How I became a self-taught UX designer
By: Taly Levinsky
Tags: UX, UX Design, Bootcamp, Ux Bootcamp, Self Taught

How I became a self-taught UX designer

Picture from VectorJuice

To bootcamp or not to bootcamp, that is the question. Especially when you’re brand new to a field you only recently googled and set your heart on. A new career path can be challenging.

But more than that, it’s also exciting, frustrating, rewarding, and terrifying all at once. And after swearing off universities forever, you might find yourself questioning how you’re gonna “make it” — how are you gonna learn?

Bootcamps are obviously readily available to sweep you off your feet and back into a school-like structure, with the promise of employment waiting for you at the end of the tunnel. But the reality is that if you swore off universities, you could probably swear off bootcamps too. Or at least that was my case. I didn’t have an extra $10,000 lying around and I definitely did not have the patience to stay in the career I was in for much longer. So I opted for the self-starter route.

My name is Taly, and I’m a self taught junior UX designer doing an internship with under a year of experience in the field. And I didn’t go to school for it. In fact, I graduated with a degree in linguistics and psychology and wanted to be a speech therapist. But after working several mundane jobs in the education field, I was ready to make an aggressive switch into a career I didn’t know very much about. I was curious enough about it however, to figure out on my own. And I want to share what I learned in the process.

Teaching yourself a subject can be overwhelming. Where do I start? How do I know what to study? How do I teach myself how to actively learn for the first time in my life since I spent my entire degree doing anything but that?

That’s where I come in. I want to share my experience as a self starter in hopes of motivating others to do the same. I’m gonna provide a framework for how to be your own teacher, and moreover, how to optimize the learning process as a self starter in a new career.

I’ve broken this framework down in to 3 things you should do, and 3 things to avoid for the sake of simplicity.

On their own, these steps seem rather obvious, however it is the combination of them in practice that inevitably lead to GROWTH🌱

Let’s start off with three things that any self starter should absolutely do:

Number one: Engage with the material you’re learning.

Don’t just read about the topic. Don’t just watch a youtube video. Become involved in it. Go to skillshare, or coursera, they often offer free trials. They may only be 2 weeks, but there are SO many free trials available online that you could make your own cocktail of freeloader content.

I did a 2 month free trial on skill share and paid 0 dollars while I learned the in’s and outs of Adobe XD. I found a course I liked, and immediately from the first video I was designing alongside the instructor (who by the way, was Daniel Scott. 12/10 I recommend him with my entire being. You can find the exact course I did here).

Skillshare on the left, XD on the right. It’s like business on the left, party on the right. Except now your career depends on it and learning has become your 9–5 job.

Messed it up? Didn’t turn out how you wanted? Great. Try again, learn the tools. Keep engaging with it.

And while we’re on the topic of engaging, reach out to people in the field too. Sometimes the internet doesn’t have all the answers you need, it can be vague. Put yourself out there, force yourself to formulate awkward questions. It’s only gonna help you grow.

Number two: Work your way backwards from job requirements.

Find a job posting from the career you want, look at their requirements. What are your knowledge gaps that you need to fill? It’s important to work backwards from the list of requirements because it helps you focus on the right things, and keep you on track.

I imagine you probably want to start your career as soon as possible, and sorting out what you need and don’t need to get hired is what will save you time, and also allow you to develop the proper skillsets.

Number three: and this is the most obvious one but SET YOUR GOALS. SET THOSE TIMELINES.

This step is most powerful when tied in to number two. When I was looking at careers in the UX field, I saw that all of them required a portfolio. At the time, I didn’t really understand how they worked.

I learned that your portfolio needs to showcase 3 case studies, which outline the entire design process from start to finish. Knowing this information allowed me to break down the design process into a series of steps that I had to learn and become familiar with.

For example, one of the steps in the design process is to conduct research, and in my case the research was specifically focused on conducing interviews. I had never done them before. I had never even written interview questions. But this was my starting point.

I set a goal that by the end of that week I will have read several articles about conducting user interviews, By the next week, I will have written my own questions Then take 3 days to conduct my own interviews.

I went from interviewing my roommates for practice, to interviewing strangers from facebook. All because I identified the knowledge gap, planned around developing the skill, and then did the thing.

Apart from learning the necessary steps to take, I have also learned some things to avoid during the self starter process. Here are three of them:

Number 1: Avoid hyper focusing on every piece of information and trying to memorize every last detail.

It’s more important to actively engage with the material such as designing something alongside a tutorial, rather than spend your time reading and re-reading information. The nice thing about taking the self taught route is that there won’t be an exam in your near future that asks you to reiterate every last detail about colour theory. That being said, learning this stuff is of course valuable, but you want to optimize how you use your time. And to be fair, you probably didn’t read every last piece of information from your school textbooks anyways, so no point in starting now :)

Number two: Don’t finish online courses for the sake of finishing them.

This point ties in with the previous one because it’s highlighting the importance of learning how to manage your time. I am proud to say that I have never completed a full online design course. I found that the quality of the material was no longer what I needed, and it was no longer filling the knowledge gaps I had previously outlined. Instead, I opted to find a daily UX challenge where I could put my knowledge into practice, and continue to develop my skills while I worked towards creating my first portfolio project.

Number three:

(and this honestly should be number one, but due to the recency effect I wanted to put it here so it’s the last thing you remember)

Don’t get discouraged because you’re not in a structured system that costs thousands of dollars only to have you complete unoriginal assignments.

There’s something really sexy about figuring out how to build your own curriculum, and sticking to it despite the difficulties, uncertainties and ambiguities. But if you’ve already embarked on the journey of becoming self taught in a subject, then just know it’s absolutely possible, it’s absolutely attainable, and you get to create an education structure that suits you best on a topic you genuinely want to explore.