The self-taught UI/UX designer roadmap (2021)
bootcamp.uxdesign.cc
bootcamp.uxdesign.cc
I think things have gotten a lot better since then. Now it's routine to see very well-designed apps (and sometimes even websites) from even relatively small national/local entitities that totally nail all three main aspects: GFX/UI & UX (well, and sometimes even transitions/motion design). It's really impressive to see how the field has scaled up. I must assume that the various variants of education are working. (Northern European context.)
This helped us be more in sync with engineering teams and allowed us to seemlessly get plugged into teams of Google engineers, Startups etc.
It's difficult to learn because it's experience-based listening and intuiting, without any books that I know of, but it provided a greater boost to team productivity than their learning nuts-and-bolts details.
Then add on to that our current work culture prefers specialists to generalists: HR and exec teams will hire a product designer with 5 years of design experience and no coding over someone with 2 years of design experience and 5 years of software engineering experience.
When I was earlier in my career it was a major struggle to stop coding. every place out of university would say there was some kind of design opportunity for me, but then I’d find myself implementing mine and other designers features. I’m glad that’s over.
Anecdotally, I’ve met several eng -> PM and Eng -> design transfers, probably all possible to the leveling of pay and prestige.
There are tons of websites that give you fake briefings and challenges to practice on:
- https://www.frontendpractice.com/ - https://www.codewell.cc/ - https://cssbattle.dev/
my full list https://github.com/sw-yx/spark-joy
The article touches on something that resonates with me, that is you may find yourself learning more (practical skills) on the job. So I wonder if there is a way to learn faster without having to switch careers, such as being a part-time designer at startups, practicing under a mentor, or indie-hacking a product. Does anyone have any advice on this?
Practicing with a real project brings enormous potential for learning based on quality feedback.
As a bonus, you might end up creating a business with real users that you can further develop or sell right away if you're not interested in going down that road.
Thank you for your thoughtful advice.
Thought it was always funny, I guess hiring managers don't see the overlap the same way I do.
My wife is trained in UX research and UX/UI design and is trying to break back into the job market after years of being out (kids, sick mother, school, etc.) and although she had a background in some graphic design (and marketing and content) years ago, she doesn't feel confident-in or want to emphasise on graphic design and doesn't have an up to date portfolio of that kind of thing. And what she is finding is almost all the positions titled "UX Designer" are really just "web design" or "graphic designer" with a fancy new title, and they won't look at her, really.
The few times that I've done front end work I've always found it frustrating how the UX people I worked with seemed more concerned right up-front with pixel padding and font choices and colours and animations and logos than with getting the initial storyboard and low fidelity mockups right first.
TLDR; most shops hiring "UX designer" are really wanting to hire graphic designers and pixel slingers.
P.S. if you know of anybody hiring (remote, full or part time or freelance) for UX research, content design, information architecture, and so on and who wants a mature and conscientious worker with past professional experience in the tech sector... ping me at ryan . daum @ gmail.com
TBH, the overwhelming majority of developers assume they know a lot more about UI, UX and visual design work than they actually do... I'm continually shocked by how many think bringing in a UX person to add visual polish to an otherwise complete product in any way makes sense. In software dev environments, they necessarily have a lot of say in who gets hired. If you're not clear on who does what in the design business, you get people with shiny portfolios of app UI screens assembled in Photoshop to do your "UX" if there's enough time and budget left for the "extra" sprint.
The challenge the profession currently faces is that a lot of people go into it for the wrong reasons and who are not suited for it. Because there is no money in traditional graphic design, many graphic designers elect UX thinking it's nearly a 1:1 transfer. There is a lot of mis-match.
You really have to really like and have a good sense of human cognition and human factors first and foremost. You also have to like thinking in systems. You are basically design (engineering) solutions for how humans interact with computing in all its forms and in many modes.
Many designers, whether they admit it to themselves or to others, would really rather be designing book covers and concert posters.
I generally work with graphic designers who made the switch to calling themselves UI/UX designers because the realized it paid more. They’re much better than me at understanding composition, fonts, colors, visual hierarchy etc…, but they don’t know much at all about actually designing interactive UI.
In many cases the designers are the first people to work on engineering the product and they aren’t equipped for this work at all.
What I think is worse is even when they have a formal background in UX the company never wants to utilize it. Every time it's the same junk process. Instead of deriving features from user journeys, empathy maps, and personas the company has the "UX" person generate documents that validate the feature list the customer already wanted, users be dammed. You can also forget about A/B testing or in-person testing the person at the top with a C in their title knows what their users "need" so there is no need to pay for testing.
