 So there are basically three different ways you can make more money as a UX designer or UI designer, to be honest, these rules apply both ways. And I'm going to jump into them. I'm going to give you a lot of detail on each of them. And I'm also going to be practical things you can do to actually, if you choose one of these paths to actually execute those paths. If you don't know me, if this is your first time coming to this YouTube channel, my name is Jonathan. I run a company called AJ and Smart. We work with all of your favorite companies. It was a UX design company, like specifically UX design company. Today it's more of a product strategy company. I'm the founder. I also was a UX designer. I'm still a UX designer, but I just don't do so much UX anymore. I hire UX designers. I decide their salaries, whether they're in house or freelance. And my company also goes and trains other companies in UX and in other sort of designing things. So I know a lot about how much money UX designers make and also get to see the types of designers that tend to make it to the top of the pile. Now, I know when we do any video related to money, there's people in the comments saying, oh, well, that doesn't apply to my case. And I'm not trying to reach every single person here. I'm basically looking at designers who are maybe beginner or mid-level and want to make lots more money. That's basically what I'm trying to do here. And if it doesn't apply to you, I'm sorry. Well, you can just stop watching the video. Okay, let's just jump into the three things. Number one is just getting really good at what you do, meaning the skill of UX design, actually the thing you do day to day, just becoming the absolute best at this. Meaning you just focus in on your craft. You don't try to learn anything else outside of your craft and you just become an absolute master. Now, this is really one of the most difficult paths because it actually requires a lot of talent. And to be the best in the world at something and to be in the top 1% of something requires not just a lot of practice, but also a lot of inherent skill. So the best UX designers in the world, you know, they work at companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google. And these people are getting paid a lot. But they're also extremely good at what they do. And they focus 100% on their craft. So one way to make more money as a UX designer is simply just focus everything you have on just becoming the best at that one thing. The best at becoming a UX designer. This is not the path that I specifically took at AJ&Smart. But there are employees at AJ&Smart who just focus on making the best prototypes, being the best product designer in the end, being the best UX designer. And these people can make it to the top levels in terms of salary. However, what I will say is that, at least from my perspective, these people were already uncommonly talented when I met them, even when they were junior. So I do think this is a route that has some limitations when it comes to pure skill. But really, that is one of the paths. If you want to make more money, and I know this is the most obvious and boring one to start with, but I want to start here just because I know if I don't, then there'll be people in the comments saying, oh, what if I just get really good at UX? Yes, that is a path. Just be the absolute best. Get a lot of practice, and just be amazing at UX design. A couple of the things that I've seen the best designers do and the best, like, highest-skilled UX designers do. Number one, they're obsessed with the product and tech world. They're always downloading the newest apps. They're super curious about what's going on in the small details of every single digital product. They're just completely immersed in that space. I know that I've had a lot of conversations with UX designers at AJ and Smart who want to be at the top salary level, but also they can't tell me really anything that's going on in the industry because they don't really care about it. Their hobby is not UX design. Their hobby is not product design. And I think it's really hard to get amazing at something if you're not obsessed with it. So one thing you can do if you want to be the best is try to become absolutely obsessed with that topic. And it's not just your job, but it's also your hobby. And that's really the best people at anything. Their job is also their hobby. Another way to become an amazing UX designer is just get crazy amounts of different experience. This means if you're working at a corporate and you've been there for five years, that's not going to get you a lot of exposure to working on lots and lots and lots and lots of different products at the same time. Or within like three months of one another, what I've noticed is that people who've worked in a lot of startups in the early days, a lot of hyper growth startups who've had to do a little bit of everything tend to actually be the best UX designers that I meet. And later, of course, when they're in their 30s or mid 30s, they go to Apple and stay there till they retire. But in the beginning, how they got good at something was just repeated practice over and over again with different types of product. So I do think if you want to be a top level UX designer and get paid the top salaries, having a lot of different experience is going to help you there. Now, I'm not going to go into this video how to get jobs and stuff. I'm just talking about, well, what do the best UX designers actually do? And the best UX designers, they're obsessed with UX design. It's a hobby. For me, when I would finish work here, I would just go home and read UX books. I would be on Smashing Magazine website, just looking at all the new things coming up. I'll be downloading every app. I'll be buying tech products just to look at what's going on. What are the little animations? I was deeply obsessed with UX design. And I still