. If I had a clear goal, I would have been able to achieve this at a much shorter time. Transitioning from one career path to another or starting an entirely new career path can be a very ambitious thing to do, and every ambition needs to start with a goal. A lot of people get into the process without clearly defining what their goal is, and whenever things get tough in the middle, they get discouraged and they have nothing to remind them of why they started in the first place. This is why you need a clear goal. Your goal should consist of the following things: a timeline for when you want to achieve it, the reason why you want to achieve it, and some objectives that can help you achieve it. An example of a clear goal could be, by September 2024, I want to become a UX designer in a health tech startup because I enjoy solving problems in the health tech sector while having a rewarding career. To achieve these, I will follow the next steps in this video. You could even design a reward system for yourself for any of the objectives that you meet so that you can reward yourself and encourage yourself to keep going. You can print out your goals, stick it on a wall or on a door so it's in your face every time. The next thing I would do differently is to understand the fundamentals. By understanding the fundamentals, what do I mean? Understand the basic principles of UX design. First of all, I won't separate user experience and user interface design because I believe that They can't do without each other. You cannot do UX without UI and you cannot do UI without UX. The outcome for the user is always dependent on how good the experience is and how good the interface is. So I won't separate both, right? I would consider them as one and I'm putting them under the umbrella of UX design. So I would try to understand the principles of UX design and how to differentiate between a bad design and a good design. Based on this principle. Also, companies are no longer looking for people that are skilled in UX and people that are skilled in UI. Companies are looking for designers that can merge both skills seamlessly to deliver value. With that being said, I will try to understand what's expected of a UX designer. What does the role of a UX designer entail? Who are people that I'll be working with the most? What value does my role bring to a company or to a business? These questions are very, very important because a lot of people skip out this process, and I think I skipped this process as well when I was becoming a UX designer because I was so focused on, oh, as a UX designer, I have to be an advocate for the user at every point in time. That is it. The user has to get the best outcomes and everything. And whenever I found myself talking about UX, I'm talking about user, user empathy, and I'm just throwing all these buzzwords around. But it's not about just throwing those buzzwords around. It's very, very important to understand that as a user experience designer or a product designer, What you are trying to do is to give a user the best outcome while delivering value for the business, right? The business has to make money and the user has to be able to use that product. So your focus is usability for the user and also value for the business. That's why you need to understand what your role as a UX designer is. Another thing is to understand the design processes that you can use to solve problems. Right. The popular design process is the design thinking process and the double diamond design process. But I want you to look at these design processes from a point of understanding, not from a point of following that particular process because it has been stated that you have to do this, then do that, then do that, then do that. No. Understand the process and think about how you can use it in a real-world scenario. For example, the design thinking process has 5 steps, but the truth about it is that in the real world, it doesn't follow this linear pattern. Things change depending on the project that you're working on. Sometimes you start from the very last stage and come back to the first stage. Sometimes you start from the middle and go to the last stage. So things always change. So you need to understand it and know how to apply it in a real-world scenario. The way I think about the UX design process is that it is a 3-step process of discovery, development, and iteration. Right. And at the discovery stage, I'm conducting user research. I'm trying to understand what the user needs to do. I'm trying to understand why the user needs to do that. I'm trying to understand the problem that the business is trying to solve or the problem that we're trying to solve for the user. And in development stage, I'm coming up with all my ideas. I'm coming up with all these solutions and I'm trying to put something in front of the user that I can see how they can experience it and see how I can get feedback from that. And in the iteration phase, I'm putting the user feedback back into the solution and trying to see how I can make the solution better. And all of this could come before each other. Now you need to understand that as well, that you don't follow a linear process as a designer. You follow the process that is required to solve the problem. The next thing I would do differently is to start to learn the hard skills that will make me stand out as a UX designer. The first one is being able to conduct user research yourself. You shouldn't be dependent on a user researcher before you can be able to uncover some problems that the user might be having. This is where you need to understand how to ask questions, and the kind of research methodologies to use. Because when a company is hiring a UX designer and let's say the company is hiring their first UX designer or it's a team of 3 or 4 UX designers, which you find in most companies, and they're trying to hire like a 3rd UX designer or a 4th UX designer, there's a chance that there's no user researcher in that team, right? So you need to