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For many digital enterprises, the quality of user experience can make or break a company. A good UX designer can completely change the impact of a service or provide access to a new audience, so they’re highly valued by all kinds of brands and organisations. A UX designer must be many things at once – a creative thinker, a visual designer, a psychologist and a technical specialist. If you can manage all these things then you’ll have a world of professional opportunities open to you.
What does a UX designer do?
It’s all about the personal experience. In simple terms, UX designers turn digital services such as websites and apps into products which people enjoy interacting with. Sounds interesting? Here’s what you’ll be getting up to.
Your work will involve many different aspects, such as making a website visually pleasing, ensuring that an app is easy to use or fun to engage with, or enhancing the effectiveness with which a user base can access a digital service.
One of the most important things UX designers do is to adapt an existing product or service for a particular target audience. This means you’ll need to understand quite a bit about human psychology, including desires, motivations and social network effects. In addition to this, UX designers need the technical abilities to implement their creative ideas within the app or website. Some of the tasks and requirements which you’ll engage with on a weekly basis are:
- Face-to-face client discussions regarding design requisites and planning
- Concept development and proposal design
- Understand user journeys, and create site maps and browsing flows
- Fast and effective digital communication via email or video link
- Collaborative working skills
- Analytical skills, including numerical work, graph reading and data handling
- Strong ability to review work and suggest improvements based on data
- Researching new technologies and softwares
- Cross-platform design, spanning computer, tablet and mobile apps
- Ability to articulate ideas quickly and effectively to clients and engineers
What’s it like to work as a UX designer?
The life of a UX designer is highly collaborative. The job requires a broad range of skills and the ability to work at the centre of operations within a project, often co-ordinating work between the client, engineers, marketing team and customer base. This means lots of face-to-face meetings, quick catch-ups, review and ideas sessions so you’ll very likely be working in an office environment with lots of interactions with your colleagues.
UX design is much more than just interface design. It deals with the whole user journey and requires a team with skills in visual design, human psychology, programming, and communication. Daily tasks involve research, prototyping and testing of new ideas, and this can vary quite a bit depending on the scale of client you’re working with. Every business needs a digital profile these days, and UX designers are needed from the smallest mobile apps to the largest global-scale corporations.
Ultimately, it’s a highly iterative working process which means you’ll be testing and reviewing your design again and again over a period of weeks and months. Expect daily team meetings, to-do lists and frequent deadlines. If you enjoy working in a fast-paced environment, then this might be the job for you.
What skills do you need to be a UX designer?
UX design is a multi-disciplinary profession which draws upon a broad range of skill areas. Here are some of the most important things you’ll need for success:
- Effective verbal and digital communication skills
- Empathetic reasoning
- Proposal design and prototyping skills
- Attention to detail
- Creative thinking
- Problem solving skills
- Methodical approach towards design
- Open mindedness and flexible mindset
- Advanced IT and technical skills
- Superb collaborative abilities
- Good time-management and organisation
How much does a UX designer earn?
According to a 2019 study, UX design was ranked as the sixth best paying entry-level job. In the UK, the average starting salary for a graduate junior UX designer is typically between £19,000 - £25,000. This varies based on the company you work for, your level of experience and key skills, as well as the location you’re working in. Salaries in London, for example, are usually higher than the rest of the country.
Once you gain some experience, you can expect your pay to rise to £30,000 - £50,000 annually, and if you continue in the profession to a senior or consultant level, then salaries of £40,000 - £65,000 are not uncommon.
Many UX designers benefit from additional perks such as private health insurance, annual pension, performance bonuses and other things like memberships and travel allowances.
How to become a UX designer
Still sounds good? Here’s how to get started.
The best way to launch your career as a UX designer is to study a degree in UX design, or in a relevant degree field such as:
- Digital marketing
- Web design
- Psychology
- Computer science
- Business studies
- Graphic design
- Design and media
- Media and communication
Whatever you study, you’ll definitely need a firm interest in web and applications design, so subjects like design, computing, apps development or digital media and technology options are especially helpful when seeking employment after university.
Nonetheless, if you have strong computing and design skills, with proven work experience and are fluent with UX softwares and HTML, then having a degree isn’t a prerequisite to starting your career. If you can get a few internships and work placements under your belt then this will show future employers that not only do you have the skills they need, but your experience working in a professional environment with work in your favour too.
There are also options to take a Level 6 apprenticeship in UX design, which means you can combine your studies with paid work and learn as you earn. You’ll also avoid university debt this way, which boosts your earning potential. There are many other short courses and skills workshops available, as well as taught master’s degrees which allow you to use an existing degree to pivot into the UX profession after just one year of study.
