STAYING AHEAD OF THE GAME AS A UX DESIGNER | Aj&Smart

Key Takeaways

hi i'm jonathan from aj and smart when I first started out being a UX designer in around 2010 2011 there was very little competition on the market there was very high demand for UX and almost nobody who could do it because nobody could learn it anywhere there are also no tools that were really easy to kind of use to create prototypes and to create digital products so it was sort of like a Wild West of product design back then and back then being a UX designer kind of meant you were almost like the king when you were in product meetings because nobody knew anything about the topic and you could pretty much derail any conversation by saying oh well the user won't like that or well you know it's bad for the UX okay that's good intro skip to 2017 UX is a well-established part of the product design process there are things that we just didn't have back in 2010 that make the junior UX designers of today almost at the same level of the senior UX designers of 10 years ago we've Beit we've reached a baseline of good enough that most companies can achieve to be someone useful to be someone who's actually going to be a valuable member of the product team you need to understand the business and here are three ways that you can make yourself a more valuable UX designer number one product strategy you need to understand the bigger picture of the product you're working on for the company how does it fit into the other products in your company how does it fit into the other services in your company is this a product that's just being released to capture data for something else you need to know why your company is making it and where they see it going in the long term some really great resources for product strategy are this amazing article called what the is product strategy by Vince Law and these three great articles that are linking to in the description by mg Siegler number two you need to understand growth growth is one of those things that UX designers were allowed to ignore for years or there's a sentence I forgot to say here the second thing you need to understand is growth back in the Golden Age of UX when nobody knew what was going on and the UX designers ruled UX designers sort of got a free pass on understanding things like growth but growth is one of those kind of metric that many companies and bigger companies like Facebook Amazon Google Tesla they based their entire businesses and they based their product decisions on growth number one I would recommend reading hacking growth by Sean Ellis this is sort of the it's actually a relatively new book but it's already become the Bible on growth at least 60 to 70 percent of a lot of product decisions come from the topic of growth and this is something you absolutely absolutely absolutely need to understand third and last marketing and awareness you need to understand how people are going to find this product you need to understand how the marketing team is going to talk about this product because this way you're going to be able to even help them out they're gonna be able to help you out it's not a good idea to start designing this thing purely focused from the customer point of view when you don't know how and why your company is marketing in in a specific way so if you want to argue with the rest of your product team about something that you don't like relating to the marketing you better actually know what you're talking about and the best way to know what you're talking about is just to do some quick reading up on the topic one really great example of that is Jab Jab Jab right hook by Gary Vaynerchuk and overall gary vaynerchuk's videos are and podcasts are amazing if you just want to get an immediate boost and understand product marketing go for that in the end ux design UI design whatever kind of design it's creative problem-solving your job is to be a creative problem solver and to be the best creative problem solver in 2017 for the products that you're working on you need to understand a broader part of the product picture i'm done i'm leaving a bell pepper a bell pepper