step into that role to conduct some user research that can help you provide the right solution. That is how you bring value into the company. So the hard skills that you need to learn as a UX designer is to understand what kind of user research methodology to use for the problem. It's not every time that you have to send out a survey, or it's not every time that you have to interview the users, or it's not every time that you have to do a diary study, right? You need to understand the problem and think about what is the fastest way that I can be able to uncover the problems that the users are facing with this product. When I started out as a UX designer, I would just get into my designs straightforward. I just start designing immediately, right? Because I didn't understand that I always had to lead with the questions. So whenever you are faced with a challenge or a design challenge or a problem, start to list out a couple of questions. First of all, the things that you don't know, right? Who is using this product? How do they get to use it? In what scenario do they get to use it? What are the kind of actions that they want to complete? Why are they completing those actions? There are a lot of questions that you can ask, and when you approach your projects in this manner, you're going to be able to understand the kind of research methodology to deploy to solve that problem. The next thing is to learn a design tool. Of course, it is very, very important for you to know how to use a design tool. When you are solving the problem, one of the ways that you show that solution is through what you have designed. And that is why you need to learn how to use a design tool so that you can quickly think about ideas and iterate on those ideas in the tool and you can quickly prototype a solution. I would always recommend Figma because that's the tool That is the industry standard. That's the tool that most companies use. That's the tool that we use at Monzo. There are several places that you can learn how to use Figma online. One of my favorite YouTube creators that teaches how to use Figma is Miss Cool. You can check his channel and you can see lots of videos on how to use Figma. I also have a couple of videos on using Figma. The next thing you need to do is to learn how to write. I know that, of course, for you to be watching this video right now, or for you to have even come here to come and say you want to learn about UX design, You probably know how to write. But yeah, there's a difference between knowing how to write and being able to communicate properly in writing. It is very, very important for you to level up your writing skills as a UX designer because you're going to need them and it's going to come in handy, right? Whenever you're designing, you always have to prompt the user about the actions that they're about to take. And writing is a key part of UX design. That is why global tech companies have UX writers or content writers. But you might not have the luxury of a UX writer when you start out as a UX designer. So you need to add writing to your arsenal of skills. Also, it is going to become very, very important when you want to start creating presentations or when you want to start communicating your ideas, especially in the world where we are right now where everything is remote, right? We don't have like the in-person communication as we used to before. So now you need to be able to write your thoughts and articulate your thoughts properly so that you can influence your team as a designer. This is one of the things that I wish I also learned early, right, in my career, right? At the beginning, I didn't like to write. I didn't like to write. One of the reasons why I have this YouTube channel is because I don't want to be writing blog posts about the things that I want to share. That's why I'm in front of a camera right now. But I've also realized that it's It is very, very important to be able to use writing to communicate with people. The next one is to leverage AI. Of course, we have to address the elephant in the room, AI. Now, how can you leverage AI? How do you use AI and how can you introduce it into your workflow? The last point I spoke about writing, AI can be your writing buddy. AI can help you generate content that you can use on the product, at least before you have a content writer or UX writer look at the product. Instead of using a dummy text like, you know, Lorem Ipsum, do not do that. You can ask AI to say, hey, could you generate a text for this website that I'm working on? And give AI the context of what you want to do. You can do this on ChatGPT. You need to learn how to write very, very good prompts. If you're able to write very good prompts, ChatGPT will be able to generate writing for you that you can add as part of your designs. Also, even with like the new models of ChatGPT, ChatGPT-4, you can upload images. You can upload a screen of a design that you have worked on or you can upload a screen of a design that you're working on and you can ask ChatGPT to tell you about the usability issues that it can see on that screen and it's going to respond to you, right? There are so many things that you can do with AI. You can do competitive analysis, you can try to understand the competitors of the product that you're working on leveraging AI. The next one is to learn how to find inspiration. One of the things that you would need the most as a designer is to always find inspiration. A creative cannot survive without being inspired. One of the things that you can do is to be observant, look around you, find inspiration everywhere around you, and make sure that you always open your mind to be inspired by the things that you see. The world is a very, very beautiful place. There's beautiful nature around you, so you need to pay attention to your environment and let your environment inspire you so that you can put that inspiration back into your work. The last one under learning the hard skills is challenging yourself, right? This is