How to become a UX designer and its demand

Let’s become a UX designer

After 2020 a lot of you probably feeling apprehensive and might be wondering if 2021 is the right time to move on. If you are reading this article, it’s obvious that either you are looking for a career change or you are thinking to become a true UX designer by improving yourself. Now the question is “it is worth it?”, “is the UX design market still blooming?”, and especially how is it possible to become a successful UX designer in this unprecedented time of 2021?

A lot of questions! Don’t panic. You’ll have an explicit overview by the end of this article. You will also get a complete step by step guide to learn UX design and become a true UX designer.

Note: The UX designer has still an immense market demand and the outcome is pretty awesome.

We will cover some important and frequently asked questions in this article.

What do UX designers do?

User experience means the interaction of a user with a product. Assume you are going to book a ticket online. In an ideal world, you will go to a specific website or application which is easy to navigate, you will add the destination and timings and other details, pay for the ticket and will leave the website. You have made the purchase smoothly and the on your way. That’s what we call a nice user experience. Similarly, if a website page takes too long to load, show annoying ads and popups, ask you to fill a lot of forms, the design is broken, and have a bad font and colour choices. You will get tired of it, leave the app and will probably never come back. That is a bad user experience.

Experiences never happen by chance; they are totally dependent on research and design. That’s the point where UX designers come in. Designers consider each aspect of human psychology to make the experience as efficient as possible either it is a web application or app or it is a product like iMac or iPhone. How does the product work? How does it feel? Is it able to complete the task user is looking for?  Does it reduce the pain of the user? UX designers help to make a bridge between a company and the user by combining market analysis, product development, planning and strategy to create a seamless experience for the user.

Does the market need UX designers? Are they still in demand?

So you have decided to invest money and your precious time into a career change, but you are now confused because you don’t know if the future design job prospects are solid or not. Of course, the world has changed dramatically in the past few years but the scope of design is still the same. UX design is still high in demand. A good UX never goes out of fashion, trends may change with time but as long as companies want to provide friendly, effective and enjoyable products, they will be needing UX designers to lead the way.

Is this for me?

So, now you know what is UX and you have started to take interest in it. Awesome. But is it really for you, let us find out together?

Are you desperate to jump into UX? Do you really love research and quantitative data analysis? Or you love to develop and test rapid prototypes? Your main goal is to understand the principles that constitute a board of church of modern trendy UX design. So before deciding to do your research and explore the interior of UX from alter to the aisle to find out whether it is for you, would you like to enhance your skills in a specific area of user experience design ultimately?

By now you’ll probably be thinking where can I get the knowledge? There is nothing to worry about gathering knowledge either it is from a book or the web. Just do normally as you do. If you like Instagram just follow some pages like ui_gradient, the.ewk, uxbites. If you like YouTube just subscribe to some nice channels like Dansky, Futur, Figma, AJ&smart. Watch videos about how UX designers work at big companies like google.  The best book to start learning UX is “The design of everyday things” by Don Norman, considered the father of UX design.

Learn the UX principles

Of course, if you are taking UX design seriously you can do all things we discussed above. The book reading will give you a strong start and will help you to learn basic principles, subscribing to the blogs and pages will help you to develop your skills according to the latest design trend.

Of course, if you’re very serious about getting into UX, you can do all of the above: reading the books first will give you a strong foundation, subscribing to the blogs will keep you abreast of all the latest trends and developments, and following the social media accounts will deliver you a compelling little insight now and again via your feeds. Oh, and if you’re into podcasts, here are the top 15 design podcasts, courtesy of our friends at InVision.

User-centricity is the golden rule of UX design. and you will soon find out that each specific rule and best practices you come across in UX feeds into this one ubiquitous rule. What user-centricity means is to make decisions by considering real users in mind, what do they actually want, not what you think users need.

