This article describes my experience of becoming a product designer from a graphic one. I’ll share some tips on necessary skills a product designer needs, how to create your first portfolio, and prepare for the job interview.

My career started with graphic design — I dreamed of designing books and fonts. Before changing my specialization, I managed to work at Art. Lebedev Studio and Hooga; I took part in a project that got a Red Dot award (“Corruption Park”).

At some point, I realized that I could do more good for businesses and users in product design.

When creating a book or visual identity, designers mostly don’t mind specific metrics. They don’t question themselves: how will my work affect the product profitability? Will the book be convenient for readers? This got me really frustrated at work.

I had been planning to switch to product design for a year and a half. During this time, I made my first simple websites on Tilda and Readymag and later began studying Webflow. So I dived into how websites are created and designed. I also read plenty of guides and articles, trying to understand how a product designer works. Finally, after self-study, I decided to take courses to structure my knowledge.

I got my first job as a product designer in one of the global technology companies. Later, I joined Universe, where we developed mobile apps, games, and web projects. My responsibilities included:

• conducting research.
• developing and redesigning current products.
• maintaining and creating design systems on projects.
• mentoring and training junior designers.

What graphic design skills will come in handy?

Many skills that a graphic designer already has will be of use during the transition, such as:

• Drawing icons. You can create custom icons for apps and websites. Yes, there’s always an illustrator or graphic designer for help, but it saves time if the product designer creates icons themselves.
• Creating visual identity. You’ll need this experience when shaping the product’s visual style to hit the audience. I still create mood boards with a general style to find the right visual language.
• Book design. The general knowledge of the creating layout helps understand how UI interfaces are created.
• Working with animation. This is a necessary skill as you will often design transitions between screens, icons, and components.

What skills do you need to acquire?

Don’t overthink the interface look; try to focus on a successful user experience instead. The product designer’s goal is to make the business profitable and the users happy. This is what product designers and movie directors have in common — they can create anything as long as it fits into the budget and shows the result. The movie needs to break the box office.

Some basic product designer skills will be required of you, no matter where you work.

Product designer hard skills:

• Developing products for iOS, Android, macOS, Web and knowing all the technical features of these platforms. Often in a product, designers are focused on one platform — for example, iOS or Android. But it would be best if you studied how each of them works because some behavior patterns can be unexpectedly helpful to you. For example, patterns from macOS may be required when designing iOS apps, and vice versa. Thus, you may bring something new to the interface design.
• - Creating a visual language of a product, which means finding its style, applying, and scaling it.
• Testing your design solutions. To do this, you should know how to conduct interviews, create basic prototypes in Figma, and work with data from qualitative research. Only practice will help here. You can learn by taking tests on existing apps to improve your skills.
• Forming hypotheses based on user research and analytics. Research can often be done by product managers or separate teams of UX researchers. But product designers should be able to work with data from qualitative or quantitative research. It is best if they conduct user interviews by themselves and form the hypotheses together with the team. You can learn this right in the working process or at the courses.
• Working with Figma, Sketch, Adobe, etc. Basic technical knowledge of these tools is required. You can learn them yourself on Youtube. It’s better to focus on Figma because most products have either already switched to it or are in the process of transition. Improve in the basic tools constantly, and don’t forget to go through all Figma tutorials if it updates.
• Animating and assembling prototypes. The main tools are After Effects and Principle. It’s essential to know how to work with JSON animation and submit an animation for development.
• Design management, which means managing the project and adjusting processes in the design team. You can read more about design management here. You’ll need this skill when working with multiple designers on big products.
• English knowledge (Intermediate at least) is essential as most professional articles, tutorials, and free courses are in English. Clients are also likely to be English-speaking. Anyway, if you’ve read this far, you probably haven’t got any problems with this skill :)

Requirements for your skills may vary depending on the place of work, so you should be able to develop new skills and adapt to the needs of the current project.

Courses, practices, communication with developers and other designers will help you along the way. My recommendations are: take courses (Projector, Apollo, Kama are good Ukrainian schools) and read articles by Nielsen Norman Group. You’ll acquire many skills right in the work process.

Soft skills are also necessary:

• Complying with the principles of nonviolent communication.
• The ability to learn new things from colleagues, understand how analysts, product managers, and developers work, and listen to their expertise. Product designers communicate with plenty of people on the project.
• Pitching and selling your ideas.
• Fast-learning.

How to make your career development plan?

1. Start reading a lot. Don’t try to design anything at first; just spend a couple of weeks on Medium, study Human Interface Guidelines, Material Design, and read articles by Nielsen Norman Group. I added links to specific articles to the end of the post.