didn't even become the best UX designer. We hired people who are way better than us. But it was something that was part of my life. It was my hobby. And it wasn't something that I switched off at 5 p.m. And also, by running an agency, that's another thing you can do, go work in an agency that has a lot of products coming through the door every day. By running an agency, I got to see so many different products from so many different companies all the time, exposing me to different UX teams, to different UX patterns all the time. And it just kept me really sharp while I was actually doing that type of work. So again, the first thing you can do to make more money as a UX designer is simply become an amazing UX designer. Again, that's the maybe most obvious one of all of these, but I have to put it in the start to avoid you pesky commenters pointing out that that is also a path. Number two, another really great way to make more money as a UX designer. And I think this is probably more realistic for a lot of you, because if you're not naturally the absolute best in the world, then you have to take the other paths if you want to bring up your salary. And this is more of the path that I took, to be honest. So I'm just straight up admitting that I am not the best UX designer on the planet. And so I decided to take this path and the next path, which is number three. So this path is moving away from execution. Maybe they'll put a little circle on the screen here like execution written here. So moving away from execution and moving towards strategy. So what do I actually mean by this? Like most UX designers, when they start their career, if there's this line and the two dots on either side, so we've got execution, we've got strategy, most of you are more on this side. You're more on the execution side. You're actually doing wireframes, doing screens, doing the actual building UX work, doing the actual research, heads down in the trenches, doing UX. And later, a lot of UX designers who make their way to the top of the salary pool, you'll see that they do a lot more strategy and a lot less actual execution. Now a lot of people don't like to do this. I'm not telling you you have to do this. This is just showing you a suggestion of something you could do. So a lot of the people who make their way up the salary bracket, they move from, hey, every day I'm making screens to, hey, now I'm part of the conversation about what this product is even going to be in the first place. Now I'm talking about what the business model behind this product is. Now I'm helping the company figure out what the strategy is to get from we need an app to this app is actually making money. And so this is the path that I took. So early on in my UX career, I had the feeling that I just wasn't loving the execution as much as I used to. I wasn't loving the research. I wasn't loving making all the screens and I wasn't loving doing the actual UX. Although it was something I enjoyed, I didn't love it anymore. And I feel like I just got a little sick of it and sick of making app and app and app and app and over and over again. And I started to think, well, what if I could be more involved before we even get to the execution phase? And so I started learning strategy and I started learning things that would help me get a seat at the table with the people making the business decisions before the UX stuff even happened. And actually, there was a long phase where, you know, I would be sitting at the table on the strategy side being part of the strategy conversations, but then also going away and doing the execution work. So it doesn't have to be one or the other. It's more like maybe moving that dot more into the middle or more towards the strategy side. Strategy tends to make more money. People who are doing strategy tend to make more money than people who are doing pure execution unless they're the best in the world, you know, C.1. And so really moving that way is going to help you automatically bring that salary up because you just become more valuable to the business side of the business. So what are some things that you can do to start moving from pure execution to strategy? Well, the first thing is just learning more about what strategy is. And when I say strategy, I mean a mixture of strategy and business modeling and all of this kind of stuff and a couple of books that I would read just to understand the bigger picture of the product you're working on. And that's it. Strategy is, can you understand the bigger picture of the things you're working on, including the business models, including the strategies, including the mission, the vision, all of that kind of good stuff. So a couple of books that I would recommend to dig into or if you don't want to read books, maybe just look at YouTube summaries and try to understand it. The first one is the Lean startup. This book really shows you how someone can go from nothing to a successful product and how they think before any of the design stuff even happens. So the Lean startup is just one of the most famous books on building products in sort of Silicon Valley style, which is something that you'll see played out through a lot of other companies. And I think it's a fantastic starting point to start to get a feeling for, ah, that's like what the pre-execution steps are before you even make one button. So the Lean startup, I think is really an essential book to read if you're a UX designer who wants to bring yourself a little bit towards the middle. Another two books, this is sort of like a duo that I would add to your reading list if you want to move more towards the strategy side would be Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Design. These books go really well together to help you understand how companies come up with, well, business models. And I think that's a really important thing for product design. You need to understand the business