where you start to put some of the things that you're learning into practice. There are lots of examples of challenges that you can do. The simplest one is having like maybe a 30-day challenge or where you're just designing screens that you see on different inspiration websites. Speaking about inspiration, one of the places that you can get inspiration is mobbin.design. You could go through mobbin.design and see how apps are designed, the apps that we use every day. You can see an app like Coinbase, Airbnb, Twitter, all the apps that we use today, most of them are on Mobbin.design. You can see all the screens and you can even recreate them to challenge yourself. As part of challenging yourself, you can go on Dribbble, for example, and try to recreate some of the designs that you see, but you still need to take that just a step further. So instead of creating a design or challenging yourself with just a Dribbble design, one thing that I would have done then is that I would have thought about challenging myself with user flows, right? So instead of just creating one screen and saying, hey, this is a checkout page, this is a login page, I'll think about challenging myself with an end-to-end onboarding flow. I'll think about challenging myself with an end-to-end checkout flow. I'll think about challenging myself with an end-to-end flow for adding something to a playlist, right? So you have multiple screens that communicates an experience that a user would go through rather than just having like one screen and saying that, oh, this is your 30 days challenge. But yeah, very, very important to make sure that you challenge yourself and you would see that you're not the same designer that you were from the beginning of the challenge by the time you get to the end of the challenge. One of the mistakes I also made was the fact that I didn't identify the soft skills that I needed on time, right? I was engrossed in the step before this, which is learning the hard skills. So I would spend so much time in Figma trying to make something look pixel perfect, trying to make something look beautiful, but I wasn't identifying the soft skills that I needed to thrive as a UX designer. And when I got into the industry full-time and I started working as a UX designer, I started to see why those soft skills are important, and then I started to build them as I was gaining experience. So now what I'm saying about identifying the soft skills is not necessarily saying that you need to have these skills on day one when you start learning how to become a UX designer, but you need to identify them. You need to know that these are the skills that I need so that when the opportunity to deploy those skills arise, you're going to understand which one you need to deploy. So what are the soft skills that I'm talking about? First of all, presentation skills. This one is very, very important because As a UX designer, I don't think you would have a week go by where you don't have to do one presentation or the other. Either presenting real designs in your Figma file or presenting a document or a slide to stakeholders or presenting to your colleagues or your teammates about an experience that you just worked on or that you just created, right? So you're always going to have to present and you need to sharpen your presentation skills. You need to be able to understand how to tell a story when you're presenting. You need to be able to understand how to craft a presentation that your audience can follow. One of the things that helped me with this was because my first degree was in architecture, I always had to present, you know, I always had to present the buildings that we designed, and that happened like almost every semester. So presentation skills wasn't really hard for me to nurture because I'd been doing this since my first year in the university. The next skill that you need to identify is workshop facilitation skills. This is equally important because in the process of gathering ideas or thinking about ideas, you need to bring your team into the brainstorming session. You need to bring stakeholders that you're working with into a brainstorming session, and you're literally the chairperson of this session. So you need to plan ahead for the session. You need to be the one that is going to host this kind of sessions and ask questions and moderate this session. So you need to understand How to facilitate workshops. Again, these are not skills that you need to have on day one, but you need to identify that you need these skills so that you can start gathering resources that can help you get there. The third one is product and system thinking, right? Just being able to understand how to think like a product person, how to think like a true designer, thinking beyond what people see on their screens, beyond visuals, and thinking about the strategy that is driving a particular innovation, thinking about the strategy that is driving a particular product, thinking about the problem that users are facing to the root cause, not oversimplifying the problem, is very, very important. And that is what system and product thinking is. For example, on an online grocery app, the users are adding a product to their cart and they are not checking out. That is a problem. Now, when you want to apply system thinking to that particular problem, you need to understand Why are they not checking out? What was the data that existed before then? Right. How many people are dropping off? At what point are they dropping off? Right. Try to understand all the layers of problems that might exist beneath the surface-level problem that you want to solve so that you can understand the root cause of the problem and you can tackle the problem right from the roots. That way, you're not solving problems at the surface level. That is how to apply system thinking as a designer. The next one, as part of the soft skills that you need to pick up, is effective communication. Of course, you should know how important it is to be able to