THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in September.
Can a professional with a background in journalism follow a career as a UX/UI designer? What steps should he take?
I wouldn’t let the previous answer about programming scare you. UX designers rarely need to program. It helps to have some understanding of programming capabilities to communicate with developers on your team, but UX designers are more focused on the user. As such they are focused on user stories and there is where a background in journalism (or fiction writing or film or philosophy) really pays off.
What is the user’s story? What is their motivation? What problems do they need to solve?
You can’t create an effective solution without understanding how the intended user expects a product to work. To do that, you have to observe, ask questions, get an understanding of their mental model, really put your ego as a designer aside and focus on what the user needs. Journalistic training is excellent for this process. Interviewing skills, truth-seeking impartiality, storytelling.
What are absolute must haves in a UX Portfolio?
Stories.
Too many people create a Dribbble portfolio with a lot of pretty pictures but don’t explain the rationale behind their decisions and why the pretty finished product was the right product.
It is also impossible to know from a finished app or website exactly what you did and what other people on the team did. Without that story it can seem like you are taking credit for all of the work your team did.
Don’t just show the end product. Explain who the users are.
What problem does your solution solve? What questions did you ask to discover that the solution you envisioned was the correct one?
Where were you wrong and where did you change direction?
Who else did you work with? Developers, stakeholders, visual and graphic designers, UX researchers? How were you able to negotiate your vision or incorporate theirs into the design?
Was the client satisfied? What do you see as the next step? Is there more work to come? Etc.
If I learn UI and UX online, will the skills I learn apply directly to websites?
Much of what you will learn in an online UX design course will apply to all types of products including physical and digital products such as websites, as well as services.
Understanding who the user is, what problems they need to solve and whether a digital product or some other solution will serve them is a big part of what you learn. How to plan and create a digital solution comes out of UX and UI design, UI being more about the actual product interface, ie the digital components that the user interacts with.
That said, for an online course, you aren’t going to find users to interview in the course materials. You’re going to have to find them out in the real world.
You also won’t learn a whole lot about what it is like to work on a team, especially if it isn’t group oriented such as a video course, or if group activities are asynchronous, such as a message forum. A good online course will have real-time, group activities and use virtual white-boarding/sticky notes. It will encourage discussion and positive design critique of other classmate’s work.
But still may not get the same kind of energy and feedback that you would in person. If you can do a class with a group of people or find people in the class who are in your area to do exercises with in person, it helps a lot.
And one more question for fun…
How do you make the crust of the pie when you don’t have enough butter?
Joy of Cooking has one of my all-time, favorite recipes. It’s a chard tart with an olive oil crust. The crust recipe is essentially two cups flour, half cup olive oil, half cup water and a dash of salt. It’s a very soft crust so you need to press it out directly in the pan with your fingers. No need to grease the pan. It’s super flaky and the taste is divine. Works well for savory or sweet dishes.