Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey everyone, My name is James. I'm a UX designer and mentor
and I'm going to be teaching you how to build your portfolio
for your first UX job. Now this is for beginners
and bootcamp graduates. I found that there's a gap
between graduating from a bootcamp and then
landing that first job. Lots of questions come up from my students about
how to prepare, what the interviews look like, what kind of roles to apply for the day-to-day and
responsibilities of the position. I'm going to lay
out some details on all this and hopefully
it helps you out. This is my first course
and I'm very excited to do my best to help you and
be a good guide for you. And if you ever need
anything, I'm here. I actually switched careers
and got into UX random. I'm turning 30. And I was
in a completely a field. We've gone through the pains
of starting something new. I've gone through the
imposture syndrome, still am going through
that actually, hopefully this
course is relatable.
2. The Gap Between a Bootcamp & Job: There were a lot
of gaps going from a bootcamp into a
real-world scenario. There's a lot of
questions that remain on what a day to day job and environment actually
looks like within UX, what are you going to
actually have to do? Does everything you learned
apply in the real world? And so it's a very
different experience once you actually
get that first job. Now landing the first job is very heavily dependent
on your portfolio. It's what employers
look at the most. They're going to want
to see how you think, how you solve problems. And you show that through your UX process that you
lay out in your portfolio, you want to obviously know
the goal of your designs. They want to know
what any kind of user research or discovery
that you went through and the KPIs that
were measured and data that was acquired and
the results of that, and how those influenced
your design decisions. They also are going to want
to know what challenges you faced and how you overcame them. Anything that you would change a future project,
things you've learned. We all learn from mistakes.
They want to know about that. They want to know how you apply, what you've learned from
mistakes into future projects. But again, the focus of the portfolio and in
any project you lay out in there is going to
be how you solve problems.
3. Most Common Questions I Come Across: Some of the best
questions that I've come across as a UX mentor have been. What is the day
to day look like? What most UX jobs look for? Tools to know, and different
types of UX roles. Depending on the role you land, it's always gonna
look different. But generally you're
going to work within small teams internally. You're always going to
work with a client to some extent or
wherever the user is. Your day-to-day is going
to be spent working independently on wireframes and different design assets that you're responsible for creating. There's obviously going to be constant
communication throughout the day via Slack or Discord
or whatever your team uses. And then of course
you're gonna have your daily touch points
via Zoom calls or whatever other IDEO calls and meetings that your team has. I personally always worked
promote as a UX designer. And so there's a
lot of flexibility there, a lot of autonomy, which is very cool and as an introverted type of person and independent, I loved that, but it's important to
keep these things in mind when you're applying for positions and try to look into the company culture on
their website or whatnot, and try to get a
feel for the kind of daily interactions
you're gonna have. What are employers looking for? As I said, the portfolio
is gonna be number one of secondary importance
would be your experience. How many years
you've worked with previous companies that are in a similar industry perhaps. Or as a beginner, obviously, that may not be the case and they
understand that, but they want to see
that portfolio and how you've worked through certain
projects that you've done, either through your bootcamp or because you chose a real-world
example to work on. Obviously, if you can apply to a position that's in a sector that you have some
relevant experience in, within your background, even if it's completely
different role that always helps the primary tools use as UX
designers are gonna be Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD, those
are the big three. Sigma is kind of become
number one right now. For good reason, it's web-based, it's super easy to
collaborate with teams on its free sketch requires
a licensed software. Generally, you'll see on
a lot of job postings, employers mentioned
Figma first and then they'll say or UX tools, but It's kind of
always be mentioned. If you have to learn one, if you're truly a
beginner and just looking to get into this field, I would focus on Figma. There are many different types
of UX roles manually from a UI UX designer role to
more on the visual side, visual designer, you can be more on the front end
of the UX process. And to be a UX researcher, There's UX strategists,
or you can go into more branding and
become a graphic designer. But a design bootcamp generally will prepare you for any one of these roles and you can figure out what you like
best, which is great. Simon number one,
write down what you think are your biggest
strengths so far in UX, your weaknesses and what
part you liked the most. Because that's ultimately going to influence your decision later on on which one of these roles you would
like to apply for it.
