UX Career Path - Tips to Designing Your Own Path

Editor's Notes

• #11: Write out your strengths and weaknesses Ask someone else you have worked with what they think Be totally honest with yourself, you are only lying to yourself
• #12: Start with: What matches what is happening at work What you are most curious about What you are lacking the most
• #13: Lots of ways to choose: Passion Strength Job opportunities
• #16: • Is a great way to explain a concept or inspire a team or get stakeholder/client buy-in • Have a whiteboard? Sketching while you tell a story is even more powerful • Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks
• #17: • Not talking about beautiful sketchnotes more like back of the napkin sketches • The next time you are working through an idea, sketch it. Interface or flow or whatever • Resources: On the Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam and Sketching the User Experience by Bill Buxton
• #18: • You are probably going to be designing as part of a team • Partner that with the fact Great design happens through iteration • You need to be able to give good feedback and to receive it • Aaron Irizarry and Adam Connor’s site Discussing Design, http://www.discussingdesign.com/
• #19: • At it’s core great presenters are good storytellers • In this business your gonna be presenting your work in many contexts • Show and Tell by Dan Roam and Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds … or watch lots of TED videos
• #20: • At some point in my career I realized this was a huge part of my job • You are going to be working with various types of people and will need to pull out the best from them • You’ll need various methods for the context • Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo and writings by Kevin Hoffman
• #30: How are you going to know whether or not you are heading in the right direction without getting feedback Find someone who can give you feedback and listen to what they have to offer Don’t have a mentor, get one Find a design buddy who is learning like you
• #31: I have found the best way to truly ingest something is to teach it It makes you really have to think about the subject matter and usually in different ways Some ways you can teach are: Talk to the local IxDA folks they are always looking for speakers Interactions South America is looking for speakers for this year’s event Start an apprenticeship or internship program at your workplace Mentor another designer
• #33: For example if you have some gaps you might say: My first goal is to fill in the gaps of my knowledge by the end of the year. My stretch goal is to grow my vertical a little bit.
• #34: Let’s say you have 5 months left in the year and have 4 areas of gaps. You can say for month 1 I will focus on Visual Design, month 2 research, month 3 content strategy, and month 4 information architecture. You could spend the the first 2 weeks learning and second 2 weeks practicing. The following month find a way to to teach others about what you learned and what you did with it. You’ll have one month extra in case something takes longer. Try to align it to your project work if you can, this way it will be easier to practice. Consciously work in those other skill sets into your practice. Some align better with others. Storytelling with say with storyboarding within interaction design. Sketching with visual design.