model behind what you're actually doing. And if you can understand that, you're going to show the people you're working with that you're just extremely valuable. And Value Proposition Design, well, I think that's just a huge part of building any product. How do you actually make this product seem valuable to the customers who are going to use it? These books together, I think, are a great overview on just business models in general. And the third book I'd recommend if you actually want to move in this direction and that's something that you want to do is Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. I think this is the best book on strategy that I've personally ever read. Now, there are other books that have Blue Ocean Strategy that's playing to win. I would actually recommend reading all three of these together. But if you only can read one of these strategy books, if you don't want to, like, read them all, then read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. That's a really excellent overview of the strategic process at companies. I will also give you a lot of, like, the buzzwords and all the stuff you need to have in your head around how that all works. But there's an article, if you really just do not want to read any of this stuff on strategy, there's an article that we'll link down in the description, which is called What the F*** Is Strategy. And this is just a such a good, quick overview of product strategy, of business strategy, and just read that, I guess it will take, like, 10 minutes to read that entire article and then you'll have a better idea. Maybe it will get you excited about the strategic side of things. So that's point number two, how to make more money as a UX designer. It's moving yourself, if you want to, if that's what you want to try, more from execution to strategy. And you don't have to go the whole way. If you can be here, you can be here. I've moved my company, like, over the center line, more towards strategy. We do a lot of strategy work now, but we still have lots of great UX designers here. We still do a lot of design work, but we're definitely leaning more on the strategy side, just because we feel like that's where we deliver the most value. And yeah, that's the second thing I would consider. And really, these books are a great starting point to see if this is something that maybe you're excited about. The third thing is layering on high value complementary skills. Now, this is going to blend a little bit into number two, but it's a little different because it doesn't focus specifically on strategy. It's looking at what other things can I learn that can just make me more valuable as a UX designer, that can make the work that I do as a UX designer more valuable to the company. And also, if you're lucky, adding these skills on can also make your work life more varied and more enjoyable. So I'm just going to give you an example of something that I layered on top of my UX design skill. Now, okay, I layered on some strategic thinking stuff. That's true. But I layered on, like, a kind of a hard skill as well. And that hard skill was facilitation and workshopping. And that was the ability to bring a group of people together when we're in this early collaborative stage where we're just sort of coming up with the ideas for a product. And I learned how to be the person that can run that entire collaborative session. If you're watching this channel, you know what a workshop looks like, whether it's in person or remote. But a couple of years ago, or like five or six years ago when I was starting to get into that, it was just something that was never even on my mind as being something that a UX designer does, which is kind of funny. But we would have like, we would be working with a client and then an external agency would come in and do a little workshop for us and then they would go away and then we would do the execution work. And I was always thinking, these guys are getting paid a lot of money to do this thing. I wonder if I could also do it. And the other thing is, I also realized my UX design work is going to be a lot more enjoyable to do if I'm part of the process where the product decisions are getting made. And so workshopping for me and facilitation were the easiest things to layer on for me as a UX designer. I would also make my work more enjoyable, more varied. I could do less execution work, more workshops. And also the cool thing is, back to the previous point, I also learned how to run strategy workshops for clients. So it also helped me with this sort of point two. I mentioned that there was going to be a bit of blurriness between point two and point three. So for me, that layering on of that skill was killer because I was able to, I was a super versatile UX designer. Eventually what I did is I dropped most of my execution work and now I run a lot of workshops or I'm running the workshops before my team actually goes and does the UX work. I just really personally enjoy that type of work where you're coming up with the concepts where you're coming up with the overall strategy and you're like doing all of the pre-work before you go away and hammer out the screens and do the user research, et cetera, et cetera. And you're getting to, you know, bring these people together, these creatives together and just help them do their best work. I love, I love facilitation. I mean, that's a big thing for me. Now, there are other things you can layer on and there's a couple of things that I've seen work for other people. You can layer on the ability to do web development or development in general so that you're a full stack designer. So you're basically someone who can not only design things but also develop things. And I think that's pretty, they call it like a unicorn, someone who can do everything. And those people are really, really, really special and if you're like the best of those types of people, you