1. Forget everything you know about visual design and stop doing anything related to it
In at least the first 3 months when you start practicing UX design. Stop doing UI design even thought you are designing a new website, designing a new application. Especially a must not for Graphic or UI designers who want to learn new skills of UX design
Most of the time, UX designers tasks rarely require UI design skills. Another thing is if you start thinking about visual elements, you may go into the wrong direction or out of the design process. This leads to the result that you need to redo many times and it will take a lot of time and effort. So instead of that, try to practice your skills on sketching ideas on paper, drawing low-fi wireframes. the more you start to sketch on paper, the better you are in exploring ideas. For UX designs, we will want to explore as many ideas as we can, pick the best one and refine it later. A good e-book by Adaptive Path will help you more on sketching and designing faster: Good Design Faster
More than that, a portfolio of a UX designer shows less of Visual or UI works, but more of Process, Design Decision. One common mistake that designers usually made is putting a wireframe as before and a complete UI as after. This doesn’t show how to make design decision, what should be shown is the whole thinking process before came up with the that wireframes.
2. Understand clearly the problems before doing design
This is important. There are so many web designers used to design web templates that sell on themeforest or creativemarket may skip this part. That is because template design serves general purposes of everyone, there is no particular problems. Or the only problem is coming from the client who purchases the template, not the real customer who are actually using that template.
So, always try to think about the real problem that you are solving. Ask the client about their problems, identify whether it is real problem or just assumptions. And more important is don’t let customer gives you solution. You need problems not solution because you are the one who provide solutions. If someone give you a wireframe and ask you to design something, ask them to find the UI designers.
3. Think about the whole flow, not a specific point of the design problem
When designing for something, think of how the user came to that point, what happened before that, and at the moment they are using your application, and after they complete it.
Let’s think of the situation when you want to check your flight ticket booked a week ago. You may want to open your inbox application, type in the search input for “flight…”. Or in different situation you are holding your phone on one hand and the other hand is busy, then the only way is to scroll down and find the email about a week ago. Then how would you design for both scenarios? Think about it and you can provide the solution that can solve for both cases, you will have a more complete designs and satisfy customer no matter what situation they are in.
To practice this you can try to learn more about Story telling in design:
Or empathy mapping:
4. Stop doing Redesign for big product/system
As this article points out, instead of trying to redesign those, try to design a solution for any problem of some small application or website that you use everyday. Why not the big one? The reason is those big company has their own big product team and business decision to make that design, and not always that they haven’t known about the issue you found, they might know it but chose to put it in their backlog, or it does not impact much comparing to other problems they are having.
The other reason is you don’t have enough resource, money, budget to do a proper user research. I saw some redesign project that the designers only asked 5–6 people with very general questions without consider what is the correct sample size, who is the right target customer and so on… We cannot always ask the same general questions to some random people without a reason why we do that instead of sending a survey to 1000 or 2000 people. Those 5 to 6 people interview is meaningless for a product of 1 million customers with different segments and culture without a complete research plan.
5. Critical Thinking and Convince Skills
Critical thinking is the objective analysis of facts to form a judgment. (Wikipedia)
This skills is very important in every industry, and for UX, it’s more important because it helps designers in choosing the right reasons to make decision. Designers learn how to pick the facts and give the right reasoning. It also helps us to strengthen our convincing skills when we propose some designs to business stakeholders or clients. Which is the foundation of design driven. No designer wants to say “I design this because the client wants it”, and you can prevent it by having strong reasons to support you.
I hope some simple tips here can help you understand better about the UX jobs and keep you in the right track. There’s a lot more to learn but start from basic and get the right understanding is better than reading lots of new terminologies of UX and getting confusing.
