Whether you are looking to improve your UX skills, catch the recruiters’ eyes with a shiny CV and portfolio or land your first (or second, or third) design gig, here are my answers to some of the most frequently asked design mentoring questions.

Learning the craft

1. How can I learn product design?

There are a lot of hard and soft skills that benefit a product designer, so it’s important to be clear about your priorities.

If you are just starting out, comprehensive courses like Google UX Design Professional Certificate will help you build a solid foundation and good understanding of different steps in the product design process. You can listen in to selected parts of the course for free, but there is a great benefit in taking the assignments and getting feedback on your work.

If you already have some knowledge of product design and are looking to specialise, there is plenty of shorter courses diving deeper into user research, user interface design, front-end development and so on. Online platforms like the Interaction Design Foundation, Coursera, Udemy and Domestika return thousands of results for the “UX design” search and you can arrange those by popularity or rating.

Finally, tools like Figma offer a great selection of learning materials that go way beyond the software.

2. What are the best ways to keep learning and improving my design skills?

If education isn’t your main focus at the moment but you want to keep growing as a designer, consider subscribing to relevant publications, podcasts and social media channels. It’s entirely up to you to find the content you like, but here are some of my favourites:

• UX Collective and Prototypr online magazines and newsletters for weekly round up of the latest news and thought-provoking reads
• Nielsen Norman Group for more in-depth reading on product design best practices
• 99% Invisible and Design Matters podcasts for some on-the-go inspiration
• Zander Whitehurst and Carol Huang instagram channels for those who like to keep things social

3. What knowledge and skills are essential for product designers?

All the learning opportunities can be overwhelming, and you won’t be expected to have mastered the skills when you are starting your first job, so it can be hard to decide where to focus your efforts. I recommend early career product designers to focus on these areas:

• Process: overall understanding of the product design lifecycle and the key outcomes of each stage. You don’t need to know how to do each step (at least not without guidance), but it will really help if you understand the process you will be a part of.
• Terminology: product design is full of technical jargon, and learning it will help you navigate this world with ease. Again, you don’t have to be an expert on heuristic evaluations or be able to recite Jacob’s Law in your sleep, but having some idea what people around you are talking about will help a great deal. There are plenty of resources online, including my own UX Glossary project.
• Tools: while too many people focus on how (the tools) before the why (the process), you need to be familiar with the tools that will enable you to do your craft. The exact toolkit will change depending on the team you will be joining, but you should spend some time getting comfortable with the most popular product design software, which, at the time of writing, is Figma and Miro. And don’t just poke around or watch tutorials — it’s like watching YouTube channel about cycling and hoping it will teach you to ride a bike. Go get your hands dirty, it’s the only way to learn!
• Soft skills: some knowledge of psychology and anthropology, as well as good communication skills, are vital for designers advocating for the user needs. I don’t suggest you get a degree in psychology to boost your UX career, but practicing empathy and learning to be a better listener will make you a better designer. And a better human too.

Showcasing your work

4. How do I create a portfolio?

Your potential employers and future clients will want to see your design skills in action, so you will have a tough time finding work without an online portfolio.

If you have some front-end coding skills, this is a perfect opportunity to showcase them. I built my own online portfolio from scratch and learned a ton redesigning it over the years.

Alternatively, there are plenty of drag-and-drop templates you can use instead. Product design case studies are very different from other visual work, so make sure you find templates that support large image, as well as seizable blocks of text, and have a clear layout and content hierarchy. I’ve not used a template in years, but I review a lot of portfolios and many of the best ones are made using Webflow or Square Space.

Photo by Bruce Mars on Unsplash.

All of the above can take time to build and maintain, and if you need something urgently, here are some shortcuts you can take:

• Good old PDF portfolio can be a lot quicker to put together (especially if you have background in graphic or print design). Some recruiters won’t accept it, but a well crafted PDF is potentially better than a broken website.
• Figma has very powerful prototyping capabilities and can be used to build something that very closely resembles an online portfolio. If your files are extremely tidy, you may even consider sharing those directly. It’s a bold move that exposes a lot of your design process, but I’ve seen it work.

5. What should I include in my portfolio?

Portfolio is a great opportunity to showcase your creativity, but the usual “better safe than sorry” rule applies. There is nothing wrong with having a clear and simple portfolio that showcases your work without additional funfair. At the very least, it needs to do the following (and do it well):

• Tell me who you are and what you do. This doesn’t need to be a full biography, but at least some basic information about your experience, passions and aspirations.
• Have 2–3 relevant case studies that walk me through your design process and show examples of work. They don’t need to include every thought you had along the way, but they need to follow a clear narrative path, so the reader understands what the problem was, how you went about solving it and what the outcome was.
• Include a simple way(s) to get in touch with you, ideally an email and a phone number rather than an imbedded form. It should also be clear where you are based and what kind of opportunities you are open to.

