Have a brother entering sr year in college as product/industrial design. He wants to go for UX design (not necessarily UI design) and taking ux design class this fall. The school only offers one semester ux design. What are some desirable/critical skills to enter the UX design world? If coding is a must/highly desirable, what language over others?
Hands on means more than anything and one semester won't provide him with the hands on necessary to make a splash. Coding is completely overrated given the conflict that engineer driven designs create. Empathy is all he needs. A basic self education course in CSS/etc would go a long away. I suggest getting a UX certificate from an industry authority like Nielsen Norman Group or General Assembly, and then just gobble up as many little projects as possible so he can build his portfolio.
Thanks. I didn't know there was ux cert. I'll look it up.
User research. Empathy. Wireframes. Flows. Sketch and Prototyping tools like InVision, principle and framer. That should get him started.
Thanks. I'll flow that information
Being completely real with you, it's going to be very hard finding a software design job with only 1 semester of UX experience and no UI skills to create a convincing portfolio. Job market for pure UX is abysmal and designers these days are expected to be generalists who can do everything, as they should.
That's what I thought. I'm trying to get him helpful info to help him get off his career after graduation. I was searching for an internship opportunity on my spare time, and it was difficult to find pure ux type. Most ux opportunities I saw required coding... and job function sounded more like software dev on UI side only...
I disagree. UX is heavily influenced by research and testing and the visual design of a product is a craft and process on its own that takes time and skill to master, especially if visual designers can help direct front end methods. UX and UI will - especially in the future - be an ever more separating field, especially with things like Voice UIs and iOT devices that rely on things other than a screen to do their jobs well. UX is what all of that is. The best places to work have UX, UI, and front end team members that work together to create good products. Not one or two “unicorns”
Making it in UX can be pretty rough. I have friends graduating with a masters in HCDE having a hard time getting a job. A big part of it is networking with people already in industry and hoping one of them will hire you
Thanks. Networking always works. Difficult part is to find a way to start networking..
There's no such thing as junior or entry-level UX. Not really, anyway. To succeed in a UX role, you really have to be able to balance what's best for users, with what engineers can feasibly build, along with meeting business requirements. Good PMs can help with this, but someone has to do the actual work of designing something that serves two frequently-competing masters (so to speak). Thus, it's best to develop skills that can be immediately useful to an employer. Strong command over visual design helps. It's not necessarily sufficient to get a job, but polished work is a good thing. A portfolio of elegant solutions to actual problems--as opposed to sweeping, overarching designs of an entire application, or, worst of all unsolicited redesigns of existing apps/sites--is quite welcome. Everybody wants to be a big-idea person. Not as many want to dig in and solve the myriad of decidedly unsexy problems that businesses deal with regularly. Showing an ability to design for error states and edge cases is also desired.
Unsolicited redesigns and solving problems are inherently overlapping themes, so it's unclear why he should steer clear of such.
I’m sorry - but the question begs the additional question - why is he an ID student but wants to build digital products (UX) ? Most ID students I’ve worked with through my education at SCAD are now industrial designers and very few are UX (which is seemingly the back burner career for an ID graduate). yes, the themes work but in a 2017 world of education (especially tech) you need to educate yourself formally on your intended field.
As I mentioned, he wants to pursue ux design, not necessarily ui design. My understanding is that ux is broad term where it affects all types of design, while ui is for digital products. As for why he wants to go for ux? I don't know. Maybe he found out about ux while he was studying as id. As far as I can tell, there is no ux design major around here. Schools with design degree offers a course or two that are related to ux design. I am not familiar with design world, but many people cross majors in engineering world. I am an aero major, but I was able to get eit in general and pe in mechanical. Quite number of people jump between aero, mechanical, and civil. I would be surprised if designers get stuck on their career solely based on their major.
ID has a huge overlap with digital product design. Have them look into internships that mix digital with hardware (like Alexa). ID and UX incorporate much of the same design process but with some tweaks. They'll probably benefit from taking some sort of graphic design class to get comfortable with Sketch. It's hard to find junior roles, so that internship is critical for creating professional connections.
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Coding is not a must but a good thing to have that can set you apart from the rest, mostly for prototypes, so I would say css,javascript,html,etc. I would suggest any classes that have tangible projects so he can start building his portfolio relevant of course to UX, even if it's not a UX class you can own the design part, cheers
Okay thank you.