communicate your ideas to your team members, stakeholders, and even your bosses at work. You need to be able to communicate your idea. People need to be able to understand you. You need to be able to form your opinions based on the knowledge that you have because you've done a lot of system thinking. A lot of product thinking because you've been able to understand the problems and you've been the one that has been closest to the problem. You need to be able to form your opinions and communicate your opinions effectively to the team and make sure that you're understood. Another thing I would've done differently is to stop consuming and start creating early. It's very, very easy to get stuck into the consumption loop. I realized that whenever I wanted to solve a problem or whenever I wanted to work on anything, would just be constantly looking for inspiration and watching YouTube videos and reading something on some material, and I would just keep consuming. And I realized that I wasn't spending enough time actually creating, actually trying to solve the problem that is in front of me. The fastest way to grow is to learn all the things that you've practiced and start to identify your design strengths and weaknesses fast. Once you're able to identify your design strengths and weaknesses, you already know that these are the weaknesses that you need to sharpen. And how can you do this? I spoke about doing like a challenge in one of the steps where you are actually challenging yourself with designing user flows. You can take that challenge a step further now by actually creating an end-to-end experience of a solution for a user and actually solving real-life problems. You could think about one bad experience that you've had with one of the products that you use. It could be with your bank, app. I mean, if you're watching this and you're from Nigeria, we know that a lot of the banking apps that we use are horrible. So there's a lot of room for improvement on the design side of that. So you could pick that solution and design that as well. And I think it's the same thing, right? All over the world, we use products that have one issue or the other, that don't meet our needs in one way or the other. So there's always an opportunity to make it better. Holds an opportunity to redesign it. So this could be one of your challenges that you pick up first. So think about something that you use today. Think about a product that you use today and think about how you can make it better with all of the skills that you've been acquiring from what you've been learning, right? This is where you stop consuming and then you start creating. I would advise that you pick like 2 different kinds of solutions. You could design something for a mobile app and you could design something for a web app. It could be a mobile app and a web app of the same solution, or it could be a different mobile app for a different solution and a different web app for a different solution. If you're not sure about the kind of problems to solve, you can visit this website. I've dropped the link in the description and I'm going to be showing you a little bit about it. The website helps you to solve challenges by giving you different kind of challenges, and it even gives you different kind of tools, UX tools that you can use to solve those challenges. The next thing I would do is to start building my network and showing my work early. What happened then was that I was just really focused on trying to create new designs, trying to get better every day, that I ignored almost everything that was happening around me. I wasn't sharing my work, so nobody knew that I was even trying to transition into a UX designer. I didn't have any designer that I could get feedback from, so I literally just was in my own silo, right? But as soon as I understood that I needed to share my work and I also needed to speak to like-minded people around me, things changed really, really fast. It's very, very important to start to find mentors around you, designers that you look up to that can give you feedback on your work. And it is very simple. There's a network of designers on ADP List that you can book a session with and they can listen to you and give you feedback on your work. If you also have any designer that you look up to and they have a LinkedIn account or a Twitter account, You could simply send them a message. Just make sure that when you're sending them a message, the message you are sending is clear. You have a clear description of what you want feedback on, and the worst that could happen is that they don't respond to you. And if they don't respond, you move on to the next designer. There are designers out there that actually want to mentor other people. Make sure that you're building your network of like-minded designers that are in the same stage that you are, that are trying to become a UX designer as well. And also design mentors that can guide you and help you to nurture your budding career. Another thing that you need to do at this stage is to start showing your work. And this is evident in one of the books that I've spoken about on this channel, which is the book by Austin Kleon, which is Show Your Work. One of the chapters in the book says send out a daily dispatch. This means sending out snippets of your work. It doesn't have to be like the full thing. It could be a work in progress. Just find a way to engage the design community that you belong to. Also, part of showing your work is creating your portfolio. One of the most important project that any designer can work on is their portfolio. Even senior designers struggle with it, right? But this is your passport into any organization that you want to work for, because when you're submitting a resume, your portfolio has to go along with that, and the recruiter is going to judge you on the quality of your portfolio and your resume. But most importantly, they would look at your portfolio, and if you're not able to gain their attention in 30 seconds of them