 In this video, I'm going to share with you six simple steps for how to get started in UX design and I'm going to tell you how I started my journey until I got a job and the lessons I learned from it so that you can avoid making the same mistakes. So let's get started. If all of these six steps, I guarantee you you will get a job. And how do I know that? Because that's what I did over a longer period of time and it got me a job where I'm working right now. Hi, my name is Amir and I'm a self taught UX designer working at a design agency called Agent Smart. And I wanted to make this video because I wish it existed when I was first starting out. So I didn't study UX design in university, but I love design and technology. And when I found out that there was this thing called UX design, I was immediately hooked. So I made this video to like really condense down the steps to the essentials for you to get started to make sure that you have all you need to go from a beginner to someone who can actually get a job in UX design. As you're watching this video, if you have any questions about any part of what I'm talking about, make sure to let me know in the comments and I'll make sure to get back to you. Also, if you have any tips that I forgot to mention, please make make sure to put them in. It'll be useful to me and anyone else watching this video in the future. By the way, if you're interested in videos like this, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified every time we put out a video. We do videos like this every week. So let's dive into step one, which is deciding whether UX design is for you. So I'm assuming if you're watching this video, you already know a little bit about what UX design is, but you might not know if it's actually the thing for you. You don't know if you're going to enjoy this. And I picked a really useful resource for you to be able to do that. So there's this website called Career Foundry and they offer UX design programs, but they also have this very nice and short email course. It's a six day course. If you put in your name and your email, you don't have to pay anything and they will basically send you a series of introduction email about UX design to help you decide whether this is the thing that you want to be doing as your job. By the way, everything I mentioned in this video is going to be linked in the description. So you can check it out. You can keep referring back to it as you go through these steps. The other thing you can do to decide whether UX design is for you is to actually talk to someone who has a job that you want to be doing. So in this case, you go and find a UX designer, whether it's a friend or a friend of a friend, just talk to them about what their job is like, what they enjoy about it, what they don't enjoy about it. And that'll give you a much more solid idea of what the day to day job is like and not just the highlights or what's great about it. So that's also a really good thing for you to try. All right. So step two is to take a course to learn the principles. Now this is really important because a lot of people, when they want to learn about UX design, start watching random tutorials here and there and have the feeling that they're making progress. But when you're learning in such a scattershot way, you never have anything concrete that you can say that you've mastered. And that's why it's really important for you to go through a structured curriculum. And I picked out two really good courses for you to try. And I'm going to show them to you right here. So the first one is the introduction to user experience design. This is a course by Coursera. And it's free for you to take and you only need to pay to get the certificate, which is not something that's that important, in my opinion. And this course has gone a ton of really good reviews. And the syllabus is also really good. It's not too long. It's five weeks long. And it gives you all the basics that you need. If you don't know a lot about UX design, it has a really good overview in the beginning. That just takes one hour. And then it takes you through the steps that you need to know, like how do you gather requirements for a design? And then how do you start thinking about alternatives? And then prototyping. And then you final steps to evaluate your design. So this is a really good course to go through. And it's completely free. Another option is from Accenture. And it's called Digital Skills User Experience. This is also a really good course. I just put it as an alternative here because sometimes some people respond to some courses better than others. So you have a choice between these two. But I narrowed it down intentionally so that you don't have to choose between multiple things and spend a lot of time choosing instead of actually learning and doing. So just start with this course, the Coursera one. And if you don't like it, move on to the next one. It's really not that important which one you choose as long as you actually go through it and finish it. And like I said, both of these courses are completely free. But there's also a third option that I want to show you, which is really mostly useful for people in Germany. And it's from Career Foundry. Career Foundry has a really good boot camp, a long boot camp. I think it's around six months or something like that. But it's also quite pricey. But if you're someone who's living in Germany and you're unemployed, if you're making a career change, you can actually get this course for free and we'll have a link in the description for how you can do that if you are someone who's living in Germany and you don't have a job right now. And once you've finished a course, now you're ready to start practicing on your own and start mastering a design tool. Now for this, I also picked out two tools for you. One is Figma and it has a very generous free plan. You can be working on it using all the features completely for free. And it has some collaboration features so that if you're working with someone, you're able to work on the same design file at the same time, kind of like working in a Google Doc. Figma is a great option. This is what we use at agent and smart. We're designing apps pretty much every week. And it's a very, very good tool. Another option is from Adobe. If you already have some Adobe apps, it's called Adobe XD and it also has a generous free plan that you can go with. Figma is based in the browser so no matter which computer you have, like a Mac or a PC or a Linux, it'll work on everything. Same thing for Adobe XD. So these tools are both free and they're available no matter which computer you're using. I'm also going to include a link to a quick tutorial for Figma. This is a short tutorial that will show you all you need to know just to get started. And with the