At first, it will be hard for you, but this knowledge will really come in handy in the future. Don’t worry if you don’t understand or remember something. What matters is that you know where to find information. I still visit Material from time to time to remember how this or that feature works.

2. When the guides become clearer, move on to the interfaces. Choose an app or a website you like, take screenshots, and put together the user flow out of them. This will help you understand how the interface works and how to design such flows.

3. Next, try to repeat the design. It’s easy as a pie; the more you design, the better are the results. No need to make the exact copy; add your own vision. Then try to create an architecture for a personal project and draw wireframes.

4. Be sure to test your ideas on colleagues and friends. That’s an easy way to understand whether your design solution works or needs refinement.

5. Create multiple options. There were projects where I had to create 200 drafts of one screen. There is never a perfect solution, and you can always do better.

6. Try to keep your layouts in order and follow the 8-pixel grid. Web developers will thank you later.

Where can you study?

Here are courses in Russian and Ukrainian that I recommend.

UX Design at KAMA. I took this course myself, and I highly recommend it for beginners. Here you’ll master the basic skills needed to start working as a designer. While studying at KAMA, I started working in one of the leading technology companies, for which I’m grateful to my curator Aleksey Stiques. At the time, he believed I would succeed. Read about how I took the course here.

Product Interface Design Professium at Projector. This course fits those who already have experience in design. You will structure your knowledge and understand the processes profoundly.

UX / UI: user interface design by bangbangeducation is an extensive course that will organize your knowledge. It’s more suited to experienced designers.

You can find other courses at the link, as well as at my library of useful courses.

I think you’ll also need a mentor during your studies. You can find all the information yourself, but it will be difficult for you to realize your strengths and weaknesses without a mentor.

What if there’s no opportunity to take courses?

If courses aren’t an option, ask your fellow designers for advice. You can message me or any designer whose work you like. We are open people, always happy to give feedback.

I often turn to designers from Wetransfer, Dropbox, and other product companies via Twitter. There are also many Ukrainian channels on Telegram where you can ask any questions. For example, R9. Research Community, kyivux, Figma chat.

How to make your first portfolio?

There are many options and discussions on designing a portfolio, whether to make case studies and get awards on Behance. However, it all seems pointless to me now.

The best option, in my opinion, is to create a profile in Figma Community and publish your designs there. Then, a potential employer will be able to see your work and evaluate your skills.

You can also create a website with your case studies. Again, it’s important to describe the cases in detail because that’s how you show your way of thinking, not only the design itself.

Your first projects can be a redesign of existing ones. Try to find a problem in a real product and redo the design. As an option, you can offer your services to charitable or volunteer organizations pro bono.

How to get ready for your first interview?

Be sure to save your CV in PDF format. Many companies print them out, so it should look good on A4.

Don’t mention the percentage of knowledge you have in Figma. Just tell honestly where you worked and what you can do. When interviewing designers, I focused on how the candidate designs, why they make such decisions, and how many options they show.

If you are applying for a junior position, your soft skills play a key role. Employers pay attention to whether the candidate is open to criticism and explains their decisions well. Some product companies use the white board practice instead of test tasks. A white board is a quick test with a UX task on a whiteboard. You need to quickly develop a design solution in a stressful situation and explain why you propose it. It’s not the result that’s evaluated here, but your way of thinking.

When you get your first job in a product company, ask a lot of questions and hang on every word. Communicate with team members as you should know who’s doing what and how. Pay attention to the job requirements; try not just to complete the task in Jira, but to find and solve the problem that users have. Be active and keep your eyes on the little things.

Useful links

• The Apple guide Human Interface Guidelines helps understand the design principles for iOS and macOS platforms.
• The guide by Google Material Design has a lot of information about the basic rules of design. Useful for Android platforms.
• Nngroup is a Nielsen Norman Group research on different patterns in interfaces.
• A complete guide to the product design process (Russian) is an article about a product designer’s work.
• Webframe.xyz — references and patterns in interfaces.
• How to choose the right metrics for a product (Russian) on Medium.
• Here is the checklist for design.

I also recommend using apps that will help you grow professionally. Adaptivity (iOS), MaterialX — Android Material Design UI (Android) are the apps for designers and developers to understand all the patterns of interaction better.

Books

• Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler gives a profound understanding of user logic.
• Ptolemy’s map (Russian) by Herz Frank helps understand how to evoke certain emotions in users.
• Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change by Victor Papanek is a good book for design rookies where complicated things are described simply.
• Living with Complexity by Donald Norman is a book on why interfaces are complex and when this complexity can come in handy.