As a self taught frontend developer, it was clear for me on how to gain "experience" as a web dev without having a job (in order to get a job) by participating in a Hackathon or open source, working on a project with others using git and Scrum, write articles, etc.
Especially working with git on a project with another person (or open source) you can gain so much of real world experience (talking about Git Workflow, creating Issues and Projects in GitHub, using Scrum etc).
I wonder now, how would someone gain this kind of βexperienceβ as a UX Designer? (Besides creating projects)? What could be compared especially to working with Git/GitHub, workflows and Scrum?
Update
After talking to some UX designers, it seems that knowledge and skills regarding workflows, scrum, tools like Jira and Confluence are the things that make a UX designer look more professional when looking for a job.
Top comments (6)
I'd advice on the following
Don't have much to share, but hope that helps.
Thank you so much for your input, Clifford!
Thank you Clifford. This is really helpful.π
I face the same problem when developing a project. I want my projects to have good UI/UX but I struggle when thinking about the design. Websites like Dribble provide some ideas but most of the time, I am not satisfied with it.
Really wish to improve my design skills.
I hope you will improve your design skills soon! Wish you best of luck.
I need quite a long time to come up with a good design (I literally mean weeks or months), but I am already used to it. Just start with something. Don't give up.
This is something a lot of early UX designers wrestle with. While UX does not have quite the same open source ecosystem as dev, you can still build meaningful collaborative experience.
One solid approach is to join design focused hackathons or community driven product builds where designers and developers team up. These give you real world constraints, cross functional collaboration, and exposure to Agile practices like sprint planning and standups.
You could also contribute to open source projects by helping improve usability, designing onboarding flows, or even running a quick usability test on an existing tool and proposing refinements via GitHub issues. It is not as common, but some projects really appreciate UX input and are happy to collaborate.
If you are looking to mirror dev workflows, start documenting your design process in tools like Notion, use Figmaβs version history and comments for collaborative feedback, and try running a sprint based solo or group project. Pair up with a developer to create a mini app and use tools like Jira to manage your tasks even if it is just between two of you.
Treat it as practice for working in cross functional teams. That mix of design work plus exposure to the tools and rituals of product teams makes a big difference when job hunting.