Why online UX design advice doesn't work in real life

I recently paid £1,000 for a course on UX strategy, and I didn't just buy the course, take one lesson, and forget about it. I took it seriously. I watched the lessons, I took notes, I studied the frameworks, and I applied them properly. And after all that, nothing worked. In fact, by the end of the course, I started thinking to myself, did I actually learn anything I didn't even know already? Maybe you haven't spent £1,000 on a UX strategy course, but it's very likely you've experienced your own version of this. You followed UX advice you keep hearing online. You've polished your portfolio website. You've rewritten your case studies multiple times. You started posting your work online. You learned AI because somebody told you that designers who don't use AI will be replaced by designers who do. You weren't just watching the YouTube videos and Instagram Reels. You actually followed most of the advice. So why didn't it work? When nothing changes, the easiest thing to do is to conclude that the problem must be you. Maybe your portfolio still isn't good enough. Maybe you're not posting consistently enough. Maybe you need another course, another portfolio template, or another complete redesign of your portfolio. But this isn't always the case. In most cases, the problem isn't you. It is the advice that you followed. Not necessarily because every person posting about UX online are giving bad advice. There are success stories that prove the advice actually works. The problem is that many of those success stories are edge cases and outliers. What you see is the polished portfolio that landed the job. What you don't see is that the person already had 5 years of experience in a recognized company on their CV. Online, the few success stories get presented to you as proof that it works, and then the algorithm takes over and amplifies it because it gets a lot of engagement. So the advice that reaches you is not always the most useful advice. It is the most engaging advice. And by the end of this video, you'll understand how useful advice about standing out as a designer gets stripped of all of its context, why the same tips stop working once everybody follows them, and how to tell whether a piece of advice is actually right for you. So here's why most online UX design advice doesn't work. In real life. I've posted a lot about UX on this channel. I've made videos about portfolios, interviews, storytelling, craft, standing out, and what hiring managers are looking for. Some of that advice has helped people. Once in a while, I get DMs from people telling me that they applied some of the frameworks that I share on this channel and it helped them get a new job or get promoted. So I'm not here to tell you that I have suddenly seen the light and everybody else is a fraud. I'm admitting that it is much easier to package advice into an 11-minute video than share everything that actually happened in reality. Because reality is often messy and packaged advice is rarely grounded in that reality. Most times, it's a checklist of things you need to do without factoring in your own situation. And to understand how that checklist fits into your scenario, you need judgment. Judgment is the missing piece from most of the career advice that you see online. The good thing is your brain already exercises judgment subconsciously, so exercising judgment is not a foreign concept to you. For example, my videos are more popular in Nigeria than any other part of the world. This is because people that watch me from Nigeria feel they can relate to me better because I look and talk like them. That's subconscious judgment. But how do you move from subconscious judgment to conscious judgment? Most online UX advice is a snapshot in the timeline of somebody else's career journey. It captures what they did at the time. It does not really capture everything that made what they did work. In fact, I wish all advice you get on the internet could come with some kind of warning label that tells you this worked for this person at this stage of their career in this specific market for this specific problem so that you can understand the context behind the advice that you're getting. Unfortunately, that's impossible. Every packaged advice that gets to your timeline has been stripped out of most of its content context, and the one that rises to the top of the feed usually has 3 qualities. It sounds certain that it will generate results. It is generic enough that it looks like it works for everyone. And it sounds easy to achieve. Thank God the days of content claiming that you can become an expert UX designer in three months from zero experience are over. But that's a good example of the type of content that rises to the top of your timeline. It's certain, it's generic, and it sounds easy. The problem is a real career is none of these things. A career is contextual. Things compound slowly, and you often don't know whether a decision that you made was right until much later. That is why. Popular content on the internet is a trap that you must avoid because popularity doesn't automatically mean useful. The platform is measuring whether you clicked, watched, saved, or put down a comment. It is not measuring whether it worked for you 6 months later, whether you got the job, or if you got promoted, because there's no way you would know. So when you see advice everywhere, do not immediately assume that you're seeing evidence that it works. Sometimes you're seeing evidence that it is easy to consume, which is why it has gone viral in the first place. There's a third problem that I believe is the most important to understand. Most of the advice that you see and interact with takes you from just okay to good enough, and it stops there. Because once good advice becomes popular and enough people adopt it, it stops creating an advantage that can help you stand out. For example, um, 10 years ago, having a polished portfolio website could separate you from other designers immediately. Today, a polished portfolio website is the floor. It may get you shortlisted, but it doesn't significantly increase your chances or guarantee that you will be invited for an interview because it's so easy to have a polished portfolio now if you know what you're doing. Again, 5 years ago, posting your work online twice a week is enough to get you noticed. Today, doing