 addiction to No. Felly, on the left is what I think you might be now which is confused about UX, maybe interested in starting a career in UX and I'm going to give you a presentation, we're going to go through seven steps and by the end of the hour, hopefully you're going to be the one on the right and you're going to know something about it, and you wanna get into it. So it's really brilliant career. We've got a guest speaker today as well. Xavier, so she's my friend and she works with me in Cisco and she's going to really help you guys when it comes to figuring out how to build your portfolio. Ie'n meddwl ddiweddu doedd hwnnw fel hyn yn unrhyw. Rhywbodaeth yr ystyried llywodeibur. Rhywbodaeth yr ystyried llywodraeth ymlaen o'r gwyntiau perthyn. Rhywbodaeth yr oedd y bêisic. Rhywbodaeth yr aes wedi'u ffordd Neverd. Rhywbodaeth yr oeddro beth sydd ybryd yn ganddo i ddefnyddio'r amser ac oedd yn dweud nhw'n gwneud findud i'r bai o'i masypus. Elin ymlaen على y cymsgol cyflachau. Hay wnaeth ymlaen dechrau IWX? professionals use, and which ones are my favorites, whether they're free or paid for, we're going to go through them so you can all get up and running. Then we're going to go over your portfolio, which is very important. So I'm presuming here people don't have any experience. We're going to show you how to build a portfolio, how to get it together, what tools you use. Shabby is going to explain to you how she built hers. Then we're going to go over some example projects, how they're put together in the portfolio, and then Shabby is going to share her case study using Google standards, how you can write up your work and how you can share it with people. Then I'm going to talk about some self-promotion, how you can let people know that you exist. We're going to talk about LinkedIn. We're going to talk about YouTube. And then at the end, we're going to talk about finding a job and we're going to share some advice for you about how to share a job. So let's start. I'm going to talk about the basics. I can see Shabby's got a hand-off, but I don't know how to use her properly. So I don't even know how to get her to say something. But if you guys have any questions during this, please drop them into the chat and then we'll get to the Q&A at the end. So if Shabby is there, do you want to just unmute and say hello before we start? Yes, thank you. Thank you all for me each for some reason. Hi, yeah, I'm Shabby and Anthony were kind of friends and we work together and stuff, and yeah. So we'll be talking about UX and I'll go through the portfolio and depth. And the portfolio is really important because it really helps you get your first job, not your first job. And it's unlikely you'll get an interview without having some work to show. So yeah, and any questions around that? Just drop them in the chat. Right. So I think my audio is a bit delayed so I can see Shabby and stop speaking. So I'm going to go ahead and start with the basics. So let's go through this. So UX is short for user experience design and basically what it means is it's in its essence, you're designing for screens. So you're designing for computers and you're designing for apps, most probably you're designing websites and that's all it is. And I'll talk about UI in a second, but UX is really the human interaction between the person and the device. And it's summed up pretty nicely in this one. And it's sort of my UX designer focuses on the interaction between use of digital products and the thing. But UX is much more than a lot of people see what UX designers produce in the end, which is essentially you produce something which you can give the developers to build a website. So you're almost imagine an architect, an architect draws up plans and the people who build the plans in the end, the builders. But what UX designer produces could be sometimes it's called the wireframe. It's like a basic sketch of a website or it could be anything up to a high fidelity prototype, what me and Shavia make. And but UX is a lot more than that. It's about someone will come to you with an idea normally because you're hired to work for people and they'll say, I've got this website. But you as a UX designer, you need to think, OK, does this actually make sense? What is the purpose of the website? Who is the audience for the website? Is the website solving a problem? Is there a business problem to be solved? And you need to make sure the whole things make sense because a lot of the time some projects have big holes in them. And this is really where the skill of a designer comes in. It's understanding how digital products are made, understanding the whole ecosystem and then and then making sure that it's solid. So when it goes live, it's an actual real thing. And we'll talk more about the different steps on what UX design is produced, but it's a lot more than just design. It's it's really thinking about who the users are and then making sure that the thing that you build for them actually solves a problem and is is any good. So this is also just a quick example of a wireframe. But, you know, to get to that takes a long time and on the standard. And the only reason wireframes are showing a lot is because the quicker they are, you can throw them away. But UX design, you know, it could be anything up to high fidelity, which is what we produce then UI design. So you'll you'll have heard about UI design and UI design is. Essentially screen design. So it's taken it's taken what the UX design is produced, which is all the way up until they've got something. And then it's laying out in nice detail and it's making sure that it looks great. It's using fonts. It's using different colour styles. It's using UI kits, which we'll talk about. And it's putting it all together and making a screen design. So this is this is the design part of it. UI design, which stands for user interface design. And sometimes these different jobs, you can have UX design jobs and you can have UI design jobs and and this sums up nicely here. I'm going to share this in the in the chat a little bit later on if you want to download it or you might have got it when you signed up. But user interface is the point where the user interacts with the website. It's not really about the concept behind it, which is what UX is. Right, then moving on to what the other basics is how you actually work in a company. So when you get hired as a UX designer, whether this is your first job or whether you're a senior or much later on, then you actually work as part of a team with other designers, developers, scrummasters, product owners, and this is called agile development. So let me show you how the team is built up. So you'll come in as a UX designer or you could be a UI designer. Then your work with other people, which are developers. So a lot of people think UX designers and UI designers need to know code. But in a professional set, and that's actually not true because you have developers who make the actual thing for you. So you're just the architect and then they develop it and you can feedback to them, but they really own