4. What Should Your Portfolio Look Like: What should a
portfolio consists of your best projects?
Two or three is fine. It should have your process. How do you solve problems, research and discovery,
outcomes from that? Wireframes, your UI,
KPIs, challenges. This is generally going to be your outline for your portfolio. And this is the best way to
structure it so that they get to see how you
approach the problem, what the problem was, and then your design decisions based off of that understanding, results, testing, problems you faced along the way,
and the outcomes. Of course, what would you
do better in the future? What you learned, all of this is super important
to the employer. An additional tip here is I would definitely
real-world project as a beginner through
your bootcamp, you're going to have projects that you've worked
on and that's fine, that's a good starting point. But if you could utilize
your network, reach out, do some research on
some different websites or apps that you think could use a little design tweaking
or kind of an update. It will be super helpful for your portfolio to have
this kind of project, especially if you reach out to the company and they
get back to you and actually say it's okay to
create a design for them. They may not use it, but
to do that and to have that on your portfolio is
going to look really good. Simon number to select
your best project and make sure you haven't presented with the aforementioned
sections. If not, create those sections now and fill them in at
the end of this course.
5. Interview Questions to Expect: What are some of the interview
questions that you'll get? They want to know your
experience, of course, while you're looking to
switch jobs, your UX process, as we've been talking about, examples from the
portfolio and what you built in y, what are the KPIs? Discover you came across and how you used it
to make a change, your challenges, things you
would have done better. And then sometimes they'll make you do a design challenge. Now an example of this
could be designing out in advanced search
filter on a car website, matching different makes and models in this kind of thing. It's stressful, it's
nerve wracking, but generally they're
pretty straightforward. And with just a
little preparation, you could certainly nail this. No problem. For junior roles or
beginner level roles. You're generally not
going to have this, but it's just something worth
noting for a future role, this could come up
assignment number three, write down your
hypothetical answers to these interview questions and
see what you come up with. Analyze them and
see what you can improve the process of
actually accounting jobs. So obviously there's a lot of really good
resources out there. Indeed is number one job site. You have Google. You can just literally
Google UX jobs and you'll get tons of search results
right on that first page. And they're generally all from different sources and
updated every day. I think it's a great
resource for finding a job. And then if you want something more specific like remote job, there's of course, websites like remote.co removed,
promote ok.com. We work remotely know desk. If you want to start off roll, you can go to Angel.co. All of these sites are
great places to find specific jobs that
you're looking for, for specific situation. And I think that's great. First step, but just beat up, figure out what you actually want to do and how
you want to work, where you want to
work, and how you want your life to be structured. That's an important thing to tackle before you apply
to your first job. Of course, utilizing
your network on LinkedIn, reaching out, telling people
what you're doing, what your new position is,
what you're looking for. You never know someone might get back to you. It doesn't hurt. I didn't really have this
luxury when I started, I didn't have a huge network
to reach out to. For me. It was a numbers game.
I just applied to a ton of jobs, positions. Just eventually landed on,
but it took some time. But if you have a network
within the space or you know, people that work
within the space and tech or design or whatever, it definitely start there. Again, write down your
ideal working scenarios and don't limit
it to just today. Think about your future self and what would make you most happy. Consider the types of companies
you want to work for. Start-up, a more
established company. Each has its own set of
challenges and perks. And you really wanted to think through what you
take your career.
6. Final project: Okay, For your final assignment, I want you to build out one
project in full showing your entire process
and implementing the sections and structure that we discussed in this course. Look over it, leave it for
a day, come back to it. This is the best way
to catch errors and spark new ideas on how you
can articulate your findings. Make sure you include
actual outcomes, whether real or not, as well
as challenges you faced.
7. Wrap up: That is, it reach
out if you want me to help you with
anything finding jobs, or if you want some personal
mentoring or if you just want to talk,
please reach out. I wish you all the
best of luck and thank you so much for
taking this course with me.
James Everett, UX Designer & Mentor