can get an amazing salary. I know a couple of designers who can like design something and also do the front end development and I'm always blown away by these people. That was not something I was personally interested in doing. I did try. I learned like JavaScript and HTML and CSS and I used to like design websites and I thought I was going to go in that direction but it was just not something for me. I knew I couldn't be the best at being a UX designer who was also a developer. Another skill you could layer on is a deep research skill. So we have UX designers at AJ and SMART who also have a background in research and actually studied research and are really amazing at doing that part. Again, that wasn't the thing I love to do but that's also definitely a path. And by the way, I know that there's going to be some people here saying, wait, isn't UX design also research? No, there are UX designers who are doing user research and then there are UX designers who are absolute experts at research and who've actually gone to college and studied how to do research and have a whole background in it. And so we hire those people who are research heavy when we want to put them in a UX researcher role. So they're not the same thing. It is actually an extra skill that you would add on top of your baseline UX skill. It's a specialization. So that's it. That's my third point is that you can find something that you enjoy, hopefully, that you can layer on top of your UX skill that just makes you more valuable. If you're interested in learning more about how to layer on the facilitation skill and the workshopping skill, we've got like a ton of free resources on that. Down below, you'll see a training. We'll say free training. It's like one hour from zero to becoming someone who can actually do that kind of stuff. So that's a one-hour free training. Check that out down below if you're interested in that sort of thing. If you're not, well, there's loads of other stuff you can research online around adding those other skills on. So for me, when I look at my last 10 to 12 years of being UX designer, I'm saying 10 to 12 because I don't know if I should count when I was a web designer for two years. But my last 10 to 12 years of being UX designer and looking at and hiring other UX designers, dealing with their salaries, dealing with my own salary, working at lots of other companies seeing the salaries. These are really the three things that I've noticed that helps UX designer go from, you know, whatever salary they're on to growing their salary to wherever they want to go or at least progressing their salary upward. And that's also throughout all the different countries and parts of the world that I've been to. The numbers are not the same, but the growth of someone's salary tends to culminate around these three things just to really summarize very quickly. One is just get amazing at what you do, like specialize down into UX and just be the absolute best in the industry, be the top 1%. I do think this is the most difficult one to do because the competition is just really extreme and you have to be naturally talented. And again, this is not something that I knew I wasn't a natural UX talent. I'm a good UX designer. Maybe I'm even a great UX designer, but I'm definitely nothing compared to the UX designers that work at my company today. So I don't even, I didn't even want to compete with them. Number two is move away from execution a little bit towards strategy. It doesn't have to be the whole way, but just getting a little bit more of that strategic thinking hat on and adding that to your repertoire of things that you do as a UX designer that can really help you get a seat at the table and be part of the decision-making before you even do your UX work. And number three is adding skills to what you already do that are complementary to what you do that make your work maybe even more enjoyable but are also high-value skills that companies actually want so that you have both the UX skill and your complementary skill. I suggest facilitation because I think it's in my opinion one of the best complementary skills a UX designer can have. Being able to run the workshops that precede the actual execution work I think is a really killer thing to know but there are a lot of other things you can do. Like I said, learning development if that's something that interests you if you want to nerd out on that. Maybe even learning illustration and becoming a UX designer that does amazing illustration. There's a lot of other things. So that's it. I hope that was useful for you. Let me know in the comments if I missed anything. Let me know if you agree with anything. Let me know if you disagree with anything. I know you will. And let me know what physical problem that I have in this video that you'd like to point out is it my hair? Is it my braces? Is it the wrinkly weird kind of matrix style jumper? I'd love to know what physical problem you can visualize here. Now at the end of the video I always ask a question an important question. One of the previous videos I asked you what was the worst thing you've ever smelled in your life and we got some amazing comments. Thank you for commenting those. So we had this we had this we had this if you want to go to the video where I talk about what the worst thing I ever smelled in my life was you can go here. So the important question I have for you all this week I'd love to know down in the comments is what is the worst thing you've ever tasted in your entire life? It's very important to me to find this out and if your answers the funniest answer will get featured in the next video. Thank you for watching the video if this was enjoyable if this type of video was enjoyable just let us know in the comments as well hit the like button subscribe whatever you want yeah there's that free training down below if you want to learn more about facilitation goodbye