Congrats on finishing the Google UX certificate! Here is what’s next for you.
Since Google launched its User Experience Design certificate on Coursera, we at the UX Collective have seen an exciting influx of recently graduated students who are looking to learn more about our field. Most students are coming in through our group on Linkedin, and they are generally looking to network with other designers and get a bit more guidance when it comes to the next steps in their careers.
Digital product design continues to grow, year after year. From the number of practitioners, branches of specialization, and amount of knowledge shared online about the topic. We know it can be overwhelming — especially for someone who’s just getting started. That’s why we decided to put together this list, to help prioritize some of the next steps you can take to continue to learn and grow in UX.
1. Expand on what you learned (and keep learning)
With all the great content available online (plus a bit of discipline), we believe you should be able to learn the basics of digital product design before investing in more formal education and training. The Google UXD course is a great start, but there’s definitely a lot more to be learned.
So we put together a little guide to get started in design, that you can use to continue to expand your thinking and your sources. The goal of this guide is to un-complicate design and eliminate the jargon. Read it at your own pace — by yourself, with a friend, one chapter a week, or all at once.
The guide is broken down into 9 chapters:
- Why Design? Why now?
- Industry overview
- Design with a capital D
- Purpose & community
- The architecture of information
- Taking to users
- Balancing form & function
- The job of a designer
- The road ahead
Here’s the link to the guide:
2. Join UX groups and communities
Connecting with other designers is an important part of establishing your professional work—especially if you’re starting now.
Here are a couple places to start:
3. Make your work stand out
We understand how much work is needed to organize and write case studies, and how helpful they can be to designers who are just starting out in the industry. The fact that so many case studies are being published every day is a sign our industry is more active than ever.
But given the plethora of case studies out there, how can companies find the talent they are looking for? And how can designers differentiate themselves when applying to a position?
Here are some tips on making your case studies stand out:
3. Get your portfolio in front of senior designers and hiring managers
If you’re looking for new opportunities — especially if you’re an entry- or mid-level designer with 0–3 years of experience — you can now apply to have your portfolio added to our directory. It’s all curated, invite-only, and you can choose to be public or anonymous.
How the process works
- Submit your portfolio on the UX Collective Network website
- Your submission will be reviewed by one of our editors
- The best applications will will be featured in our Talent tab
- Every month, we do a portfolio drop to senior designers and hiring managers working at some of the most exciting companies in our industry — including Netflix, Twitter, Twitch, Amazon, Autodesk, Cash App, Coursera, Docusign, Kayak, Meta/Facebook, Walmart, and more
Tips for a great submission
To make sure we’re bringing the best talent forward, we will be selecting the top 20% best applications received. Here are some attributes of what we consider to be a solid application.
Include a portfolio
- Make sure to include a portfolio link with at least 3 case studies in it
- Portfolio websites get more points than dribbble/behance, since websites allow you to tell a better story about each case study + about yourself
Introduce yourself
When submitting your application, make sure to write a paragraph explaining:
- Your name and location
- What type of opportunity you’re looking for (e.g. full time, internship, in-person, remote, etc.)
- Your years of experience in design or other relevant areas
- Why companies should consider you to a position (i.e. your differentiators)
- Why you are excited about design and UX
Include your Linkedin profile and photo
- Unless you’re specifically interested in remaining anonymous, adding your Linkedin and a profile photo helps companies feel confident that you’re a real person (e.g. not a bot).
If you’re not approved immediately, no worries. We will be limiting the number of portfolios we drop to companies every month to make sure we’re bringing them really strong candidates, but every new month/drop we’ll be going back to look at older submissions. Also, you can always submit new applications when you update your portfolio or you have something new to show to the world.
This initiative is an exciting experiment for us, and we’ll be improving our process as we go, but we’re really excited about the idea of leveraging the power of our network to connect companies and designers — so they can ultimately build great things together.
Ready to apply?