the building of the process. Then there's testers who actually make sure it works because design websites for millions or billions of people. Then you need to make sure that they work. Then you'll normally have a scrummaster who's basically the project manager who'll make sure that everyone's doing the job and there's no problem with anything. And then you'll have someone called the product owner, which is the actual person from the business who owns the project and they get all the requirements and they let you know what you need to build. So they're effectively above the manager. They belong to the business and you're kind of like the team and they let you know what work needs to be done. So for anyone who wants to understand agile software development, I've got this link here again, I'll drop it into the chat in a bit, but it just explains what it is. It's kind of a new methodology, which has been around for the past five years, but it's hot every company in the world uses it pretty much now. So I just thought I'd give you a brief introduction to what agile is. The next basic thing I'm going to talk about is design systems. So design systems are a godsend to a designer. And back in the day, people used to have many different websites. So I used to design Barclays that could at UK and that might have had four or five different looking fields. So there was like a premiere for really rich people. There was a normal one and they all look different. But a design system effectively is a collection of reusable assets that as a designer, you can you can use and build stuff really quickly. So I'll probably show you the websites in a bit, but there's Google have a really good one and material that I owe. So if you're developing something like an app for Google or Apple, then you can actually go on to these websites and you can download stuff from one of the design softwares that you use and you can build pages really, really quickly, make them look like real websites and apps because all of the designs done for you. Then you know you're allowed to create it really quickly. You can do lots of different ideas. The actual designing of the thing is not really even that hard anymore. It used to be a lot harder when you have to build it off and scratch. I mean, shall we have built our one for Cisco from scratching our design tools? So whenever we have something now, it's actually super quick for us to make. But we'll have a look at them in a bit. This is an example of what it looks like with all the components and you drag and drop them and you put it on. The next basic thing we're going to talk about is accessibility. Now, accessibility is basically making the web available to everyone and making it easy to use and there's loads of different things. But what I've got on the screen now is it's the tube map for London. And a couple of years ago, they had a brief to make it basically people who suffer from color blindness couldn't tell the difference between the lines and what they've produced here is a map where instead of just colored lines, they've actually got different textures on the lines. So they've got dashes and dots and their thick colors and different shades. And that's really what accessibility is all about. It's about making sure that people who have disabilities can use your website. You know, there's things like colors. There's other things like making sure it's technically built right, which is more for developers, but it's just really thinking about other people and making sure what you build everyone can use. And that's really, really important to a designer. So there's a couple of links we're going to have a look at again. One is WebAIM, which tells you all about the standards and there's another one, which is a contrast checker where it checks your colors and it lets you know if it's accessible. I see a couple of people raising hands and what I've done is I've opened the chat so anyone can leave messages now and I'll try and answer your questions as we go through. I know there's a lag as well. So when I hand over to Xavier, I'll probably be quiet for a few seconds because I won't be able to hear it. But just before we get to some of the interesting, another basic thing is to use the centre design process and just touching on this briefly, this is how someone builds any digital application. So before it gets developed, really, there's four stages which any websites or app needs to go through. One is research, where there's loads of different tools. You know what we'll talk about? We'll talk about research now. So the goal of research is to understand who you're designer for and what problem you're trying to solve. And this is there's loads of different techniques in EOX designers, goodie bag, really. The main thing, though, is to understand the problem that you're trying to get to. And just for an example, there's things called personas that we create. I've got a couple of links which I'll share with you in a minute. That's how you how to create personas. But basically imaginary customers, it's best to understand who you're designer for. So if you have a couple of people, they may be imaginary, they may be based on real people that you can refer back to later on. Then it's it's really good and it's useful for the design process to make sure that you're actually catering to these people's needs. There's two types of user research. So we're going to talk about quantitative and qualitative. So quantitative is could be like a survey where you want a lot of information from a large amount of people. And qualitative is more personal. So it might be interviews of your customers when I used to work in Barclays. There was the endless like glass booth where you could do a user interview. You could get people to have a look at your app and ask them questions and there's loads of different things in the US designers tool bag. And depending on what company you work for, these come up a bit later on. And. There's some really good links here. One of them is usability hub and usability hub is a great place where you can do a lot of these testing online. So what I want to share with you today is lots and lots of links, but I'll go through the presentation first and I'll come to the links at the end and we'll have a look at some websites and some examples. And this is on my personas. Then one of the links I want to share with you. It's a really good flicker link and I use it whenever I create my personas, I get the images through. Put them all, put them all together and then it's got loads of free images and I'll show you off to build them in a bit. Then the next thing I want to talk about is the design phase. So once we know what we're making, then we move on into the design phase and this is where we use different UX tools. So touching briefly on to step two, which is the tools that we use and there's three main tools in the industry. There's Figma, there's Adobe XD and there's Sketch. I think Sketch might be $99, Figma is free and Adobe XD. I think you might need a basic plan, but it's not it's not very expensive and these are amazing tools. So when I designed Barclays, I used to use Sketch and each one of them is excellent. So and each one of them is really easy to use as well. If you've got an experience using Photoshop or anything like that, then these can go up and running. There's plenty of tutorials online, which we'll talk about in a second. The one I patiently use for most of my work is Figma. So I think it's something like just Google Figma Design Tool and it's very, very easy to use. There's lots of built-in design systems on Figma.com as well, which you can have. I see people raising hands. If you just drop me a message in the chat, because I don't know how to use this properly, I can't actually. I don't know what to do when someone raises hand. So if someone could help me and let me know what's going on. But. They're the free best tools. I've actually got a video which I share where I can I compare the tools and go over them. But that video stairs like 20 minutes I go through and I show you what each one's like. Then once you've actually designed it, then you go into a testing phase and this is where again, you use you use online tools. You can use usability hub. You basically want to dramatically improve your design. So you'll get some a basic together and almost never is what you design originally, what you look like at the end. I mean, Shabby knows this, we'll design something and then it'll probably get changed 100 times before it becomes real. And the goal of the testing phase is to make sure you talk to as many people as you can. You can do that in person or online and basically make it as good as you can. As good as good as possible. Then the last stage is development where you as a designer hand over your finished design, which you made in Figma and other things. And then and then it gets made to developers. There's a book that I'm going to share as well here, which is really good if anyone's interested in HTML and CSS. There's an Amazon link. You know, as a designer, I know very, very basic HTML and CSS, but it's good to have a basic on the standard and share it with you there. So the next interesting path is your portfolio. So I'm going to hand it over to Sherry at this point if you could take over and maybe talk about your experience with building a portfolio. Okay. Hi. So my portfolio, I will share my screen once I can just show you what it is. Okay. So I hand coded my portfolio because I felt this was the easiest way for me, but you can really do it in any way you want. You could do it like in PDF or you could do it like using some site builder, like what's called WordPress, Adobe portfolio or Webflow, which is pretty popular. I did try it with Webflow, but it didn't really work out for me. So for me, I built this and for the portfolio, what you need to do is I followed Google standard portfolios and that's usually pretty strict. So if you do follow the standard, I think you have a good chance of getting it up. Well, then just put it like a blank portfolio. So what you do is you put together four projects or a couple of projects, no more than six, I would say. So I've got four in mind and then each one is like a case study that you can go through and like some basic information. So one thing I would say, if you're like looking for a job designing a mobile app, put mobile stuff in there. If you want like a website or something, put web stuff in there. If you want, like if you like, like there's a specific industry you want to go for, try to aim your portfolio for that because usually your employees, what they look at is what experience you have related to their kind of job role or their industry itself. OK, so each of these four things that I've got here are real work that I did and each of these are case studies. OK, so I'll just open one up. So when you go into this like a base information about what this actually is and it's just usually a tagline just to give the other person some idea of it because it's unlikely, especially with a project like this one, they'll know anything about it or be like used to it at all. So for the portfolio, like usually I start off with the process of like it took me to design the whole thing. And this is pretty much in depth and it is a big project and it took a little bit of time. So then there's like the problems, the background and what you need to do, talk a little bit about the users and audience and like the team and the tools, like how did you even collaborate who was on the team and things like the methods and stuff that you use. For this particular one, there's like a mix of things that we use Figma and then like I did a lot of paper phototyping but using like iPad and Adobe Sketch and making like Wi-Fi diagrams and things like that with Milo. So I do write all that stuff down. Then we talk about like how we collaborate and any kind of constraints and things like that. So after that it's like just a brief idea of what we circuit it. If you did, I mean you don't need to go in depth just so the person looking at it can have a look like you actually do your homework before you just design enough. You need to know who you're building it for and they like you to understand that. So you talk to users, then analysis and then look at the requirements from the users and this project is pretty big so I just skipped a lot of things because no one's going to really hear it. And then we start going through the design and showing how we did the information architecture like drawing the user flow kind of diagram. So this is a bit of work and then showed like a small part of it. Then like some more and then like how we did rapid prototyping and rapid prototyping is when you quickly design up ideas and usually I do it with a pen and pencils, you could do whatever you like and quickly put some ideas down like prototype them and write the pros and cons and just go through them and they don't need to be neat or anything. Like this doesn't look like anything but it makes sense looking at it from this project perspective. And then these are like some problems that I found that needed solutions for. And then after that you have your wireframes which seems to be broken and I need to fix it. So yeah, okay, I'll look on that. So yeah, these are some examples of wireframes and these are like the prototyping but at a higher level just to show what it's looking like and then like some iteration. So how it works is that you do one iteration and you have a discussion with like the team and you know you get feedback and things like that. And then you come back to it. Then you make changes and then you make another wireframe then you go through the process a few times until everyone's happy with it. These are just some areas and after that you look at the visuals which you solve by visual design. Like we have for example in this there's a lot of lines in this but it's hard to read them so we kind of came up with different coloured lines which makes it easier to read them. So they're still problem solving but you do it through different mediums. So we'll just skip through this. And then the final things is just showing the design and then a few interactions of how things actually work. So you can see how that's actually gone from a sketch to actually working examples. So once you've kind of gone through and shown demonstrated your stuff you can talk about your lessons and outcomes and what you expect from the future and how you think this project actually went. I'll pass it to Anthony. Hi, thanks. I just want to apologise again for the delay on this so when Shavie speaks I have like 10 seconds and wait for it to go in but thanks for sharing with that. So let's just talk about portfolio for a minute. We'll come back to Shabie at the end because I've got lots of questions for her. Right, I can hear myself on my headphones so I need to switch that off. Right, so let me let me just share my screen. Right. Let's get this back up. So for anyone who's joined in the chat I've just dropped a link to Shabie's profile and you want to go and check it out as in your own time and I've dropped about 140 GB but the actual PDF for this so if you want to in your own time go back through some of these links they're all in here but you show Shabie's profile portfolio and I want to share with you two great places where you can create a portfolio and as a designer a portfolio is the most important thing that you need so you need to remember when you apply for your first job and we'll talk about how to do that a bit later on the only thing that people are going to know about you is they're going to see your portfolio and it needs to they don't know who you are and this is basically the stepping stone for you getting an interview so it needs to be really good and need to put all your effort into it so the two places I want to share with you now is one is Adobe portfolio and the other one is Squarespace so these are people who don't know you don't need to know how to build your own website and at the end of the day you just want to produce a website and now it's cool to do HTML and CSS and build it but you just want to produce a website at the end of the day and you want to get something live and Adobe portfolio is great so it's a super small thing they've got loads of templates it's built for designers and you can go on over there and think of your part of one of the cheap price things that they have over there you get it for free but it definitely encourages you to check Adobe portfolio and today start your portfolio even it's got nothing in it we need something to work towards and build and this portfolio is what we're going to do all our example projects and we're going to put them in this and this is what we're going to send to employers to get you a job at the end of it Squarespace is also really really good so you'll probably hear about these builders there's a lot of ones Squarespace is one of the biggest and we went through and we built a portfolio and it didn't work half an hour it was really good maybe Shabby are in a bit can tell you about how she built hers but if you want to see some other examples of portfolios then go actually on to BeHance so BeHance is a great place where it's kind of like a social media for designers so your portfolio it can live on your own website like Shabby ShabbyS.com and mine's AnthonyComboy.com but you can actually create a profile on BeHance and you can have a website as well but I think you should have both and it's a place where people can leave comments on your work you can get inspiration from other designers it's definitely a good place to check out I put a lot of my work on this so whenever I finish a project I normally package it up in Photoshop write about it like Shabby did and then drop it onto my portfolio and on BeHance it's something for you to do so the next step we're going to talk about which is really important so the goal of this hour is basically to get you from no experience to some experience and not the hardest step in your career once you have your first job as a junior you're ex designer you kind of often run into it but how do you go from nothing to something and that is through example projects so I want to point you over to a couple of things so one is my own website which is AnthonyComboy.com and I've actually put together 17 sample projects and this takes you through we have a brief on there there's a persona an example user journey then you'll actually see me take the brief and design a website maybe through like 5 or 6 different videos and I'll share the prototype with you and what you can do is you can follow along and actually build these websites so there's an example of one that we did together in the video so I wrote 17 briefs effectively to get you started so this was one for a shoe company called Blackout I give you links to images in there everything and you can just there's a persona in there as well so you can get your persona you can get your prototype you can build it together you can look at how I do it and then follow along but all of this there's another example one that we did which was a website that I think was a restaurant or something like that but the idea is you need to have something in that portfolio so now you've got that portfolio as a base example projects are a really great way to start because in real life when you have a job some of the projects might take it here and with these example projects because the thing that takes a long time when you're building stuff is the back and forth and the changes and that's something that you write about in your case study but with example projects you definitely want to pack a portfolio with maybe five or six spend all your time doing them make them look great but this is just a sneak peek of what's on my website and I'll talk about it at the end about how you can sign up and join along with me but I just want to jump back to Shabia so I had a case study next but she actually already showed you what she put together so I just want to ask her what does she think about example projects and does she have any advice at this point yeah so I think it's a good idea to do example projects and I definitely do it and there's something I did start off with so I used to sometimes make up something and then now redesign it and as long as you put your process and you're thinking and how you solve problems that's what employees look for so I think it's good if you don't have anything it is good to start off like that right okay again apologies for the delay I'm just watching Shabia sitting there all my audio is coming through but again okay so now we've got a portfolio and we've got some example projects in there and you've written it up kind of like Shabia's done just because the brief's there doesn't mean you can't do some of this stuff but next is how to promote yourself so this is important actually before you kind of get a job because employers now don't just look at your websites and your portfolio they look at social media it's crucially important and actually there's never been a better time so the two things that if you're not on you need to get on straight away are LinkedIn and on YouTube this is probably the best advice I'd give to myself 10 years ago when I should have started a lot of people use social media in the wrong way there's a lot of you're looking at LinkedIn and there's a lot of not useless content but like not interesting stuff people talking about themselves a lot if you use these platforms to educate people even if you're not the best and you're a junior but you learn something today like you learned a great place to get images from or you've learned that thing that was the best tool you could make a little one minute video like I'm doing this on my iMac just using the camera talking for a microphone you could post that to LinkedIn and LinkedIn is actually the best platform to get content out of a wide variety of people it's actually really easy YouTube I think one of my videos that I did three years ago has got like nearly a million views and it took me a couple of days to put together and actually I've probably done over 100 videos on YouTube and I find that actually the lowest quality ones actually get the best so you don't need the best studio this is just me kind of in the garage talking but it's about the quality of content and you need to realise that nobody knows you exist until you publish from work and that's just the truth so start publishing work even if it's just one post a day on LinkedIn even just encouraging other people to get into design showing your love and passion for the subject what people will do is when you apply for a job which we'll talk to at the end they will look on your LinkedIn and they will look on your YouTube channel if you have one and it's a good place to get your personality across you need to think your poor photo it'll have your work but a lot of the time you hire people because you like them and that's just the truth and you like the personality and the only way to get that across really is video and a lot of people are shy on video and I was certainly shy when I did my first video three years ago I got an American guy to do a voice over because I thought because I have such a fake Liverpool lean accent people couldn't understand me and I was very nervous through those videos but I actually found that people preferred it when I was doing it and those videos got a lot more likes than the ones I thought were really slick and polished from the American guy so I guess that just when people first start liking your videos you get a lot more confidence and actually you might not like some people can make a career out of this you could build your own online business you could promote it through video there's so much opportunity now by using video on these two platforms and it lives forever you can even make a little bit of income on the side by doing 10 minutes of video a day you never know which ones are popular and you also don't need to be the best designer in the world you just need to teach something a little tiny thing and they'll be grateful to you to you forever I just wanted to show this to my youtube you know you can make a tan don't go in for the money, you don't make that much but I wanted to show you honestly what it's like on the analytics you can see videos that I had years ago were still coming through it's just a lot of fun it's just a lot of fun to be honest and there's other platforms like Skillshare and Udemy so you could do a little course like I'm doing just film it on your computer teach something and you'll grow an audience and with that audience you'll become well known and that will help you get into the next section which is finding a job so I've actually got a question for Xavier and that is how did you get into UX and how did you get your first job if you could share with that while I get a couple of things sorted that'd be great no worries now I got into UX it's very conventional I did computer science at university and I really enjoyed the design side of building apps to the point that I actually would do with the people's homework because I just liked it I would design their entire front end sometimes you can build it but I just enjoyed it and that was like a cue for me to know that this is kind of what I wanted to do so at university all the work that we did was pretty much exactly the same as working in the software industry you get a brief then you have to design some software so I built my portfolio from all my university projects and they weren't great but that's the way I got interviews and I learned that quite early on that you always need a portfolio and in the interviews they said they decided to interview me because of my portfolio so that was pretty good at that time there wasn't really like a lot of UX jobs or anything like that because that's more in the last like five years, six years that's gone quite heavy so I actually started as a front end developer that focused on design and then because I enjoyed doing the design side and showing then I made some nice UIs visually so I slowly transitioned into a full design role so yeah right, I'm going to take over now I know Shavia stopped speaking I didn't hear the last couple of seconds I was sure what she was saying but I want to share a couple of things so let me help on over to my I want to share Google Chrome I've got loads of links for you I want to show you how to get your first job but I also just want to quickly show you that UX is an extremely profitable industry to be in it don't go any just for the money but you can see here £500 £700 in the UK I think that's totally realistic for now to be a UX designer I think the average in America is $90,000 and there's effectively two different job types that you can get and this is something that people don't teach you so you can be a full time employee which is where you get a salary like $90,000 and you'll get all the benefits for your company but in the UK and the US there's also another thing called contract then there's a day rate so say here you've got £500 to £600 you get paid that you're effectively a small business by yourself so you have to pay business tax you have to set up properly and do things like that and you'll normally get free to six month contracts and they roll on but I think the way the industry is changing now is contract it's kind of dying out because of a law that was introduced in the UK but it's still very much prevalent in America it's more obviously you make more money when you're in contracting but obviously it's a short term thing it's free to six months and then you might get moved on after that or you might have to change quickly so if you're in a big city with lots of different companies to work for maybe just getting a small contract is a good way into the industry but I just want to show you how to hack your way into the industry effectively so how I got my first job was it was an internship so I was very lucky because my teacher at college his cousin was married to the creative director of Oak in the UK so because I stood out in college and I was good at design at the time I was very lucky to get an internship for three weeks but from that