If you’ve little to no work experience and you want to become a UX designer from a completely different field, you should consider a formal degree program, top-rated UX courses or a certification. However, many UX designers come from adjacent disciplines, and it’s not mandatory to have formal training and education to become a UX designer, although there’s plenty available.

Rebekka Zorn, for example, a digital product design consultant and UX Design mentor at Springboard, studied industrial design with an emphasis on how people play and learn. “It was a lot of psychology; how do you remember stuff and how do you acquire information.”

In Canada, many universities and colleges offer programs related to User Experience and User Interface Design. (Unlike the “UX designer” whose focus can be broad, the User Interface or UI Designer works on designing actual interfaces. This often means creating high fidelity mockups and high-fidelity wireframes of the web pages that web developers will go on to code, including layout and spacing, actual fonts, colours and imagery.)

In addition to multi-year programs offered by colleges and universities, there are focused courses and certifications you can do, mainly online.

Aside from training and certifications, there are many online communities you can join to connect with other UX/UI designers to learn and get inspired, including:

Behance

One the most established communities for designers in any field, this community allows you to showcase your work and get feedback from peers.

Dribble

Both a social networking platform for designers and a lively community, Dribbble’s main goal is to help designers form teams and collaborate with each other.

UX Stack Exchange

A reservoir of valuable advice, lessons, inspiration, and ideas where you can peruse forums and ask other designers questions and answer questions too.

There are many more, and they complement your formal training and certifications and support continuous learning and development to help you advance your UX design career.

As with any digital discipline, there are technical, “hard” skills and knowledge that are required to get things done, such as graphic design knowledge and specific software tools.

Among the tools you might want to learn are those for wireframing, including InVision Studio, Illustrator, Sketch and Figma. Interface design tools include Adobe Photoshop, while Sketch and InVision are preferred for prototyping. You might want to get comfortable with project management tools – there are many out there – and learn to code, although it’s not necessary. At the vary least, it’s helpful to understand coding concepts so you can collaborate with developers.

Other hard skills you should invest in:

• Research
• Information Architecture
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Visual Communication
• Project management
• Team / stakeholder management
• Coding concepts

Zorn says many UX designers come out of graphic design, but what surprises them is how much user research needs to be done as well as the information architecture required to achieve the right behaviour. “The systematic approach is often very new to them.”

But like any job that involves working with others, many “soft” skills come into play, too. Among them:

• Curiosity
• Empathy
• Communication / Presentation
• Collaboration
• Flexibility / Adaptability
• Active listening
• Open mindedness

“Many people don’t even know what kind of skills they already have that apply,” says Zorn. Graduates from psychology fields contribute to UX design because they are people who know how people work. “Those people have skills that are highly needed.” A big part of UX design is conducting interviews and creating surveys, so being able to properly compose a questionnaire is an excellent skill to have, she says. “At the beginning, you really need to understand the user. What are their real needs?”

People who come from a pure UX design don’t always have that ability. Zorn says her partner, who’s also a UX designer, taps into his behavioral economics education to help parse available research and truly find out what users need. She also has a colleague with a psychology background and sees many students transition from disciplines such as architecture, “from creating real spaces to creating virtual spaces.”

You’ll also need to educate yourself about the industry you end up designing for, including the technical aspects. It’s not that you need to know how to write code, but you need to have a basic of understanding how those things work. For a gardening automation project leveraging the internet of things (IoT), Zorn had to spend a lot of time talking to developed of embedded devices and systems, particularly about sensors, how data is sent and received, and what can go wrong. “This needed to be communicated to the user in a structured way that they actually understand it.” And that meant she had to understand those concepts to design something that made sense.

Aside from research skills, you also need to be able to plan and manage projects and communicate with different stakeholders, she says. An actual design combines communications and visual aesthetics. “There are so many layers to this. Some people are a jack of all trades, a master of none, and some are specialists.”

Information architecture is a key element of UX design – you’re not just designing the visual interface by shaping the structural design of information and content, you’re creating a structure for the experience, whether it’s an app, website, or other product. Wireframing is an important skill because it allows an UX designer to build a blueprint to help optimize the user experience as they interact with the product.

As a UX designer, you’re not solely responsible for the experience of a product – there’s a product manager who decides on features and developers who help build it, among others. “All of them actually are working on the user experience, not just user experience designer,” says Zorn. The technology chosen to power a product also affects the experience – the chosen database and how quickly retrieves information is part of the experience, for example.

More importantly, you’re not building a product and tacking on the user experience after the fact. “The whole product is already an experience.” She says people who get into UX design want to create beautiful apps, but then realize there’s more than visual aspect of the interface. “There are also very logical parts to it. It is a technical job, and you are working in an IT environment.” For Zorn, that means more than simply telling developers how the final user interface (UI) will look, but how the system works on the inside.

As much as being a UX designer can draw from different disciplines and requires a mix of hard and soft skills, there are UX design methods and “deliverables” (work products) that are commonly used across different industries that UX designers will need to know.

Among the most common:

Personas

A persona is relatable snapshot that makes it easier to for designers to align and empathize with consumers – a persona encompasses the target audience, highlighting demographics, behaviors, needs, and motivations through the creation of a fictional character.

Value proposition

This early-stage process aims to boil down what the product is going to be, who it’s for, and how it will be used so that there’s agreement as to what the product is going to be.

Competitive audit

By looking at what others are doing in the market you can figure out what’s already working for other companies in your industries to improve on them and distinguish your own product in the market.

Stakeholder and user interviews

These are an excellent example where soft skills come into play, as conversations with customers, bosses, subordinates, or peers both within and outside the organization allows you as the UX designer to put yourself in the shoes of these stakeholders so you can prioritize features and define key performance indicators (KPIs). User interviews allow you to get qualitative information from existing users and better understand them.

Product roadmap

Whether’ it’s spreadsheet, diagram or a series of sticky notes, a product roadmap lays out the evolution of the product over time and prioritizes features.

Testing

There are many types of testing; guerrilla testing involves going into a public place such as a coffee shop to ask people there about your product or prototype (it’s simple and cheap); A/B testing offers alternative versions of a product to different users and compares the results see which one performs better; concept testing is where a UX designer shares an approximation of the product to see if it meets the needs of a target audience; usability testing observes users trying to carry out tasks with a product.

There are many others, if you’re interested in learning more.

Despite studying industrial design, Zorn ended up joining the games industry as a designer where she would work alongside an artist who take of the graphics. She took care of the typical tasks associated with UX design, such as information architecture, interaction design via framing, usability testing, and even UX writing. “As a game designer you’re creating experiences, the interface and how you interact with the interface, what information is displayed, and how people can interact with it.” All these tasks including the writing are just part and parcel of how the game works.

And because you can be a generalist or a specialist, there’s a lot of options when it comes to your UX design career path, she says. Whether you want to be part of the whole process or if you want to specialize in something is an important choice.

Because there’s so many ways to participate in UX design, the job descriptions you’ll see for open positions will vary. Among them:

• UX designer
• Experience designer
• Visual designer
• Interaction designer
• UX engineer
• UX architect
• Information architect
• UX researcher
• UX writer

Many different industries employ UX designers, including but not limited to:

Aerospace and automotive

The evolution of car means they are computers on wheels, replete with digital cockpits that include Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and infotainment systems. The cockpits of a typical airplane are evolving too as well as the inflight entertainment experiences.

Computing, IT and Software

As a UX designer you’ll create websites and applications for desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Education

Even before the pandemic, online education was a growing market, and UX designers are involved in creating platforms video classes, test deliver, and studying / tutoring.

Finance and insurance

The growth of online banking use including payment apps and other financial services means there’s a lot of opportunity in this sector for UX designers to help make user experiences easy when they want to move money or by financial products such as insurance.

Healthcare

UX design is important for creating information systems that relay patient data clearly and accurately for desktop computer and mobile device applications, including medical records, as well as scheduling applications and telemedicine platforms. Diagnostic equipment and medical devices such heart monitors need interfaces that leverage UX design expertise.

Retail

While online e-commerce is what probably comes to mind first – websites and mobile apps to allow for frictionless shopping – bricks and mortar retail is also looking to improve the in-store experiences with interactive information kiosks, streamlined Point of Sale (PoS) devices, fast and simple self-checkout capabilities, and even augmented reality (AR).

Because the roles and industries vary, so can the work environments, especially in the era of increased remote work. If you work full-time in an enterprise environment or an agency offering UX design services, you’ll likely be in an office every day working with developers, content creators and other designers. Given the collaborative nature of UX design, there will be hands-on meetings with different groups. Large companies usually employ UX designers to help improve existing products, and you’ll likely be part multi-disciplined design department with a specific focus on UX design and one product at a time.

If you end doing UX design as an independent freelancer, you’re going to be working remotely, although you may find yourself visiting a client site if they’re local. Your work will be more varied with different products while doing as many aspects of UX design you want.

According to Indeed Salaries, the average salary for a UX Designer in Canada is $80,952 per year. Salaries vary depending on the location, company, and the candidate’s experience.

Source: Indeed