It's nearly impossible to find good UX resources for boring websites. It's all "30 clothing brand websites with cool hamburger menus".
If you're building a knowledge base, you're pretty much on your own. There's only the UK government's blog, nngroup.com and a few others.
UX is an umbrella term covering many design disciplines, like interaction design, UI design or research.
UI is a subset of UX.
Someone who is good at interaction design, IA, research and UI is nowadays called (digital) product designer.
It’s somewhat frustrating that the design industry can’t agree to use the right terms.
Also the guide missed to mention Axure or Just in Mind, which are real prototyping tools allowing you to prototype working forms and data grids, which are heavily used in business / enterprise apps.
The other tools mentioned, apart from Framer, are closer to creating clickable slideshows rather than sophisticated prototypes.
I would recommend these resources
And most importantly start creating as soon as poosible… learning by doing, eg recreate one of your favourite apps or site… you will learn a lot.
As a UI developer, I’ve never actually learned to conduct user research (skill that I’m definitely lacking), but during my time in the industry I’ve definitely learned to listen to my graphic designers that actually conduct these research, both to listen to and materialize their interpretation, and to bring my own interpretation. As a novice UI/UX developer I for sure had a lot of biases about user interaction which were deeply flawed, UI/UX research is a really helpful tool in braking these biases.
There's others but those two are open source if you're concerned about user privacy.
Understand business, understand programming sufficiently, learn how to understand data, learn how to observe and draw conclusions based on behavior, understand typography, color theory.
Avoid anything that says UX theory, design theory, design thinking, design psychology etc. Whatever relevance they have, it's already baked into the design patterns.
The biggest advice I have is find areas that don't have well established design patterns as that will normally be the areas you will have the ability to have the biggest impact.
This is my anecdotal +20 years experience making sure I stayed relevant.
Another one is to put yourself in the user's shoes and then lean in to your own laziness in order to come up with a UI that will delight the average user.
Also, in the beginning don't worry too much about the difficulty of implementing your ideas. You won't come up with anything new if you are always thinking "that's too hard" or "that will take too long." You can always scale back your ambition at a later time, but it's important to be excited about your ideas.
There are a few sites that follow this philosophy:
http://flyosity.com/design-then-code/
Edit:
Oh, and start prototyping the flow way before finalizing colors and so on. This is a great tool for it: https://principleformac.com/
Many of the examples are for web design however not once does it talk about copywriting. It goes way under appreciated but copywriting is also design (i.e. # of words you write effects UI layout in massive ways).
Yep. Does anybody work with dedicated copywriters and dedicated UI designers who don't do copy? What's the general process?
I find the UI design and copywriting has to be done iteratively because they're interdependent and require experimentation to find the right balance. For example, sometimes there's a tricky layout situation that can be solved by just changing the length of the copy. Same goes for development, sometimes it can be easier to modify the UI slightly to make it more practical to implement e.g. some responsive design coding can get really complex if you're not leaning into what the browser lets you do easily with flexbox/grid.
Work goes a lot smoother with better results when each team has some flexibility and collaborate in an iteratively way vs thinking they can handover their part and have it followed without any tweaks.
When they are decoupled you end up with architects making pretty buildings that are hard to build and operate. software that looks nice framed on a wall but trips up the casual user and is downright painful for the Professional user. and stylish consumer goods where the style interferes with the function.
Rich Gold’s fabulous book “Plenitude” comes to mind.
That is not to say that there aren't mediocre designers and architects out there, but I would argue that – when taught right – there are few degrees that are more multidisciplinary and cross-domain by nature than those two.
I’ve been a Senior SWE at FANG and have considered switching careers to design. My parents fed the family doing photography, I grew up from a design background, even spent a year in fashion design school part-time while I was a programmer at Google.
Seeing the politics and the non-objective strifes in the design org at Google, the actual day-to-day of the job seems offputting for me. This is obviously the bias of an engineer who has the privilege of focusing on concrete and mostly objective problems. The vast majority of my friends are designers, tech and non tech, and everyone is strong minded if not outright stubborn. For engineers, the strong mindedness can be resolved through logical arguments. With design a lot of it is intuition and/or unfalsifiable. UX research schools purport to teach quantifying and following the data/user, but the characters I know from design schools always think they know better. I can tell you the designers I met at FANG were data-driven 50/50 of the time. When they were data-driven, it was just confirming their own biases.
