4 ways to become a great UI/UX designer without a degree?
All you need is to learn the right skills.
Nowadays you don’t need a design degree or have any previous experience in design to become a UI/UX designer. I am a self-taught UI/UX designer with no design background.
All I did was learn the necessary skills from blogs, websites, videos & free courses to land my first UI/UX design job (which surely pays equal or more to the industry standards).
Here are 4 ways to become a self-taught UI/UX designer, without spending a single dime and become skilled enough to land your dream job.
1. Learn from Free Design Courses & YouTube Videos
When you hear the word FREE you may have a notation that you won’t get enough value from it to land a job. That’s not at all true, specially in the design industry. Here are few amazing courses, videos & playlist you can start learning from to get started in UI/UX design.
- Google UX Design Certificate(Free to use with no certificate)
- Free UX Design Curriculum
Start learning from any of the above courses at your own pace. They will cover every basics in UI/UX design and even more. Don’t just watch videos from the courses even implement everything.
The above video & playlist can help you master Figma, a very essential software for UI/UX designers.
2. Seek mentorship
If you are a beginner UI/UX designer or someone planning to break into the industry taking mentorship from experienced designers can make your design journey smooth.
The best way to seek mentorship is by reaching out to designers at your dream company. For example, if I aspire to join Spotify, I will reach out to designers who are working at Spotify or already have worked there.
How to find designers to seek mentorship?
- ADPlist -This website is a one-stop place to find designers from top tech companies & book free 1-on-1 video mentorship.
- LinkedIn -Use LinkedIn search to look for designers from companies you aspire to join & then drop them a short message if they could help you with a few questions.
Before you reach out to people for mentorship, make a list of all doubts you have & make it a point to get them all cleared.
3. Read real-products case studies
Learning and understanding how real products use different approaches to improve their user experience can help you make better design-decisions. Following are two amazing website where you should start reading real product Case Studies from to see how different products take their design decisions.
4. Practise, Practise and Practise
All the above ways are useless if you don’t practise. It doesn’t matter how much you learn from the courses, blogs or videos. If you don’t practise and implement what you learn, it will not benefit you in any manner.
Start by making a dummy case study every week or two.
- Implement design process that you learned from courses in your case studies
- Seek feedback on case studies during the mentorship session
- Improve your design decisions based on learnings from real-product case studies
This will not only help you practise, but at the same time you will be making your portfolio.
Thanks for reading.
I hope this article was helpful. Believe in yourself and you will surely reach your goal.
Here is a list of 60+ useful resources for UI/UX Designers a bundle of resources for beginner designers to learn all the basics from.
