How to Become a UX Designer and Land a Job for Non-Designers

There have been many definitive articles about becoming a UX designer out there. There are a ton of paid content on Udemy and others around the same too. So why am I here with just another article about the same?

Because of this secret formula 🤫

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

That’s no secret, isn’t it? The 🗝 is a roadmap for the hustle. A tangible, proven roadmap together with a mentor enables a motivated individual to blaze through the goals building a very honest portfolio and a necessary skillset.

Often what has held back my curios non-design peers from getting their foot in the UX world is the lack of visibility. Visibility of what is expected of them, a roadmap. One can also make a better gauge of the effort required of them on the path. It’s certainly not easy, nor does it poses so to bag the money other platforms charge.

This roadmap, will be FREE, forever as a Google Sheet to copy and use for one’s own.

The world as we know it has changed because of Covid-19. The education system looks at best a transaction and one with a terrible ROI for the current time. The HCI program I went to was a great one but a carpet bomb. A UX designer is a laser-guided missile. Why waste the time, I wonder, looking back at it. Targeted institutions like Lambda School and Product School, have demonstrated this with graduates landing at great product companies where they demonstrate the pin-point knowledge they received from such targeted programs. The same needs to exist for UX Design and for free, that’s the “why” which drives us.

Being open-source, this list is alive and constantly gets looked on by other designers and leaders in the field to tweak and modify and bring it to the most latest and current format. What one can expect of this roadmap is to be a minimum yet an exhaustive list of tasks that is always current to the time. Contributors who’d like to collaborate please message me on a platform of your choosing here: www.asispanda.com.

Roadmap

The roadmap goes hand-in-hand with the mentoring program. The roadmap is the first 50% of getting there. When used properly with definite timelines for each goal items that are developed with the mentor it mimics the OKR style of getting things done practised in most prolific tech companies popularised by Google. Link to the Roadmap Google Sheet 🔗.

Recommended Reading List

The above roadmap goes best with this ordered list of books. Most of them are often recommended reading in most HCI programs. Rest is what I’ve found useful over my journey as a designer.

Mentoring

The rest 50% of the puzzle is being mentored. I believe the conventional definition of a “mentor” is over-rated. Simply put, a mentor is a practitioner in the field in whose shoes you’d like to see yourself. That’s how you pick them.

A mentor in our roadmap’s context will help you tailor the goals and timelines for you. The relationship of a mentor and a mentee is one-to-one. One mentor will be responsible for a maximum of five mentees.