Likely you are here because you’ve heard a bit about this buzz word ‘User Experience’ or ‘UX.’ Perhaps you already know the benefits of a career in UX and want to know how to make the first leap. There are tons of reasons why UX is a great field to be in. You get to enhance people’s real day to day experiences using technology and stand at the crossroad between problem solving and creativity. You talk with real people to understand their needs and create something that will be in the hands of users all over the world.

It’s definitely hard work and requires a range of skills, but it’s very rewarding. If you are at all considering a career in UX, this is the article for you. I wrote this in hopes that my experience could help you, and give you all the steps that I personally took in order to land a UX job in less than 12 months.

In this article, I will go over the high-level steps to gain the knowledge and experience needed to nail an interview and transition into a UX career.

Step 1: Ask Yourself Why UX?

For me, I was transitioning into UX Design from Graphic Design. If you are in the same boat, great! It will be slightly easier for you. The reason I say this is because having the design principles knowledge and background will lend itself well when you start getting into User Interface Design, not to be confused with User Experience Design, they are two different things. I will say that not everyone has the natural ability to problem solve and put themselves in the shoes of the user, and this is 100% a skill that is required to succeed in this field. I do however believe like anything else, skills can be learned and with a lot of practice and hard work, anything is possible.

So why do you want to do UX Design?

Because it’s a booming field?

Because you like helping people?

Because you are a problem solver?

All of these are great reasons. It really boils down to the study of human-computer interaction, strategy, and a good amount of creativity. Whether you know a lot about UX already or nothing at all, every single person has already experienced a UX Designer’s work. Maybe it’s not as noticeable when it’s great, but it’s very painful when it’s not so great. The fact that normal people every day are impacted by your work is pretty amazing.

Understanding why you would even want to make this transition will help you to find your focus area and your passion. Do you want to do more UX Research and be out there talking with users? Or do you prefer to sit in front of your computer and hack away at designs? Hopefully answering these questions for yourself will give you the motivation and confidence to dive into a new career. For me, coming from the Graphic Design field, which yes, does have ‘best practices,’ can often be more subjective. With UX Design, all of your design decisions should be derived from research and data, making it less subjective. I found much more satisfaction in my work knowing that my design decisions were backed by objective metrics and that I was solving real people’s problems and enhancing their everyday lives. This led me more down the path of understanding user needs and translating them into designs.

Step 2: Research, Research, and More Research

The internet contains a wealth of information, use it to your advantage. Articles just like this one helped me to gain so much knowledge around UX, concepts, steps, best practices, and more. You might as well get used to it, after all, with a UX career you will be researching a lot, or at least, you should be. This can differ from company to company though, depending on size, UX Research might be its own role.

Subscribe to Medium emails and get a curated list of articles in your inbox daily. Dedicate yourself to reading at least one to two UX related articles per day.

All of my managers in my career have luckily been firm believers in the 80/20 rule. 80% work for the company, 20% working on bettering you. If you can do this as a part of your daily routine in your current job then that’s awesome, if not, dedicate time in the morning before work or in the evening.

Learn what an error state is, see what falls in a UX designer’s toolbox, learn how to conduct user interviews and tests and why they are so important.

All of these things will help you to understand the overall process and flow, and allow you to start putting it into practice! Just diving in and doing it will help you to learn. Pick any app or website and do a design and UX evaluation on it. Find the gaps in the experience and map out how you could make it better. This is a great way to start getting into the field and utilizing the things you’ve been learning on an actual use case.

Another great resource is Dribbble, where you can get familiar with modern design practices, trends, and common interactions. See what other UX designers are doing. This will inspire you, and keep you up to date. Design trends are ALWAYS changing. Companies like InVision will publish reports on design trends to keep your work looking current and modern. They even release free UI kits to get you started for when you move onto Step 3. So never stop learning and reading up on these things, even once you are an experienced UX Designer.

You can take this a step further and get a UX Certificate. I did this after landing a UX job and even got my company to pay for it, but if you can do it before, even better! There are tons of options both online and in-person, self-paced or scheduled. At the end of it all, you will have something on your resume to show for all the education you received and research you did.

Step 3: Build Up Your Portfolio

If you are coming from any design field you know why this is important and likely already have a portfolio. If not, listen up. Your portfolio is just as important as your resume when trying to secure a UX job. Most of the time what I’ve found in this field is that a lot of UX designers are self-taught, have a degree in something else, or have no degree at all. Most companies care more about what you can do and what you have done rather than what’s written on a piece of paper, and your portfolio is your chance to prove yourself.

I have my Associates in Graphic Design. Due to unforeseen circumstances at the time, I was unable to get my Bachelor’s degree. I honestly knew (or thought I knew) I would have trouble finding a job without a Bachelor’s degree. Nope. I had zero problems. Why? Because my portfolio was detailed, diverse, and always evolving. Now, I’m rocking the title of Senior UX Designer.

When I decided to make the transition I knew I needed to add some UX related projects to my portfolio in order to show my skills to potential employers. So I took a leap of faith on a project at the Graphic Design job I had at that time. I brought attention to the need for a desperate re-design of a product that our Financial Advisors used daily. I helped pitch the reasoning behind it and got approval and budget to go ahead and do it. This was my chance to practice everything I had been reading and studying in Step 2. If you are in a position where you can do something like this at your current job, I highly recommend it. When you start interviewing it’s good to be able to talk about your real-world experience.

With this opportunity, I was able to gain experience and insights into the UX process and do it first hand. Being able to talk with users, understand how to work with developers, it was all invaluable experience that I was able to live through for the last nine months of my job with this company.

With this real-world project now in my portfolio, it was time to build out the rest with passion projects. I picked two things that interested me, saw a problem or a gap in the industry, and went ahead and tried to solve it with my design. I ended up designing a language learning mobile app, and a smartwatch fitness app. Talk about diversified. The real-world project I was able to use from my job was designed for desktop, then I had one for mobile and one for a smartwatch. It’s great to be able to show that you can design responsively and for many different screen sizes.

One last but very important tip I have regarding your portfolio is that you must show your process. All those things you read from Step 2? Document them in your portfolio. How did you come to the end design? Did you talk to your users? Did you do any testing or research? Did you do wires with a pen and paper? What steps did you take to ensure that your design would be successful? Employers want to see this because after all, the process will be a large percentage of your job, not just going onto the computer and designing from your gut.

Step 4: Start Interviewing—You Got This!

With your goals at top of mind, with all the knowledge you absorbed from reading, and with your sparkly new portfolio, you are ready to interview. BE CONFIDENT. You know this stuff. You studied it, you practiced it, so talk about that. Knowing your process is so important in these interviews. They will ask you how you got from Point A to Point B. They will ask you why you made a certain decision. Be prepared to back all of it up. Some jobs will even ask you to stand in front of a whiteboard and have you design something on the spot while they throw constraints at you along the way. Don’t be scared of this, it’s supposed to be a collaborative session for them to see how you think through these problems and solve them. Employers want to know if you can take feedback, and they will definitely give you feedback during the interview.