three week internship I effectively conned in that as a company where there's like 10 magazines in it I went to each floor I introduced myself and I basically asked them if I could go and work for three days so from that three week internship I then got working Ferrari magazine in Wired magazine and GQ magazine I even followed the creative director to a photo shoot that he went on and I asked him for a internship so I probably had a total of maybe 20 weeks internship and from that internship Wired then had a position for a designer to design the iPad edition of the magazine that you see behind him on the wall which was about 11 years ago and because I knew the people in the magazine and I just been a company and asked for over the summer for like two or three years I got the job not based on applying for it I got it because I was in the building and internships are by far the best way to do it like to be honest not many junior roles come up so I just wanted to share my experience with internships are by far the best way to do it and if you go on LinkedIn and you search first then UX internship in the San Francisco Bay Area and you could do that from London there is some internships on there but a lot of internships might be not even advertised so just here if you type in a UX designer then on LinkedIn there's like thousands of UX designers who come up and you can connect to them and you can send them messages and you can ask them if there's any internships that are available it's not for everyone because you don't get paid but I just wanted to be realistic and tell you how I got into the industry like I slept in a hostel for probably six months because I had no money when I went down to London but I knew that getting the internship was my kind of side door into the industry because it's so competitive look at this graph so I want to show you this this is Google Trends and Google Trends is an amazing website and you can see how popular they are over time but look so when I got my first job UX was free and now look at it now it's up in the hundreds so the way I think is a good way into the industry is have your portfolio have your example projects then just try different methods if you live in a big city send someone a message to say you want to go for a coffee and then just like really UX designers don't get that many emails off random people they don't I don't know if Shabby does but if someone is sending me a message to say do you want to go for a coffee and then I might be ahead of your exercise and say okay come and do some internships like I had free students from my previous college who came with the internships from me last year and that's just the way that you can get actual work into your portfolio and then you might be lucky and you might get a job or you might not but you will stand out from the person who is then applying for the junior role Shabby, what do you think about internships do you have anything that you'd like to add? I think you've covered most things but I think they're doing free work even if you don't want to do something physically like going to a job you can also advertise your work like there's online places like Upwork and stuff like that and do work for really cheap or even free and this is a good way to get real life experience and build a portfolio as well so I always agree with if you can get some work in internships or doing free works or just doing really cheap work I think it's just really excellent and people want to know what you can do and you need to figure out what you can do and if you can do that through internship it's great Right, so one thing I just wanted to share with you before we open up the Q&A is I just wanted to go through what's actually in my thing so I'm going to post a link in the chat in a minute and it's 50% off and it's valid for an hour after this call and this is enough for everyone this is only for people who want to go a little bit further and a more serious while putting the portfolio together so the link's valid for an hour and it's access to my full course online and I get a bit embarrassed when I try and mark it but I put over a year of my life into this and there's 24 hours of content on there so if you don't mind I'll quickly tell you what's in there if you were interested in it and you wanted to go a bit further so just quickly going through it there's 17 projects so you can see here there's videos where you click on it and I actually analyse from the brief I analyse different websites which are very similar to it so the first one is a brief for an e-commerce website I give you a persona I use a journey that you can make your own version of and then I go through and I actually design a website so you can see here we made that website together but you can see how I actually design it and I think about websites and it will just give you some experience in your portfolio then there's other sections where we cover the basics again what we've done but a bit slower we talk about UX versus UI which one's right for you there's so much content in here and we go through user research how to do that there's some cool projects as well like there's this game streaming application which we put together real fun things and if you send me them I don't mind giving you my advice and feedback about what you've put together then we talk about UI design colour theory, how colours apply where to find great images online there's tutorials in Adobe XD there's tutorials in Figma and now we're here on different design trends about how you can apply those styles testing there's hundreds of tutorials and there's a section where I go through the world's best websites and I break them down so I look at Amazon Nike and explain to you from a designer's point of view why these websites are so good and then there's a whole section here on how to get a job where I basically just try to build your confidence up and explain to you that anyone can do it we go over a few questions how to get motivation how to take action and then again there's loads of questions and answers every question you've had about UX answered and then at the end there's just loads more tutorials for you to do so I'm actually going to I'm going to drop a link in the chat now it's valid for an hour it's 50% off if you're interested take it and then what I'll do as well as for everyone on this call within seven days and you don't like it, just send me the email to Anthony and AnthonyComboy.com and I'll just give you a full refund no questions asked because I want you to enjoy it so you can take it as a free trial if you're interested so I'm going to open up the Q&A Shaby have you got any questions you want you want answered or anyone in the chat please drop some questions I've got a list of some maybe Shaby can have a think or I can ask what a day in the life of the UX designer can people be excited about getting into UX design while I pull this link up and drop it in so Anthony I have a question for you so in your opinion because the big thing about the stop is that you're always going to be working with people so in your opinion what do you think makes a great team right so this is actually probably one of the most important things that a tuner should know UX design is not that hard so it's actually technically it's not that hard you can learn the skills on how to make a website quite quickly that's why they have courses you can do a course in 24 hours or something like that what the skill is is whether you're a nice person I like working with Shaby because she's nice and we have to work together every day and sometimes some people are better at things and more visual thinks about things more and she's better at the details and I've worked with people before who are the best technically in the world but maybe they're a bit arrogant or they're a bit I'd honestly hire someone who wasn't as technically good as someone else because I liked them because they came across as warm and because of what did they work with I've got to work with you for the next three years I really think it's important to have a nice person and I think that's why you should showcase your skills on videos you should do Youtube and get your personality across in your portfolio and embed them Shaby what do you think is good what would you look for in hiring someone so again very similar first thing obviously if they have the skills and you judge that by their portfolio and then making sure they can understand how to actually design something and after that after the first interview you know at the point of the portfolio if they can do the job or not so really what you have to do from the interview for me is if the person is nice to get along with and I've had several experiences with different types of people and like Anthony said someone can be really good I used to work with a very good visual designer but he was really hard to work with and he made stuff hard but with somebody who's easy to work with and quite personable you end up working really well together then you end up building the best kind of design and your aim really is to get out the best project and people you need to be able to take feedback as well so if you can't take feedback it's going to be really hard because this job everyone like all the managers business people everybody has an opinion on the design and you shouldn't really get offended by their opinion but you've got to work be able to work with people really well I've actually got a question for you I'll answer it first so it says most companies require H1 on CSS skills is it really necessary to have them so no it's not because I don't know how to go to websites I didn't learn that stuff until like 10 years into my career and here's the truth companies will put out the job description right and this job description will be like we need the UX unicorn so we can do all this stuff but like to be honest to people who write it don't even know what the way to mean I've seen some job descriptions and I've seen some people like hired for the job descriptions and the like why is the job nothing like them it's because companies have a template that they put out you don't need to know doing my opinion because you have developers who do them and Shabir actually came from a development background into UX whereas I came from a graphic design background so I won't talk about that in a second for one of the questions but what do you think Shabir do you think you need to know and actually we don't no you don't but it kind of does help to have an understanding of technology like how a browser works and things like that you don't need to know HTML CSS the only thing I would recommend is that you own a couple of devices not everything on iOS so you can see from the user's perspective how they use things and the only thing about HTML and CSS in the past it probably used to help just like talking to the developers about what you intend but now because Figma and tools like Figma and stuff are so good that you can literally design what you think and they'll get it straight away so less and less now so one of the questions that says how to be a UX designer from graphic designer so you can see the magazine behind me I started as a magazine actually a magazine as I own a print so the first thing I ever made professionally was a Ferrari the cars and I did a page in the magazine and I was so proud when I saw it but unfortunately you had to own a Ferrari to get the magazine so not many people saw it but I then went from that into like a hybrid role which was making iPad magazines which was taking print and putting it onto digital format and when actually it was kind of like the reason that industry died is because websites actually websites came about you can come into UX in two different backgrounds you can come into it from a design background so when I design stuff I focus a lot more on the visual style and because you work in a team you work with someone so I work with Shavir and she comes from a development background so she thinks a lot of stuff differently but no you can come to it from a graphic design background those skills are really helpful and you can put together instead of doing wireframes you can do high fidelity wireframes and make them look like real websites so I do a lot of that stuff Shavir thinks a lot of stuff makes it work so yeah you can come into it from a load of different backgrounds because it's not actually technically that hard it's more about you as a person being empathetic and understanding how to build a website so I'm just going to quickly go through a couple more questions so Shavir, what's your best tool for design apps? For me Figma there is no better tool I've used things from Photoshop and Sketch and things like that I've used so many tools but Figma is really good because you can do your entire prototype in Figma and do the interactions and then develop a handoff as well so it's got everything in it so thanks Shavir I have to cut it off because my headphones are delayed I'm still getting the first video and I'm sure you know what you're talking about one of the next questions is do you know whether it's different skills to design on iOS or Android? No it's the same skills so let me just share I want to share some with you I'll share my let me share my Google Chrome so here's what I made earlier so this is material.io right and this is Google design language on this website you can actually download a UI kit which has everything that Google needs for you to build websites as Apple's human interface guidelines you can download download stuff from there so I want to share with you I want to share my Figma one second if I can pull it off so this is my Figma account this is what it looks like when you download it you'll see you'll get these pages and literally to make an app what you do is you basically copy a page make it change it across and change the text and then link it all up it's super super easy but to design on iOS or Android it's the same you just get the UI kit you spend time to read the stuff and then put some of it together Shelby have you got any questions that you were you think