UX design process and methods

After learning the key principles behind the practice, you’re ready to make UX design happen by exploring new methods and techniques. Before diving into any specific methods, you need to be familiar with the whole process of UX design. At this point, you want to get a vast view of all the steps you will go through while creating a successful design experience.

The design process has four basic key phrases: research, design, process and implementation.

Research

In the first phase, you’ll research the requirements and the goals of the project at hand. As we discussed before we need to scope out the project requirements like what do we need? Who is the target audience? What does a user need? What is the context of using your product? Are there any limitations to the project? If yes then what are they? Later on, you will need to cooperate with the stakeholders. In this phase, you also meet the product owners or CEO to ascertain things like time duration and budget.

Design

After completing the research, you come up with the solutions and start to change them into perceptible artefacts. If you are following those Instagram accounts or YouTube channels, we recently shared you have probably seen your fair share of wireframes by now. Yes! You are right. This is exactly what you will create in this step. Gradually, the same wireframes will become fully interactive high fidelity prototypes that can be tested on real-life users in the last testing phase.

Testing

Testing is a crucial part of UX design. it enables you to highlight errors and flaws in the usability and holes in the solution before you make your product public or take it to a specific user market.

Implementation

In the end, you will move to the implementation after proper user testing cycles. Here you will hand the designs to the development team to code and convert them to fully functional application or product.

With our research and experience, we have put some important key methods and techniques that every UX designer can use in their projects:

• User research
• Research analysis
• User personas
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Information architecture
• User testing
• Usability testing

UX design course

Till now your learning was all about theories blogs, books, videos and all about discovery but now it is the time to dive into practical. As we all know there is an overwhelming abundance of content on the internet, yes it good for reading and learning but it will not turn you into a professional hirable UX designer. To get hired you need a structured hands-on approach to learn.

So to put your ideal background learning you will be needing to learn with professionals. You want to make sure to get the best value for your money when it comes to a course related to UX design. Learning through courses is an investment for the future. To help you distinguish between the best among the rest we have listed down a checklist.

Project-based learning

Find a course that provides a hands-on approach. A good course must provide expert content with hands-on exercises to test what you have learned. It’s not enough to learn just the theory, employers want to see that you’ve mastered the practical skills.

Building a portfolio

The portfolio is the most important thing for a designer. Always choose a course that encourages you to make a nice portfolio. The portfolio is one of the most foremost things that employers will look at before hiring you.

Human support

Learning a completely new skill from scratch is hard. You don’t want to be left to muddle through your own content after paying loads of money on a UX design course. Choose a course that provides human support and pairs you up with a senior, and industry expert or at least a tutor for future help.

Learn the tools

Learning tools is as important as mastering the UX design rules and methods. Employers will expect you to work on the latest and tools with bug names like Sketch, InVision, Figma, Adobe XD. Yes, of course, every designer has his own choice and preferences but it is important to follow what the industry wants.

We will list down some of the popular tools:

User research tools

• io
• Typeform
• ReFramer

Wireframing and prototyping tools

• Sketch
• Adobe XD
• Figma
• Framer
• InVision

Testing tools

• UsabilityHub
• Hotjar
• Optimizely
• Usabilla

There are dozens of others tools you can use but we have listed just some of them here. To start your education, we will recommend you to follow industry standards, a lot of experts in big companies like Microsoft share their favourite tools which you can follow on the internet. If you’re still confused about where to start, then ask your fellow designers. Of course the course you enrolled in before will provide recommendations as well.

So you’re pretty good to go. Do a lot of practice, make good portfolios, stay in touch with your fellow designers and promote your gigs to get more work.

Gabriel says: “Immerse yourself in content aimed at beginners. Whether you spend your time on Instagram and in UX communities, listening to podcasts, chatting to people in the field, browsing the more established UX blogs for beginners, or you purchase the most authoritative introductory books or a mixture of all the above, you should aim to develop a broad understanding of the history of the field, and then you should develop an understanding of its current status.”

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