the same thing without a strategy can barely give you an advantage. Can you see where I'm going with this? Simply following popular advice and doing exactly the same thing that popular videos and reels are asking you to do will only take you from okay to good enough at best, and there's too many designers that are just good enough. To stand out, you need to unlock the next level. When I started this video, I mentioned that I paid £1,000 for a course and I learned nothing. I was literally in the same place after I finished the course and I finished applying everything. So why did I take this course in the first place? I got some feedback at work that I needed to be better at UX and product strategy so that I can influence my team as a designer. This was around 2 years ago, around 2024. So naturally, the first thing I did was to go find a course about product strategy so I could address this feedback. When I finished the course and applied what I had learned from it and saw that nothing worked, I took a step back to understand what the problem was and why everything I have tried isn't working. Then I realized that the reason was because I didn't even understand why I got this feedback in the first place. I didn't understand the problem I was trying to solve by enrolling for this course. So I went back to the project I worked on before getting that feedback, and I asked myself one simple question. How could a better product strategy have helped me arrive at better results for this project? After doing this exercise and answering these questions, it became clear what I could have done differently based on the context of the product I was working on, based on the context of my team and my stakeholders and everybody that I collaborated with. Then I was able to find the fundamental principles in the course and apply some of those frameworks to my own situation. And it didn't take long before I noticed a difference in how I work with my team. So the course wasn't necessarily the problem, the same way the advice that you get isn't the problem. The problem was that I blindly adopted the frameworks that somebody else used to solve their own problems without asking myself the right questions to understand the foundational principles behind those frameworks. And you might think, of course, that's simple. You should have done that. But you have no idea how much we do this by consuming content and just going ahead without asking the right questions before applying the advice. So before you apply popular advice to your own situation, there are 3 questions you need to ask. The first one is, what exact problem does this solve for me? For example, when someone asks you to polish your portfolio or improve the quality of your case studies in your portfolio, it solves the problem of having an organized way to show your proof of work. That's what you're solving for. You want to show people that, okay, this is the work that I have done. It doesn't automatically solve poor targeting, weak relationships, or a lack of real experience. And any of this could be the actual problem. Maybe your portfolio isn't even the problem. Similarly, posting more content about your work can help you solve a discovery problem because when you post content, people discover you, more people find you, but it does not automatically solve the credibility problem that makes people to trust you if the work that you post lacks quality and consistency. Another one, using AI in your work can increase the quantity of the things that you create, but it does not automatically make the quality better. It doesn't give you taste, it doesn't give you judgment, it doesn't give you a unique point of view that gives confidence that you're a designer that can bend any tool to your will to achieve your goals. You need to consistently name the problem first. If you cannot name the problem you're solving, do not assume that the advice you're getting, even from this video, applies to you. The second is, what needs to be true for this to work for me? Every piece of advice has underlying conditions that makes it work. If somebody tells you to pitch your work directly in people's DMs, you still need a relevant reason to contact the person you're DMing and something useful that you want to offer. If you haven't done this groundwork, the messages you send is just going to bounce. Nobody's going to respond to you. If somebody tells you to specialize in a specific design niche or a specific industry, there should be some kind of thesis around the demand that you've already uncovered for that specialty and some kind of proof that you can operate within that specialty. If they tell you to be a generalist, you still need to have one dominant skill that is strong enough to earn trust and get your foot in the door before you start demonstrating your other skills. So can you see how when you get this advice, you need to think about how it works for you and how you can tailor it to your own situation? The idea here is to always question the assumptions that the advice is based on and then check whether those assumptions Are true for you. If they are true for you, the next thing you need to do is to ask this question: how can I build upon this advice and make it great for me? Because it's one thing to get advice, and it's another thing to make it really, really work for you, to make you go from good to great. What's one thing that I can do that very few people have thought about? An example of popular advice is to avoid writing too much case studies in your portfolio and to show more visuals to represent your work. If everyone follows this advice, they'll be good enough. So to make it great for you, what would you do differently? Can you make your own prototypes interactive? Can you introduce some motion to your designs instead of static visuals? Can you completely go against the advice and write long case studies but make it worth reading? Questioning the assumptions behind popular advice and intentionally going against popular convention is the strategy that the designers who stand out use. To compete at a different level and achieve their goals. If you want to learn more about these popular assumptions and how to compete at a different level, watch this video next where I break down the different levels designers compete at and the levels most designers get stuck. I'll see you in that video.