principles that you have from the course, you'll be able to apply them while designing something, an app or a website in Figma. Alright, step number four. Now this is the most important step which is practice. This is where a lot of people actually stop. Most people are happy to do kind of the passive learning, kickback, watch some videos, read some articles. You feel good about yourself but you're not actually learning until you start practicing. The easiest way to get started is to take something that's already out there and redesign it or recreate a design that you like inside something like Figma. Because when you take a good design and you draw out the design pixel by pixel again, you start to like absorb why these decisions were made, what's a good layout, good typography, good spacing. You'll learn that by copying a good design. Another thing you can do is take an app that you think is really bad. So maybe you're using an app for your bank and that was really bad. You know that you don't like it, your friends don't like it. So what you can do is take all the principles that you learned in the course which include gathering user requirements and just doing some research and then designing a new solution and then testing it out with people to see how much of an improvement it made. And then after you've done that, you should write about that and put it out there and get feedback on it. So that's what practice means. It's really going through the whole cycle, applying all the principles that you learned and that's really, I can't stress this enough, this is the most important step and this is the step that most people skip out on. Like they watch a few tutorials and then they call themselves a designer. It really doesn't work that way. You have to put in the hard work and you have to put up with the feeling that you know that you're not good enough in the beginning but you know in your mind what a good design looks like and you want to get to that point and that gap is always frustrating but you will get to it only by practicing. So one tip I can give you when you're practicing, if you're designing for iOS or Android, basically you're designing a mobile app is to check out the human interface guidelines by Apple and Google so you can design apps that feel natural, that feel at home on these two platforms. So if you're designing something for an iPhone or an iPad you should check out the human interface guidelines. Basically what this is is a set of guidelines from Apple telling you what makes good design on iOS and all the pages in it are quite short. It's not a long book that you have to spend a ton of time reading but it just shows you the principles of what makes a good looking iOS app and just by sticking to these principles you can design something that's not too flashy but that feels right at home on iOS and the same thing for Android. So if you take a look at the Google resource and again all of these are going to be linked in the description you'll be able to see what good layout looks like on Android, how much spacing you should leave when you're designing something, you don't want text to be like right against the edge, you should be leaving some margins and things like that. So both of these guides are really excellent resources for you to get started designing something for iOS or Android and to have it look really good from the start. Okay the next to last step is to join a community. Now this is really important especially if you're someone who's learning design on your own and you don't know a lot of other designers, being a part of community is going to help you a ton because it's going to be a place where you get to ask questions, you have other people who are on the same level as you are that are learning and you can meet them online, you can start asking and answering questions, getting feedback on your design in the community and it'll just keep you motivated because you won't feel like you're going through this journey alone. So I picked out one community that I'm going to link in the description and it's called Designer Hangout. This is an invite-only community but it's a free community, there are also paid communities but I wanted to focus everything in this video on what's free and basically you request an invite, you fill out a few information, they just to control the quality of who's coming in and then you'll be able to join a Slack community where you get to have, you get to chat to people, there are Q&As, there's even a job board, communities are a great way to get a job. As you start talking to people and building relationships, maybe someone will be works at a company and you've already built a good relationship with that person, they will think of you when they need someone to hire for a design job for example. All right, final step, step six is learning what you need to know in order to get a job. So this is only relevant if you want to go and get a job at a company instead of freelance somewhere and my two tips for you to get a job is one, to browse job descriptions because that's the best way for you to know exactly what a company wants and someone that is hiring because sometimes especially if you're hanging out online and seeing what designers are talking about you're going to think that that's what companies care about but it's not necessarily the same thing. When someone is hiring they're looking for a very specific set of requirements and you may have like three of them and they need five or six of stuff that you haven't really learned about yet. So just browsing job descriptions is a really good way to know what you need to hit exactly and start to work on your pitch and you're presenting yourself as someone who knows all these topics and can do a good job of them. So you can browse any job listing website and just search for junior UX designer and you'll find something like this and what you want to focus on is the requirements and the skills and experience and this will give you a really good idea of what you need to hit in order to be able to get a job at a company. Basically the list of requirements should be a list of goals for you. You should browse a few job descriptions and create a checklist of items that you need to have so that when you start applying you already have these things that you know you need rather than you finding out during a job interview that there is this really important concept that you should know and now you need to go learn about it. So one thing that comes up a lot when you're applying for a job even from junior positions is that you'll see the company is asking for two or three years of experience for you to apply to that job. Now the reason most companies put that is just to intimidate people and like start to pre-filter candidates who aren't confident enough to