Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Sarah Croughwell

What to do when you got your degree in graphic design but all the jobs are for UX design

Photo by: Tim Gouw via Unsplash

I graduated from college a little over two years ago with a Bachelors in Fine Arts and a concentration in Graphic Design. I learned all about kerning, Paul Rand, and how to make a poster for social change. When I graduated all the jobs were for entry level user experience positions, and I felt under qualified. So, I took the first job I could creating the designs for print pieces and got to work learning about UX. Below is a list of resources I collected over the last few years that have helped me become a freelance UX designer and researcher.

Things you gotta know about user experience:

Starting out, it’s easy to over simplify what UX design is. Honestly, I thought that having a few illustrator files of wireframes would be enough for me to launch a career in UX design, but that’s not the case. Here are some things to know up front.

UX is part of an entire product development process: There is UX involvement in the beginning middle and end stages of a project. It doesn’t end then the wireframes are done. The more you can apply UX principles to the projects you work on, the easier it is to create a portfolio of work.

UX and UI are closely related but not entirely the same: Often, there is a UX designer who focuses on functionality, usability and a UI designer or visual designer who will focus on delight and capturing the brand of the company within a project/product. These roles often overlap and many smaller companies look for people who can do both.

While it’s not required, it helps to have knowledge on how to do UX research: If there is a researcher on the team, it helps to know the process to inform design, and if you are on your own UX research helps you build a strong case to stakeholders on why you made the design decisions for the project.

Know why you are doing something: Don’t do something like an A/B test, card sorting, or surveys just because the industry told you too. UX is about using data to make informed decisions, not chasing fads. Know where and why to use each of the tools.

Practice makes perfect: I recommend coming up with concept projects that include what you learn from the resources outlined below.

UX Research & Strategy

This is where the magic happens in UX. If you can learn research and strategy along with creating designs, you’ll be unstoppable. These are the skills you can bring to almost any job in any industry. When I accepted a position as a UX researcher, I wanted to brush up on process. I took a paid course below, but I also explored a ton of other resources.

Learn why it’s important
Know how to make the case to stakeholders
Learn different kinds of research

📘 Just Enough Research by Erika Hall

how to interview key stakeholders
How to do the right research for the project
How to validate designs
Tools to help you get the job done

📰 When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

Before you start designing:
The research conducted before a prototype is built is called “Generative Research”, “Exploratory Research” or “Formative Research.”

📘 Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal

How to not being awkward in interviews
How to make the best of an hour long interview
Evaluating good and bad interviews

🎥 DesignTalk Ep. 61: User research war stories with Steve Portigal

How to collect the data:

Diary Studies
Surveys
Contextual Inquiry
Observational Interviews

After you created your design/prototype:
Research conducted after a product is designed is called “Evaluative Research,” or “Summative Research.”

📘 Don’t Make me Think by Steve Krug

📘 Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug

How to collect the data:

Remote Usability testing
Moderated usability test
Unmoderated usability test
A/B tests
Analytics

Design Thinking

Design thinking is a hot topic that is widely debated in the design industry, but if you are just starting out it’s a solid process to follow when you are working on projects. Different companies follow different design thinking philosophies. Below are some good ones to start with:

From IDEO
🖥 Free course: Introduction to Human Centered Design

📕 Human Centered Design Field Guide

From Google Ventures
📘 Sprint by Jake Knapp

From IBM
💻 Design Thinking

Exploratory Research Artifacts

Artifacts help communicate the insights that were collected in the research phase of the product. Very often before a wireframe is made there are artifacts that come before it, a research report, a journey map, personas, empathy maps. Artifacts can be built as a team in a facilitated workshop or independently to share findings from discovery research. Below are some of the most common artifacts.

📰 Empathy Maps

🎥 Personas

🎥 Journey Mapping

Information Architecture, Wireframes & Prototypes

This is the part that everyone thinks of when someone says UX Design. After the discovery research and conducted and synthesized, designers can create these:

Sitemaps: help organize content of the site or application

User flows: identifies key behaviors a user takes/needs to take in an app

Wireframes: illustrate key functionality, and experience within the product or site before creating the final design

Low fidelity: make these with a team to help identify key functionality and thinking through design challenges (uses paper, pencil, whiteboards, post-it notes)
Medium fidelity wires: concept testing, user feedback (use Axure, Sketch, Illustrator, Balsamiq)
High fidelity wires and Interactive prototypes: usability testing, identifying areas that need attention, or redesign (Use Sketch, Invision Studio, AdobeXD, Photoshop)
Beginners guide to wireframing

Prototypes: Take your designs and make them interactive in order to get feedback on the functionality

InVision
AdobeXD
Axure
Keynote

Psychology Resources that Help UX Design

📘 Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

📘 Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

🖥 Paid Course: Gamification & Behavioral Design: The Octalysis Framework

🔊 You are Not So Smart Podcast

🔊 Invisibilia

🔊 Hidden Brain

If you are coming from a graphic design background, this part can be pretty intuitive. When you are done building and designing refer back to the section on validating your designs with users.

Communicating UX findings

After you have research, design and tested your project, it’s time to report back. Whether it’s to stakeholders, your boss, clients, etc., you need to make sure the findings are presented in a way that makes sense in order to move forward.

📰 How to report findings

📰 Creating the right deliverable

How to Build your UX Portfolio

When everything’s said and done you have a finished project, complete with deliverables, findings, and data to validate your work. Now you need to condense that into a format where other people will understand it and hopefully hire you because of it.

📕 UX Portfolio Handbook

📰 Crafting Your UX Portfolio — A Weekend Guide to Getting It Done

🖥 Paid course: UX Portfolio School

The Secret to Learning UX

In all honesty, these are all helpful guides, but you won’t learn UX by reading a few articles. You learn UX design by doing UX design. When I was in college I created an app project that was focused heavily on UX even though I didn’t realize it at the time. At my first job, I was able to find UX problems to solve at work and put in the results my portfolio. I took a few classes which allowed me to create conceptual projects that used real data that I collected to inform design. There are no limits to finding user experience projects.

If you are still in college, I highly recommend taking a web design course or series of web design courses. This helped me plant the seeds I needed to further explore UX design. Then, take opportunities where you can try some of it out. I had the chance to intern at a web agency, but that isn’t the only way to learn. Work with a team to design and build an app, meet with adjunct web professors about how they got their starts.

If you’ve graduated or transitioning to UX, take a job where you can wear many hats. At my first job, I could use my knowledge of design to help with their print collateral but I also had the chance to clean up the company’s brand, design their website, and help with the marketing strategy. If this hasn’t worked, take a job you can live off of and find a non-profit you can be passionate about and volunteer. Create a side project that solves a human problem. Understand the goals of the users and create a strategy and design work that will help them achieve it.

P.S. Literally a free UX curriculum:

This is a course anyone can take right now. Full disclosure, I didn’t take this course but I would’ve, had I known about it a few years ago. This covers the basics and helps to create a foundation to build on. This covers what UX is, what design thinking is, what pieces fit together, etc. All you need is a Gmail.

How I Taught Myself UX Design was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How I Taught Myself UX Design

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles