Image by Unsplash

So, you landed your first UX job. Congrats. Your next goal is to master your UX skills and make a successful leap from beginner to expert. But how to do that?

Here are the top 5 tips that can help you with that:

1. Always be learning

The more time you invest in learning the discipline, the more valuable UX professional you will become.

Identify areas for learning new things

It’s possible to identify a few areas where you should gather new knowledge:

• Fundamental design principles. You need to learn ergonomics and human-centered design principles that allow you to design human-friendly products. Books like Design of Everyday Things and Don’t Make Me Think are excellent sources of information.
• Human psychology. Knowing how people think and act, you can design products that match their expectations. Books like 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People and Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products cover many areas of human psychology.
• Design guidelines. Design guidelines offer specific recommendations on how a product for a particular platform or ecosystem should be designed. It includes specific design recommendations for creating proper visual and interaction language. A product created according to guidelines always has good usability. Places to learn are Human Interface Guidelines and Material Design.
• Design process. You need to learn the process that will help you achieve good results. I recommend following the Lean UX approach because it allows you to experiment and achieve good business results. Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams is a must-read book on the subject.
• Latest trends. Being familiar with the latest design trends is vital for several reasons. First, you need to know what is happening in the industry right now so the solution you create won’t look outdated. Second, you need to keep a hand on the pulse to understand where the design is headed. It will allow you to create solutions that won’t look dated even in a few years. A great way to observe trends is by visiting platforms like Dribbble and Behance.

Try to find a healthy balance between learning and practice

As a rule of thumb, you should dedicate 70% of your time to learning new things and 30% to practice. In the early stages of your career, it is nearly impossible to achieve that by working from 9 to 5. So it is expected that you will dedicate more time to learning. You should plan to spend a couple of hours in the evenings or your weekend learning new things.

2. Master industry-specific tools

Proficient knowledge of industry-specific tools will give you significant competitive advantages over other UX candidates. The exact toolset that you need to master will vary depending on what you do in the UX field. For example, if you have a junior UX designer role, you need to learn prototyping tools like Figma, Adobe XD or Sketch. But if you got a position as a UX researcher, you will need to master tools like Dscout, Uselytics, and Hotjar that will help collect and organize data to be used in the desing process.

It’s hard to achieve significant progress in learning new things if you don’t have a specific plan. That’s why I recommend creating a plan for mastering tools. For example, if you work as a UX designer and want to learn how to create animated effects, you can set a milestone (a specific goal you want to achieve) and create a weekly plan with practical activities. A specific goal should be tangible (for example, you want to create an animated effect and post it on Dribbble).

3. Learn not to fall in love with your solutions

Sometimes UX practitioners are so exciting about the solution they’ve created that they ignore any opinions about their work that tell them this is not the right solution. This effect is known as confirmation bias, and it’s one of the worst things that can happen to product creators. Why? Because it makes you blindly invest time in creating something that has zero value to your users. Every year, many startups fall into traps of confirmation bias and invest an enormous amount of time and effort in building products that collapse on the market. It happens because they ignore feedback.

Confirmation bias. Image by Simplypsychology

When you begin your career in the UX field, always remember that ideation plays an integral role in the design process. In the early stages of the design process, the more ideas you can explore, the more you will learn about your product and your users. But more importantly, you will learn more about the problem you are trying to solve. So don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board to find better ideas.

4. Focus on improving your communication skills

Your soft skills are as necessary as your hard skills. In fact, product design is a result of a collaboration of many different people with different backgrounds. So it’s essential to be a part of the team rather than trying to create something alone. The more you communicate with other people, the more you can understand their point of view on the problem you are trying to solve.

Spend more time with people who actually use your product

Your users are the best sources of information about your desing. Good UX practitioners have the ability to empathize with users, understand their problems, and anticipate their needs. And it’s much easier to build empathy with your users when you interact with them regularly.

• Participate in usability testing sessions to see how people interact with your design and what problems they face.
• Take time to talk with your users. It will help you understand their backgrounds, needs, and wants.

Usability testing is in progress. Image by Unsplash

Put your ego aside when collecting and analyzing feedback

Ignoring feedback from a particular person is one of the critical mistakes that many junior UX practitioners make. You may think that a specific person is not intelligent enough to share their feedback, or maybe you don’t like the person. Either way, by ignoring feedback, you reduce the spectrum of user feedback.

Try to become a start of your local design community

Attending local events will help you get new connections and practice your communication skills. Ideally, you should participate in events as a speaker. Talking about your design process and receiving feedback from your peers is the best way to identify gaps in your approach and improve it. And don’t be afraid of negative feedback. In fact, negative feedback is the most valuable type of feedback because it allows you to grow. Check out meetup.com for UX events in your area.

5. Learn how to ‘sell’ your solutions

Experienced UX practitioners have impressive presentation skills. When they present their solution, they can convince the team and stakeholders to follow a particular path. But what exactly helps them do it? Well, there are a few magic tricks that UX practitioners use to achieve great results:

• They always rely on data when they present you with a solution. Instead of saying general things like “I think our users will love this product,” they say pretty specific things, “Based on our research, 8 out of 10 users said that they will use this product.”
• They show you the solution rather than tell you about it. Most people are visual learners — it’s much easier to understand how something will work when they see a real solution. That is why experienced UX practitioners have solid prototyping skills — they prototype a solution and show it to stakeholders.
• They interact with the audience. Your presentation shouldn’t be a monologue about your work; it should be a dialog. So when UX practitioners present their work, they invite people to share their opinions. They ask, “How do you think people reacted to this design?” and this helps keep the audience’s attention.