looking through your portfolio, then they might move on to the next person. In your portfolio, you should have at least 2 case studies showing how you've been able to solve a particular problem. This could be the web and mobile apps that you designed in the previous steps. As long as you have those, you could tell stories about how you're able to design that using a case study format. If you don't understand how to write case studies, you can watch this video I made on Writing Case Studies Like a Pro. You can also check out Folio to see examples of portfolios from top designers globally. Folio is a website that I curate, and there are lots of inspiring portfolios there to help you. The last step that I would do differently is to understand the UX job markets. One of the things that I never really struggled with is landing a role as a UX designer. Are you lying? No. Actually, I'm lying. When I moved to the UK, for the first 6 months, it was difficult for me to get a role because I was studying and I was trying to look for a part-time role, and I didn't understand the job market in the UK at the time. But when I started to understand that for me to be able to land the role, I need to find a way to stay ahead of the people that are applying for the same jobs that I'm applying for at every step of the process. So when you think about the job application process, you have the process where you're crafting your resume, when you're submitting your resume or applying for a job, and then when you are submitting your portfolio, when you are interviewing for the job, and when you're completing the interview for the job. These are all the steps that you have from when you're trying to apply for a job to when you get a job. And I realized that in understanding the job market, I need to understand how to stay ahead in each of those processes, just how to stay ahead of the competition just a And in doing that, I quickly understood that whenever I'm crafting my resume, I needed to highlight the most important things, the impact that I had in my previous role and how I was able to solve problems. I need to be able to highlight those in the shortest form, right? So I can have like highlights and make sure that I have a one-page resume. So that's what I did. And then when I'm applying to jobs, I realized that I needed to start tailoring my application. So I needed to start applying to jobs with intention. I don't want to be spraying seeds everywhere with the hope that one of those seeds will germinate. I need to be intentional about how I apply to jobs, and this meant that I had to tailor my application to every job. Sometimes it meant that I had to make little changes and little tweaks to my resume just so that I can tailor my application to that job. So it meant that instead of applying to 25 jobs in a day, I could apply to 2 or 3 jobs in a day, but I'm sure that those jobs that I apply to, I understand the job requirements and I've tailored my resume to that application. I also understood that I needed to make sure that my portfolio stood out, and one of the ways I can do this is to make sure that my portfolio is visually appealing. It stands out. Once they get onto my portfolio, the first thing that they see is to know who I am and immediately get a view of the kind of things that I can do. All the previous works that I have done in very, very convincing imagery, right? So I did that again and I added that into my portfolio. And I also realized that at the interview, I need to stand out. I need to ask questions because a lot of people do not ask questions in interview. I needed to sound confident whenever I'm talking to them, and I needed to be able to talk about how I can provide value to that business, right? So those were the steps that I followed, and As soon as I followed those steps, I saw that things just changed. I just started seeing that I was getting a lot more offers. I wasn't having any problems with my interviews, and I even wasn't having problems landing interviews. So it's important to identify the key milestones from trying to apply for a job to getting a job and seeing how you can be 10% better than the other candidates in the pool. That is how to stand out, and that is how you can get your first job as a UX designer. These are the steps that I would take if I was to start all over to become a UX designer in 2024. You're probably wondering that I did not mention any bootcamps or online courses while I was talking about these steps. The truth is that if I had to go back again, I still wouldn't take a bootcamp because I didn't take a bootcamp before. And the reason for that is because bootcamps don't exactly fit with my style of learning. Now, For you, it might be different. You might thrive in a structured learning environment, but it is very important to note that bootcamps always have this structured way of teaching UX design. In the real world, that doesn't exist. In the real world, there's no one way to solve a problem as a UX designer. So you need to go back to step 2, understand the fundamentals and identify your own design process that would work to solve the problem. That you want to solve. One thing that I should also mention is that for you to be able to stick through this process, you need a very strong mindset. A lot of people are going to tell you that your work is shit when you are posting your work online. People will try to discourage you. You would discourage yourself, but you need to remember why you started in step 1 and keep going. The UX design career is a very rewarding career, but you need to nurture it before it starts to bloom. Thank you for watching this video, and I hope I've been able to cover most of the things that you will need to become a UX designer in 2024. If you'd like to see other videos from me, you can watch this video I made on the design portfolio that got me 4 offers. Don't forget to hit the like button on this video, subscribe to my channel, and share with your friends, and I'll see you in the next one.