2023 is almost here I am so excited and I hope you are too and let's talk about whether you
shall become a ux designer in 2023 I'm sure you've seen that the competition to enter this
ux design field is extremely extremely high I see two main groups of people trying to enter
the field of ux the first group of people are people who have some visual design or graphic
design background this include a lot of Architects and graphic designers and people who are already
UI designers or physical product designers so this group of people share one quality which
is they already have really good visual design skill and they already have a portfolio it's just
that they didn't have a lot of digital product design experience and then there's another group
of people who don't have a lot of visual design experience this includes people who are working
in a different industry like if you're working in the healthcare industry or if you are currently
like an accountant working on Wall Street or if you're currently unemployed because you studied
a major that doesn't give you a job and now it's hard for you to get into Tech if you're a part
of this group of people I suggest you to jump to the second chapter of this video so if you stay
here I assume you already have some visual design background if that is the case then I think you
are going to be relatively competitive to enter the field of ux design the simple reason is that
a lot of the things you've done before in your previous role will be transferable to this new
role because after all no matter what your title is as a designer at the end of the day you'll
need to hand in your figma file I think ux design wouldn't be hard for you because you will be good
at it and I'm seeing so many of my architect friends who successfully transferred into ux
in less than a year so for this group of people I will suggest you to take a boot camp because that
will easily get you a real life experience and then transfer into ux design if you don't have
real life experience working on an actual product it will be difficult and springboard is one of the
online bookcamp that I know that's pretty good I have a discount code here if you want to check it
out not sponsored just saying although I see one common mistake that this group of people often
make which is making your portfolio too fancy if you're designing for an app it needs to work
very well it doesn't need to look super fancy so you can't really use the same idea of Designing
a poster to designing an app and I've seen many of my subscribers portfolio and I've seen many of
you doing great physical product design work but then when it comes to your app design or UI ux
design work sometimes I see portfolios that make me feel like this is not an actual app a portfolio
that's overly fancy might be okay from the eye of a recruiter but it could be hard to pass from
the eye of a hiring manager please don't do all those like fancy background colorful background
and don't add a shadow on top of a border and make a button it has like a transferring color
effect and I have different icons or animations or little animals popping up from the screen
the fact is that a front-end software engineer wouldn't be built up with exactly you design and
it wouldn't be easy to use so make your product down to earth make sure it's easy to use get at
least two real life projects send it to some of your friends and ask them hey does it look
like a real product if you feel like you've done all of those then check out my previous video on
how I landed my first role I think you'll be able to do it too another thing I want to say to this
group of people is that don't constrain yourself to the title of ux designers after one year of
working as a ux designer I realized that I would rather call myself a product designer than a ux
designer because at the end of the day if you are only called a ux designer you might get into this
situation where you don't have too much say on the product design and that's not going to be helpful
for your future career to be honest it's just like different titles different companies cultures some
companies will call a designer UI designer others would call it ux designers and others
workout product designers usually the ones that call it product designers will give you higher
salary and also higher control on the product design rather than just like like letting the
product manager sending you a list of requirements and then you go into the figma designing everyone
else idea and regarding the timing 2023 well right now it definitely doesn't look like a great time
to get into the tech industry giving all these layoffs that's happening it's just like blowing
my mind but being honest I think regardless of how horrible the timing is there will be
opportunities here and there it's just that the opportunities will look kind of different right
now there's still a lot of startups wanting to have more ux designers or product designers it's
definitely not going to be like you are going to become product designer at Apple with one or
two real life projects but it also won't be like here just never going to be a ux designer because
of the tough timing and I think there's a high chance for you guys and if you're a part of this
group of people ux designers or product designers who work in the tech industry get higher salary
so overall I think it will be worth for you to transfer into ux design or product design in 2023
now if you are the second group of people who don't have a lot of visual design background
and if you're either in the process of learning ux design or thinking about whether you start
transfer into ux design I want to be honest here it takes time to make a great portfolio and UI
design is not something you can just master in a few months unless you're putting a hell
lot of practice I understand that my Channel or my experience make it kind of look like I
just took the ux Google certificate course and then worked on one real life project and then I
got my job at eBay but that's really not the case because I started designing since I was
13 years old and I have tons of product design and UI design project before I took the Google
ux course so if you don't have a lot of visual design background it could be difficult for you
to pass the portfolio scanning step so for this group of people I want to first ask you what is
your strength are you a visual thinker or are you good at writing and languages or are you a
people person good at managing people managing projects because there are tons of roles in the
tech industry that that is not ux design but it's similar to ux design that doesn't require coding
and gives you a good salary conversation design for example is a role where you help to design
better conversation for Bots like Alexa Siri or all those bots that just pops up in a website and
I've made a video about conversation design and I also have this partnership with the conversational
design Institute so another coupon if you want to take the course and comparing to ux design fields
like conversation design has way less competition and more companies are willing to hiring people
who has a certificate some other examples include product or project management you'll manage a lot
of design projects plus people as a PM and as a ux designer I often feel like I am 20 of a PM and 80
of a designer because I talk with my PM all the time to try to clarify what is the problem we're
trying to solve what is the timeline what is the data that supports the design and a lot of times
PMS or product managers does more design than the designers because they make take the product
specifications the guidelines the requirements and you don't have to have great UI visualizations in
a portfolio to become a product manager definitely not saying that it's easier to become a PM it's
just a different route that you can try and plus you'll probably get a higher salary compared to
a ux design role some other things that you can explore are content designers content designers
write the text in every single product I partner with them all the time when I'm doing the design
if you are good at writing or making things easy to understand or good at language then
definitely check out what's content designers plus content writers similar thing if you have
some coding experience then you can also check out front-end engineering I really hope there
are more and more and better front-end engineers in this world I don't know if many people becomes
front-end Engineers because I've never worked with super great front-end Engineers it almost
feel like they are back-end Engineers who happen to be assigned some front-end tasks and I know
meta released a front-end engineering course on Coursera so maybe that course could help you if
you want to see what what it's like and of course ux design is one of the things you shall consider
and plus you shall also consider product design I am a ux designer and I would rather call myself a
product designer because I realized in order for you to do all those ux work you have to have the
power to design the product also usually product designers get a higher pay so check out both ux
designers and product designers with all that being said I'm not trying to discourage you
from becoming a ux designer because if you have a deeper reason of why you want to become a ux
designer you probably will eventually become one let's talk ux more next year and if you are not
yet a ux designer I'm still going to share a lot of tutorials videos insights about ux design I
probably will also share more about product design as I said ux designer is not a great
title if you want to be more in charge of the product what is your career goal for 2023 comment
Down Below in the description and I'm excited to see your response my career goal is foreign
so look even if I have a job even if I'm already a ux designer I'm still like so confused and
I think this is the norm the norm is to be confused about your future and a career not
everyone has a clear goal mind and that's okay thank you everyone I'm Aliena Happy New Year