Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Luke Howells

This is a question I asked my self numerous times on the lead up to landing my role as a Junior UX’er. If you’re in the same position and feeling stuck then this quick post may give you that little push you need to take the first step.

As Simon Sinek preaches, “start with why”.

People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it, so be clear on why you want to transition into UX. It’s a super competitive market and landing your first role can be a huge challenge, however, if you’re clear on WHY, you’ll be one step closer.

I found it’s all about taking small steps and lots of them, if you work in a company where there’s already an established UX team, research, designers or product design. — Reach out to them, a big part of working as a UX Designer is being curious so why not take that first step, show them you’re interested, and be curious to see what happens next.

If you’re not in a position to reach out to fellow UXers within your current work place, then do it outside of work. Most importantly, reach out to people. If you contacted 100 of companies with a UX practice, the chances are you’ll get a positive response from at least one of them. If you put the effort into making the connections, putting the people first and not leaving it chance then you’re another step closer to your goal.

Do I need a portfolio?

Don’t worry about having a fancy website portfolio, you’ll just need a way to show that you can put your thoughts and ways of working into something tangible, in most cases a slide deck will suffice, the rest you can learn along the way.

There are a few ways you can approach building a portfolio and UX knowledge:

You could enrol in a UX course they can be intensive 1 week courses, evening part time courses or 10 week full time courses. Schools like Experience Haus and General Assembly run these on a regular basis. By the end of these courses you’ll have experience of working with real clients solving real problems. This could then be a piece of work that you can add to your portfolio to use for interview.

Another approach could be doing a usability review/redesign of an existing experience, the most common form of this is a digital app experience. To show what I mean, here’s some examples.

Regardless of how you get your case study/work the main thing to convey is your approach to the problem, how you identified it, what you did to understand it, what methods you used and which one’s were right for the highlighted problem. Then onto, what your solution is, and how you validated/tested it.

In summary

If you understand why you’re looking to move into UX and you can convey this through demonstrated pieces of work, you’re most of the way there. Once you’ve built the connections/relationships and you can show your workings, you’ll be a lot closer to landing yourself a job as a UX Designer.

Although a short one, I hope this post has inspired you to take the first step in your new career.

If you do like this post please give it a 👏 or if you have any comments on suggestions of approaches, please feel free to leave a comment!

Thanks for reading!

p.s for those of you who have already landed your new career in UX, there’s another blog soon to follow about my experiences so far working in UX.

How do I become a UX Designer? was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How do I become a UX Designer?

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