would be useful for people? any questions on the key way like if you click on the key way at the bottom of the screen so one's asking how to be more social on LinkedIn if you want to go through that Anthony's good at this okay yeah I'll answer that one so on LinkedIn basically don't talk about yourself teach people so if you go through your LinkedIn for your tonight and have a look basically the I don't like it when people show off oh look how great my company is we give everyone the day off like those are the self promotion posts what you want to do is use these platforms to teach people so teach people how to just share it like people love links say I found a really great link today is a place where you can get really good images and you know what you'll get a lot more likes and people will start coming to you as an expert even though you know you should share what you learn and let's have a look at the questions there seems to be one that's about a thousand times there's how to prototype in Figma I'll let you have it so if you do a course Anthony's course he will find out how to prototype in Figma but it's actually really easy like you can download a UI care or you can draw all the graphics and stuff yourself each page there's pages on there and you can draw screens is every view on your app and then you use the interaction tools to link them so and that's very very brief but if you do the course you will find out exactly how to prototype in Figma you know I can't really just speak about it like with this quick okay there's another question so what to do if you have no college degree I think you do not need a college degree to get this job like if you can prove you're a really good designer through your portfolio like I've looked at those TVs I do not check if they got a degree or not I don't and I think a lot of some companies will ask for college degree but I think it's more and more common now that people don't ask for it so without it just make sure you get your experience up and it shows through your portfolio like if you can get some like do some internship so like cheap work or anything like that and actually showcase that you're solving problems through design and that will be pretty good Thanks for asking I really don't think you need a degree to be honest I spent three years getting a degree and literally nobody ever asked me for it in like 15 years of my thing I think I've still got it somewhere sitting in the sitting in the drawer but you don't need it you just need to be a good person have a good portfolio be cheeky you know send people messages and just there I'm just going to read a couple of the questions so the complete road max the UX and UI so I'm just going to post again in the chat I feel really bad doing this but please I put a lot of everything to it check out my course really again if you don't like it I'll give you a refund without asking any questions in seven days it's got 24 hours of content like if you think you've got a lot from this hour it's me speaking a lot more slowly actually thinking about what I'm saying and going through all tutorials going through everything that you need you can learn all that stuff it's not technically hard it's basically and I know starting a new career from scratch is really hard and it's basically I want to give you confidence so you can go out and be cheeky and ask people for work experience and put stuff together and know what you need to do is understand how to use the tools which is very very simple understand the theory of how websites work very very simple self promote yourself on LinkedIn and YouTube and then put together a prototype of loads of example projects and then let people know you exist which is the most important thing when you've got that portfolio don't just stop it there nobody cares about you no one knows about you until you start producing content and contacting people and saying hey let me come and work for you and then you'll eventually get it if you keep out it and then I'll share with you this what are the key principles of UX and UI we've gone over by a minute we'll probably finish in less than a second is there anything you can help on that so mainly the key principle is actually what problem you're trying to solve for your user and what action you want them to form so an easy thing is so you have this app that you want people to download and they're looking at it and then how do you get them to actually click download and then sign up in it it's designing that whole process and it will require like the steps which is the UX and what information somebody puts in and then the visual elements like how does the brand make the person feel and then the use of colours and things to just promote the call to action so like if the button that you want people to actually click is a colour they can't see they're not going to sign up so you need to work with colours and things to make that process work so in a nutshell that's pretty much it but you're doing that on a large scale okay guys we've actually gone over by three minutes so I'm going to end the day people have actually stayed with us for the whole thing so thank you again to everyone who stayed I hope you've got something for this I apologise for the sound delay this is the first time I've ever used Zoom and maybe the last I'm going to be shabbier for being such a great guest and helping me out so I didn't have to mumble along by myself again the link to the course is below it's 50% off for an hour there's only 20 available and there's more now on this and the YouTube so if you want to get it and again I'll give you a refund if you email me at Anthony.comboy.com within seven days and you're none into it but any questions drop me them and I hope you enjoyed it again shabbier any last words but thank you everyone for staying with us no that's been great so no last words but it's been really nice and best of luck to all you guys it's a really good career to go into it pays pretty well and it's basically a creative job that pays well and you get loads of free times and time to explore your ideas and things like that so definitely worth it it's probably unbiased and when I speak to people about their jobs I would say I've probably got one of the best jobs thanks shabbier again for anyone who wants to keep in touch with us just go on LinkedIn well shabbier might post their LinkedIn in the room you've probably got mine you know 10 of the messages keep in touch and I wish you all the best in your careers I hope you've got someone for today and I'll end this call in a second when shabbier posts their LinkedIn so you can keep in touch with her but again you can just go on my one set for shabbier she's probably one of the only ones on there let me just pull it up and drop it in thank you everyone and there you go shabbier's in there if you guys go to the top of the chat and you haven't got the PDF from me are you in the presentation you can download it now and I'll probably send the recording out to this and take care that's it from me thank you very much see you guys later bye