6. What can I do if I don’t have any work to show?

Needing to demonstrate you can do the work in order to get the work can be a real catch-22 situation, but there are other ways to build your portfolio.

Volunteering for a charity you support or a local community you are a part of can be a great way to get professional experience and do some good along the way. Sites like Goodstead connect designer looking to volunteer their skills with non-profits, but you can also reach out to organisations of your choice directly. Large companies will likely already have in-house design teams, but smaller initiatives will really appreciate your help. Be mindful, they may not have thought about needing your services yet (or, likely, not have heard of UX design at all), so you may need to walk them through the process and explain the benefits. Ensure they are open to things like usability testing, or you will be frustrated working for free and being unable to do your job properly

Design challenges are another great way to build your portfolio and skills. They give you a clear and focussed brief, which makes for a good case study. As always, just searching for product design challenges will give you plenty to get started. My personal favourites are Artiom Dashinsky’s weekly product design challenges and the accompanying book for solving them!

You can pick a single challenge and take it through every step of the design process, or you can look for smaller challenges to practice or showcase a specific skill, like user journey maps, task flows or prototyping. You can even practice designing a specific UI component, for instance, choosing a brief to design as many card variations as possible. Just be mindful that working on fictional briefs will force you to make a lot of assumptions about the user needs, business goals, technical limitations etc. This isn’t a problem, but you need to be upfront about the guesswork you are doing and explain when and how you would go about getting the relevant data if this was a real assignment.

Landing a job

7. How do I know if I’m ready to apply for a job?

There isn’t a perfect moment to start looking for a job. Wherever you are in your career, it’s almost certain you have some skills that could be improved through further learning, and there is at least one place in the world that will appreciate and be ready to pay for the work you can do right now. Ultimately, you can start looking for work as soon as you want to have a job, and you will probably get it once you are ready for it.

It pays off being strategic about this step though, so here are two questions I always ask my mentees:

• What are your core skills (hard and soft) and what type of companies would benefit from them?
• What are the main things you would like to learn in your next role and what type of companies can offer you this experience?

8. What do I do if I’m not getting any replies?

This is probably the single most common question I get, so don’t worry — you aren’t alone. It’s impossible to say why someone has no luck with job search without reviewing the entire application process, but here are some things to consider:

• How are you finding roles to apply for? Avoid putting all your eggs into one basket and sending cookie cutter application to dozens of adds listed on the same site. Experiment with using different platforms and customise your CV and cover letter to fit the job description. It also pays off to be proactive in your search, network in person and approach the companies you want to work for directly, even if they don’t have suitable job listings at the moment. A great resource on being strategic in building your career is Designing Your Life book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.
• Do the roles match your skills and experience? You don’t have to tick every box (I once read that women apply for a job if they match 90% of requirements, while men only about 50%, and this really stuck with me!), but if there are particular skills that you see mentioned again and again, brainstorm if you have some way of gaining or demonstrating them.
• Does your CV and cover letter tell a clear story? When you are starting out with not much experience under your belt it can be tempting to cram everything you’ve ever done into your CV in a hope that this will impress the potential employer. Remember, less is more, and having a clear image of where you are in your professional journey will give the recruiters the confidence that you understand what the role requires.
• Does your portfolio demonstrate your creative skills, as well as professionalism? Just like CV and cover letter, your portfolio needs to tell a clear story of who you are as a designer. Make it personal, but keep it professional and let your work take the central stage.

There can be so many reasons your application didn’t make it through to the interview stage (many of which are external), it can feel like wandering in a thick fog with no clear sign of direction. The key is to keep moving and trying out different things until you start accumulating some data on which approaches work best.

Once you begin getting responses, note which applications made it through and see if you can spot a patter. And when you get to the interview stage, don’t waste the opportunity to gather some feedback. There is one question I ask at the end of every interview, and it’s worth its weight in gold: “do you have any questions or concerns about my suitability for this role that I can clarify or reassure you about?”. Then listen.

10. How to prepare for an interview?

Different companies run their interviews differently, so the key advice I give my mentees is to ask. Job interview isn’t an escape-the-room challenge and you are allowed to know what to expect. Understandably, they are unlikely to share the exact questions you will be asked, but the overall structure, type of activities (conversation, presentation, practical task) and timeline shouldn’t be a secret. If you are asked to prepare something, it’s absolutely fine to ask for clarifications, check things like their preferrer delivery format and how much time you will have to present it.

Remember, an interview is a two-way process. Many applicants are so focussed on impressing the hiring manager, they don’t pause to consider the questions they should pose back. Asking your future employer about the team structure, ways of working, design process, tools, work culture and so on shows that you are a valuable candidate who is evaluating the role as much as presenting themselves. Turn the interview into a conversation between two equals considering working together, and you are half way there getting hired!

Thank you for reading this far, I hope you found the information useful. If there are questions I haven’t covered, feel free to leave a comment or book a free 30 minutes mentoring session on ADPList with me!