apply. So as long as you're confident enough in being able to present your skills and show what you've worked on just go ahead and apply to these jobs anyway. What's really important for you in this step is to have something to show. So if you remember from step four of practicing you need to work on something and then post it online along with a write-up. That means don't just show me some pretty pictures some pretty designs write an article saying exactly how you went through the whole design process how you did user research how you what your design process was like your thinking process the drafts that you tried the alternatives that you considered before you settled on a design and then the final design that came out and how you tested it and what the results were like and what you learned from that and publish that as an article the biggest mistake that junior designers make is just to make some pretty screens put them up on a website and think that that's a good portfolio it's not because one you could have gotten those from anywhere and two it doesn't show the person looking at them that you know what you're doing maybe you just happened to design something that was simple enough and looks okay but you didn't show that you're actually a good designer who knows how to think about design problems and design solutions for them so basically all that a company wants when it's hiring someone is to answer the question can I trust that this person can do this job or not and if you have something documenting your thought process that I can just go and read it and see how much you know about this topic what your thinking process is like and that will help me make a decision about whether I think you're good enough for this job or not the last tip I have for you for getting a job is to employ a concept called the canvas strategy now we have a full video about this that we'll link in the description and above but the idea is that in order to get a job at a company in this case you want to help that company do something and prove that you can be a helpful employee to that company so what I mean by that is let's say you you decide that there's a company that you like and you want to work there so you start following them on social media you start following the people who work there on social media and just start looking for an opportunity they're not going to come out and say hey we need someone to go and design something for us but what you might notice is that there's a gap so for example maybe something on their website is not great maybe something in their app is not the best that it can be so what you can do in this case is go and do the work and do the research to create a solution for a problem that you've identified you can go say hey I really like your service I really like your website for example but I noticed that this part was a little bit lacking and I did some research on it I talked to some people I asked them how this could be better and I designed the solution for you I just want to give it to you I don't want anything in return so this is you just doing them a favor something that's actually really useful for them and giving it away for free and not expecting anything in return and this is really important you shouldn't feel entitled for anything they might just say thank you and that's it or like most people will be impressed enough to start a conversation with you so after that you can start talking about whether they have a design opportunity for you to apply for or that you know they can maybe point you in the right direction to get a job but it's a really really great way to get a job somewhere and that's actually how I got my job at the company I work at where I found out that the CEO of the company was having a problem with his podcast and I went and helped him with it and that made him trust that I'm the type of person who he wants to have working at his company so this is a really really good tip I really recommend that you check out the video on the canvas strategy it's a great way to get a first job okay so this rounds off the six steps that I wanted to share with you for how to go from a complete beginner to someone who can get a UX design job but as you notice there are like six simple steps but simple doesn't really mean easy right like these are six hard steps and it's going to take you a while and you should expect this whole process to take you like six months up to a year if you're really serious about this especially if you're doing it alongside another job and you're learning this on the side so it's really not easy and that's why I start out with a step of figuring out whether this is for you or not because it's a serious commitment and unless you really wanted you won't be able to go through the whole process so to offer you some additional help I want to share with you a few lessons that I learned the hard way about how to go on this journey and the first one is find a partner that you can do this with so find a friend find someone that you maybe like know a little bit just anyone who can be an accountability partner for you what that means is that if you find a friend who also wants to learn about UX design you can start doing this together and this will ensure that both of you are making promises to each other so that when you're checking in with each other every few days or at least like once a week checking in on the progress you're making a promise to your accountability partner to say like okay in this week I'm going to finish the first module of the course I'm going to do some practice and this is what I want to have by the end the reason this works and this is important is because you break promises to yourself all the time and we all do this but it's much harder and you feel a lot more you know shame when you're breaking a promise to someone else so having someone to go with on this journey is really really helpful if you can find a friend to do that that's great if not then maybe you can do it through a community that I suggested earlier so that's the first step and it's really really important the second lesson that I learned the hard way is to set a deadline for yourself so I said earlier that this journey might take you for six months up to a year and during that journey you're going to want to have to have some really concrete milestones and deadlines so that's why I suggested courses for you that are very structured week by week but you're going to need to keep that structure even after you finish the courses as you're learning the tools as you're looking for a job you need to set deadlines for you because when you have a deadline it forces you to make some hard decisions about what to prioritize what you need to do how much time you can dedicate to learning and practicing and without a