I’m not saying there is no room for design intuition. That made Apple and it also got Snapchat pretty far, until it didn’t. Also Marissa Meyer era Google and, to some extent, AirBnB with their leaders being designers. But most of the salaried designers I met design out of ego and portfolio building, with service design for users being secondary. It’s arguably a harder incentive problem than with engineers. What’s changed in the tech industry since PG’s Painters and Hackers essay is that design is a lucrative job nowadays, and it attracts art snobs who a generation earlier looked down on engineers as poorly dressed nerds (and they still probably do). There are many aspects of design school such as critique and the self selectivity means some designers are arrogant, but the “niceness” culture of the tech industry forces them to hide it. With this is also a bit of art elitism, and so I’m curious about the journey of a self-taught designer through such ranks, now that actual design departments exist and it’s filled with art-trained designers rather than engineers with design sensibilities.
Design makes or breaks a product. Not sure where you got the impression that it's useless and professional designers gets nothing done.
I'm just trying to understand what makes you think that in the field of design, 99.99% of the professionals are clueless? What about in the marketers? Are they also 99.99% clueless?
Trying to learn how non-designers think of the profession/professional designers.
The difference between him and the other ones I have run into since, he watched users use the product, he would ask users how they might operate low fi paper mock ups, before us developers even saw the design. He tried his best not to project his own preferences and idiosyncrasies on the interaction design.
On the other hand, I have not seen this since. Compared to him, in my anecdata 90% are not clueless, but pretty bad.
From a couple of days ago on HN [1], it's possible to have over 1,000 layers on Figma just to create a button [2] and over 10,000 layers on an entire website. And that's just for creating a design on Figma. Then there is the field of UX research to gather data on the design, the sense behind choosing colors and typography for UI, a familiarity with working with shadows to create a sense of depth on the page, and even working with sound and audio for feedback.
I don't even see how it's possible to hold a UI/UX position and not do anything, because there are very clear deliverables that can be asked for, and a manager can soon tell if a person isn't completing the work. It's plausible that low-skill people can exist in the field, but I genuinely can't imagine how one could stay low-skill yet keep the position.
Really proves the no skill point.
That said, talented designers can arguably be a company's most valuable employees. Product design is the axis on which many tech companies compete, not technological innovation. Technical competency is table stakes.
UX = how your product makes users feel
Well designed products have to balance looking nice with not frustrating users.
You really have to really like and have a good sense of human cognition and human factors first and foremost. You also have to like thinking in systems. You are basically design (engineering) solutions for how humans interact with computing in all its forms and in many modes.
Many designers, whether they admit it to themselves or to others, would really rather be designing book covers and concert posters.
Stop perpetuating the myth of the solo unicorn designer who can do all the end-to-end design work alone and well. I’ve never seen this generalist approach work well in industry because you will never go deep enough to do good work in any of these vastly different areas of UX design and research, let alone front end and mobile design standards (UI design).
Focus on one area of design that you are passionate about and make your career out of applying that skill set instead of being the generalist who can’t do any one thing well.
Can anyone relate?
If the myth is that a single person can do what a UX team does then I agree. But to imply a single designer can't create a good user experience is complete nonsense. We've propped up modern UX to an absurd degree. Yes it provides value. No it's not the only way.
The lone UX unicorn designer this article is targeting runs counter to UX positions in large companies and the work they do as a member of a design team.
If you want to be a solo jack of all trades type designer then certainly disregard what I’m saying, just giving advice as someone who has knowledge of what hiring managers are looking for on their design teams.
Of course, there are many situations where users can’t use competing software, or where there is no competitor. This leads to resentment, and I believe some of the negative sentiment against some UI/UX designers comes from people being burned by bad experiences caused by UI/UX being optimized for the interests of the company instead of the user.
Of course, the more you scale design, the harder true talents are to find. That doesn’t mean the profession is useless. Also, developers caused a lot of havoc as well. Nothing that goes wrong today has been put on the market without developers. That doesn’t make them useless either though.
This article in particular is next level. Even if you know UX, even if you are great at UX, this one is good.
If you think that your job is to create interfaces that people don't hate using – maybe yes.
When I look at candidates for a frontend developer position, design instinct is definitely a major plus. That said, I would not expect them to be able to build mockups in Figma or conduct qualitative user research.
if you're like me and are mostly a developer who just wants to get incrementally better at design piece by piece, here's the roadmap i've been working on for about 3-4 years: