So, you want to be a UX Designer?

How I went from a junior designer to a Senior Level Product Designer at one of the best companies in the world.

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I had foresight to see that the future loss of (engineers/recruiters/sales) tech jobs to AI and outsourcing would end my current career path— and soon.

I began my journey into the Digital Marketing Specialist, Development, and Digital Design world over 10 years ago. I built my first (awful) website when I was 16, and that fascination shifted into an obsession that I still am in the midst of. How do I build the best possible experience for users on a website using human based empathy rooted UX design over traditional marketing KPI implementations? How can I use empathy for conversion rate optimization and cart abandonment recovery, instead of traditional sales tactics? How can I use Google’s new Core Web Vitals reporting to help our users, rather than lose our rankings and users? These are just a few of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of questions I realized I would spend the rest of my life not knowing the answer to fully, but pursuing constantly.

Although the industry as well as the definition of Digital Marketing has changed drastically over the past 10 years, I have (mostly) been able to keep up with the times at every major shift, certainly better than most (sorry, Schema writers). When most focused on specialization, I decided early on that being a bit better than good at many different areas of Digital Marketing would end up better for me than being excellent at 1 or 2, since fields were dropping left and right due to emerging tech overtaking the need for them. Traditional digital marketing metrics have become way less important to Google, and UX/UI became more important to not only Google but finally Stakeholder’s who now see the value in it.

I realized that UX,UI, or Product Design was the future of my industry and the most secure career options, and having the skills to work with and optimize every stage of the customer’s experience using human centered design thinking was the number one reason I landed the job. It wasn’t my background in tech, references, lingo, or portfolio — it was the way I could clearly explain my design process from experience from start to “finish”, and show the results of my decision making whether good or bad.

The Journey

My first job in Digital Marketing was an internship after high school during a gap year before college for a startup named ShareBrands here in Denver. Before even entering college I had successfully made money doing what I love (at a $20 an hour rate… not bad for an 18 year old in 2014). Graphic design, branding, and web design along with marketing for an undermanned, rapidly expanding startup.

During college, I managed to work part time in the industry while learning (mostly useless and outdated) information about the same industry I had already begun working in. Although I found some fundamental business courses to be worthwhile, I mostly found studying marketing in college a lot like watching a great book made into a crappy movie 10 years later. Missing a ton of vital information, and overall less fulfilling than the slow process of teaching yourself. After my third year of college, I made the decision to drop out of school and invest the money I would have spent on a down payment for my house I now own, while accepting a position as a Lead UX Consultant for a large Colorado based organization.

While there, I also became the go-to IT guy for the company, became the #1 salesman at the company using my custom ad campaigns and landing pages. I continued to learn better practices for blogging, and became a Google Ads and Analytics certified professional. This role was by far the most demanding job I’ve ever experienced, mainly due to my age and the amount of different areas my attention had to be on every single day. I still do freelance work for this company to this day in a similar but much more focused Sr. UX Design Consultant, and I’m eternally grateful for the growth I developed at my first “real” job.

Eventually, I left that position, and I made my way into the Digital Marketing Agency world where I worked as an account coordinator who managed email newsletter campaigns, website fixes/adjustments, and blogging/analytic reporting. It was at this agency that I learned SO many extremely important best practices for my UX design and UI design from our lead product designer, while also learning that the marketing agency model is awful for clients and small businesses (but great for agencies).

Eventually I couldn’t continue to work at an agency while also holding onto my values and ethics and passion for spending more of my time on UX projects than marketing designs. Digital Marketing Agencies are, generally, awful places to work and terrible for their clients. In-house well paid full time marketing teams are the way to go, I discovered, if you want your small business to survive the digital age. At this time, I also felt my UI component library and system designs and development expertise were good enough to make it as a freelancer. So I went out on my own, despite every single person in my life telling me it was risky and stupid.

Freelancing

The next year and a half were spent freelancing full time as a UX/UI Designer, which ended up being extremely successful. I worked for over 10 different clients, 2 agencies, and had 3 long term contracts signed in my first year. I was making good money (just over 6 figures net), and helping a lot of small businesses that could not afford to hire someone full time for their marketing projects but had been ripped off by agencies in the past. This was a really challenging, but very rewarding time. Halfway through this part of my career I began leading teams, and learning more about product management, ownership, and Stakeholder needs. I became quite obsessed with the psychology behind managing designer’s work, as it is no small feat to climb into the uncomfortable person who has to say things like “I know you love this version of your design — but here’s why it won’t work as well as this one.” Ugh.

I began to development my own unique design standards, and best practices, and relied less and less on kits and templates. I spent the little free time I had reading books on human centered design basics, including the all time masterpiece “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman as well as a handfull of other great pickups more relevant to agile product development.

Once Covid-19 hit, and work began to slow down, I took a few weeks to gather the courage to take a look a the current job market. I was turning 26 years old soon (loss of family health insurance), so I figured it would be worth at least a glance at the positions that were available.

The Dream “Job”

What are you planning on doing at work. Working on design systems using atomic or a similar standard for component based designs?
Surprise: this is the number one most in demand role I am seeing lately on career posts. Orgs realize the waste of money starting from starch rather than having a set and absolutely concrete set of components that can be interchanged and mass updated - especially with the updates to Google Chrome’s huge push towards web-apps being the standard for marketing, applications, or any other web content. What is the user, and especially when it comes to inclusion for adaptive designs that work well for those suffering from disabilities!

I found my dream job mostly by accident and it isn’t a job; it’s a career, filled with contracts and agencies but the doors have been pushed wide open. I finally was a full time lead/Sr. UX Designer for one of the top 10 largest corporations in the world as a salaried employee, while also working on a small business’s user portal — both roles at 3 times my hourly/salary prior to Covid-19. From there I went on to work for another startup, but settled down with a long term contract to hire FT position at Spectrum working with their consumer facing digital products design team until my latest role for the past year at doxo helping both the design system for the engineering team decreasing overall cost expenses which has been extremelely challanging while SO rewarding as FinTech design systems are not the easiest to implement due to the amount of strict legal requirements for inclusivity for finance companies coming at the same time the web was forced to. And I love a challange!

The biggest reasons I believe I stood out, was that I already knew my worth and exact areas of expertise and could explain them with confidence and ease as it was lived experience, not something I heard on YouTube. I also didn’t absolutelyneed to get the position as I was still making plenty of money as a freelancer and had 5 other offers on the table, and this allowed me to not come across as desperate but confident, knowing my worth and not settling for less.

Due to the risks I took earlier in my career, I was able to capitalize on the best opportunities and ignore the windy dead-end roads that only lead to frustration.

So, how do you stand out and land your “dream job”? It starts today. Take whatever free time you have and use it to perfect your craft or skills. Focus on the future of your industry, instead of your accomplishments from the past. Decide what that dream role is, and make sure it can’t be replaced with an AI Bot or a person living on the other side of the world. Most importantly, test yourself as a professional by doing what others say you’ll fail at, even when they seem convincing! No one has achieved anything worthwhile without taking risks and ignoring the bad advice given by those who live in perpectual states of fear.

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