 Hey, my name is Jonathan, product designer at AJ & Smart, and today we're going to give you five tips on how to become a way better UX designer. So what you're going to see in this video is us asking some of our top designers what they use to level up their UX skills and what sort of things they would do if they were teaching someone who is junior, you know, like what way could you level up your UX skills? So what sort of resources would you use or what sort of things would you do? So hope you find this useful and do let us know in the comments what resources or what tips you have for becoming a better UX designer or what sort of questions you have for our design team here at AJ & Smart. Alright, let's go! Hi, I'm Almir and I'm one of the UX researchers on the sprint team and I have two tips for you today to become a better UX and product designer. So tip number one is to subscribe to an awesome newsletter called Product Habits by a guy called Heech & Shaw. This guy has designed and released a few products that you've probably heard of like Kissmetrics and one more that I'm forgetting at the moment but he's a very smart guy and his newsletter is awesome. He pulls articles from the web about product design and stuff that is always a really, really good read. So that's my first tip and my second tip is actually not so much related to one specific person but more of a process that you can follow. So the way that I actually find inspiration in my design work is that I go and look at apps that I really love and I think are really well designed and then I look for the developer that made them and then see if they talk about their design process and their thought process somewhere online. So it could be on Twitter, it could be a podcast, it could be a blog, anything. And so like for me it's following Marco Arment, following Mark Edwards and Jared Sinclair but he no longer posts about these stuff. But regardless of the people that I follow you should just go look at the apps that you love, look for the people who made them and then see if they talk about their thought process because it's really helpful to see how they arrive at the design decisions that they made and I think that will make you a better designer by doing so. So when I meet someone who's trying to figure out how to just get better at being a UX designer or a UI designer and I guess my answer is kind of going to be a bit more boring and tactical than everyone else's. What I get them to do is look at the guidelines for some of the biggest platforms. So for example iOS, so for any Apple device like iPhones, Apple has their own human interface guidelines. In fact there's a whole webpage dedicated to all the different interactions, all the different animations, all the different kind of rules for designing products on that platform and the cool thing is there are really just two platforms, right? There's iOS and there's Android and both of these platforms have really excellent documentation. Both iOS and Android, Google has material design and Google's material design documentation is beautiful, it's really amazing, it's really clear and I think that one really big problem that I see with a lot of designers is that they're sort of learning UX design in an abstract way or they're learning like UX and UI design from apps that are on the market and dribble and these apps are already breaking the rules because the people who are designing these things are often so good at understanding the basics that they know how to break the rules whereas I think it's super important to know the basics and even some of the best designers, I still sometimes see them using like a modal pop-up when it doesn't make sense, having a back button when it doesn't make sense, I think it's important for a designer to know when you tap on something, how do you know whether it should come up over the screen and how do you know when it should slide in from the right and I think things like that are super important to understand and to understand those things, look at the guidelines for iOS, look at the guidelines, the material design guidelines and honestly I think that's like a really, it seems like a really basic tip but I check the guidelines every so often when I'm stuck and I'm wondering oh like should this be an overlay or should I have the tab bar at the end? I think that those sort of things are easily answered when you go and look at the systems and the design systems for these larger platforms and the documentation is really, really great so that's my advice. Hi, I'm Dee, I'm a product designer, design sprint facilitator and designs sprint educator at AJ & Smart and my top tip for progressing your UX product design career is a bit left field and it is volunteering at events, meetups, conferences, volunteering to even just do really simple things like helping run the event, move chairs around, get coffee, all the things that seem like you have more important things to do, volunteering for stuff like that will just expose you to other really cool and probably more senior people in the industry who are running these kinds of events who have probably very interesting careers because they're choosing to run a conference or run an event or run a meetup so that they can share this knowledge and their passion for their industry to the rest of the world and to the design community so exposing yourself to tons of senior people who really care about what they do and you're probably exposing yourself to a ton of information as well probably getting a free ticket to the conference being able to meet all the people that come to the meetup and just exposing yourself to more opportunities in your career and more passion and excitement in your work but there's one caveat I have for this tip is it will not work if you're just using it as a little hack and you don't actually care and you're not actually enthusiastic but if you're super enthusiastic to get into the industry and super enthusiastic about your field, about UX design or product design or whatever it is if you're really excited about it this will work for you this is this work for me from the very beginning of my career I've been doing this volunteering and also running events and I love it and it's made a huge impact on my career I've met people who have offered me jobs then from these kinds of things so it will work as long as you're excited about it My name is Rob I am a product design director here at AJ & Smart My top tip for becoming a better UX designer is to just be really aware of new products that are coming to market and you can gain a lot of inspiration and you can also learn a lot from how new UX problems have been solved but also what I would like to add to that point is that you don't have to be kind of restricted to what's being done always question whether something can be made more streamlined, more intuitive or just more easier to use so use those as a benchmark and then feel free to do your own thing to them I try and do download an app a day and it's just good to really broaden your horizons with using your apps and there's so many apps you can never keep up with them but it's just good to keep your hand in what's becoming the benchmark for best practices within designing mobile interfaces Hi my name is Tim I am a product design director at AJ & Smart and I've been in the design industry for over 10 years now I started off as a UX and UI designer for agencies so one piece of advice that I would give is to find really really good mentors to learn from I really like working with people who have a clear attitude towards the work that they're doing for clients and who didn't just treat it as this kind of like random thing where they're just kind of like doing their magic and nobody really understood what the job was so they had a very very good like a clarity to them how they conducted themselves in their job and they could also very clearly tell you why they were doing things in a specific way and I would recommend everyone who's starting out to look for people like that and ask them a lot of questions and working with people who already had like a long track record definitely helped me because I think especially in the beginning you're feeling kind of lost because it's very overwhelming you know doing like working in your first job and in some company and realizing that you are a little bit out of your depth so yeah I think if you just find one or two persons like that and you get to you get them to share their experience with you and almost like take you under their wings and work with them more often it can really help and I mean usually when you have a relationship to people like that they will also be the first one who approach you and ask you to work on something with them because they know that you are a person who is actually really interested in doing great work with them I mean you really have to show that you want to do these things and that's super ambly but that's my advice so I really hope you like watching this video and I hope there's a few things in there that you can take away do let us know in the comments if you have any other questions or if you have any other tips for us and give this video a like if you enjoyed it now if you're interested in learning more and more and more about product design we do have a weekly podcast every Monday morning called the Product Breakfast Club Podcast also check that out it's a ton of free stuff we've got some really great guests on the podcast like Jason Freed like Kim Scott lots and lots of other guests so if you're interested in the product designer tech world definitely check that podcast out and have a great week bye bye because it makes us feel popular oh hi I'm sorry is us the A.J. in smart app office a**hole we have a bit of hat down on the right hand side here okay bye