deadline you will just never finish this if you say I want to learn UX design and you don't give yourself a deadline you'll be saying that for years and I've seen this with other people and you won't be making any progress so you need to be setting deadlines constantly you need to have one big deadline of I want to get a UX job within six months or a year and then you need to break that down month by month okay if I want to get a job within six months what do I need to do by month one by month two by month three and four and so on and then break that down even further week by week like okay this week I need to do these modules and I need to you know design two screens or whatever it is until you get to planning out the day level and that's the next lesson of blocking out your time to learn and practice so what that means is that if you're a student or if you're someone who's working another job you need to find hours in the day whether it's in the morning in the evening where you can actually learn and practice and my tip for you is to put it on your calendar if you don't use a calendar you should start using right now so everyone has a calendar on their phone just create a recurring event for yourself maybe it's after work in the evening you know seven p.m. to nine p.m. or maybe it's the first thing in the morning you know six p.m. to seven p.m. no matter how long it is or how short it is just commit to something so that you're making daily progress because if you set a goal for yourself to finish something within a month but then you don't give it any time during the day it's never going to get done because you will only get to that goal after one month by slowly chipping away at it day after day Lesson number four is about publishing your work and I've already mentioned this but it's that important you need to be practicing then publishing your work somewhere just start a blog somewhere on Medium or Tumblr or whatever it is or WordPress and start documenting your learning journey this is really really important if you don't commit to putting something out there and this should be one of your milestones and deadlines to say I'm gonna publish a design once a week and put it out there and that's how you slowly build a portfolio it's not about about like getting these pretty images and then putting them on a pretty website it's about slowly and surely building up your portfolio by doing good design work and going through the whole process all the steps included and the last lesson that I had to learn the hard way is that you can't avoid getting feedback so the best part about design is that you get to design a new app that you're really excited about and you really think it's a lot better but you don't want to be faced with a hard truth of showing it to other people and them not liking it as much as you do but this is a reality that's going to happen time and again when you're a designer so it's really important to not just avoid critical feedback just so that you wouldn't feel bad you need to take out your design you need to publish them you need to show them to your friends and then get feedback on them and even better you need to get feedback from other designers who can tell you what you did wrong and how you can improve it because you might show an app to someone and they might not like it but they can't tell you what's wrong with it but another designer can and that's where the importance of a community comes in so that's a really really important lesson and as you'll notice these lessons all tie back to the steps that I mentioned earlier and they're really important for you to consider when you're going on this learning journey otherwise the chances of you completing this journey are much much lower so one last resource I want to share with you is a list of three books that will help you to start to see the world like a designer and think like a designer so the first book is don't make me think by Steve Krug and this is a really good book for someone who wants to design any app or website or any digital product it has really good principles it's a really fun read it's a funny book and it's short read as well as you can see it's not a very thick book and the second book is the design of everyday things by Don Norman and that book will really give you like like a designer eye into the world you'll start to see things differently and you'll start to consider how like everyday objects are designed what makes good design what's bad design and you'll really enjoy that if you're going into uh UX design the last book I want to share with you is called sprint by jake nap this book was written by jake nap while he was working in google ventures so this process came out of google and it's a great process for solving big problems so the full name of the book is sprint how to solve big problems and test new ideas in five days so it's a great way to take all of the design process and condense it into five days you go everything from understanding the challenge to coming up with alternatives and prototyping and testing all within one week and we're a big fan of this process at agn smart in fact we use it with our clients all the time we only do projects following the sprint methodology and it's a great process for you to learn if you're just starting out in design so those were my six key steps for going from a complete beginner to someone who can get a UX design job in a short amount of time and when I say short I mean like six months a year because it took me more like three to four years to make this transition and I really wanted to make this video to condense down the essentials for you so you can get started quickly all you need to focus on is showing up every day doing the work and you'll get a job in UX design before you know it I hope you found this video helpful please subscribe and hit the bell icon we put out videos on UI UX and product design every week so make sure not to miss out on these and check us out on LinkedIn for more articles and daily tips on product design and UX design if you have any questions please let me know in the comments and I'll make sure to get back to you and let me know also which step or which lesson resonated with you the most or excited you the most that's also really helpful thank you so much for watching and see you next time hi in this video I'm gonna and my biggest tip for you in this case is to and my tip for you in this case is to and the best thing you can do is always a blooper there's always a blooper with Kyle coming into the shop very invasively when you're feeling like you're stuck somewhere or you're not sure what to do next and that was it the last book is called sprint so sprint believe it or not I didn't have anything to say about it okay so hold on I think that the title is actually good