You can also browse and apply to specific jobs in our job board:
4. Think more critically about the impact of your work
If you use digital products on a daily basis, you’ve probably noticed the proliferation of dark design patterns that try to manipulate you to engage further, deeper, or longer on a website or app.
Eager for clicks and views, tech platforms are always looking for new ways to use basic human instincts like shame, laziness, and fear to their advantage. Digital junk foods, from social networking apps to video streaming platforms, promise users short-term highs but leave depressive existential lulls in their wake.
The result? Our relationship with technology is becoming increasingly characterized by dependency, regret, and loss of control.
So how do we change the game?
5. Don’t forget to develop your visual skills
One common misconception we see from students who start their design career learning UX before they learn Graphic Design is the idea that aesthetics are not important. That’s a fairly common mistake. Great visual design can elicit emotions from users that will make their day better, will help them achieve their goals and complete tasks more easily, and will help build emotional connections between users and brands.
Strong visual skills also help you communicate your thinking more clearly and find a job in design faster. Smart thinking that looks good is more powerful than smart thinking that does not look good — it’s as simple as that.
Here are some articles that can help you get started on improving your visual skills:
6. Find the right sources to follow
After completing the Google UXD course you’re probably in need of a little break in terms of the content you consume on a daily basis. Fair. But the reality is: designers are always learning. Technology changes at a rapid pace, tools and processes evolve, and thankfully there are a lot of incredibly smart designers who are sharing their learnings online so that other people can benefit.
But not everything out there is reliable. Anyone can publish anything these days (on Medium, on Youtube, on Twitter — anywhere). That’s why we do what we do at the UX Collective: we are always filtering the content that we know, based on our 15+ years of experience in the industry, that will be the most relevant to keep pushing our industry forward.
A few sources we recommend:
- UX Collective: An independent design publication built to elevate unheard design voices all over the world. Curated stories on user experience (UX), visual, and product design. You can also follow the UX Collective on Twitter and Linkedin.
- The UX Collective Newsletter: A weekly, ad-free newsletter that helps designers think more critically about their work.
- Bootcamp: A publication for designers who are starting now, with more tutorials, how-tos, case studies, and other resources; a place for designers to learn from one another in more organic ways.
- Smashing Magazine: Smashing Magazine delivers reliable, useful, but most importantly practical articles to web designers and developers.
- A List Apart. Explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
7. Dive deeper with the right books
There is only so much you can learn from short-term online courses — and honestly, most courses don’t go deep into topics, since they are focused on giving students a quick overview. Books are, still, one of the most thorough and immersive ways of deepening your knowledge and moving from beginner to expert in certain topics.
Our top recommendations below. Make sure you borrow these books from local public libraries or buy them from local bookstores:
- The Design of Everyday Things: Start here. This book will open your eyes to how embedded design is in our everyday lives. By Don Norman.
- Designing for the Digital Age: An overview of multi-disciplinary teams needed to design successful products and services in the digital age. By Kim Goodwin.
- The User Experience Team of One: A comprehensive practical guide on applying basic ux methods and deliverables, for teams or on your own. By Leah Buley.
- Design for the Real World: The attempts by designers to combat the tawdry, the unsafe, the frivolous, the useless product; a blueprint for sensible, responsible design. By Victor Papanek.
- Accessibility for Everyone: A guide for the accessibility landscape; learn how to plan for, evaluate, and test accessible design. By Laura Kalbag.
- How to Make Sense of Any Mess: A seven-step process for arranging the parts of something and making it understandable as a whole. By Abby Covert.
- Just Enough Research: Good research is about asking better questions, and thinking critically about the answers. By Erika Hall.
- Universal Principles of Design: Clear explanations of foundational design principles featured with visual examples applied in practice. By William Lidwell, Jill Butler, Kritina Holden.
- The Shape of Design: The mental state of a successful designer while they go through their creative process. By Frank Chimero.
9. Challenge your assumptions
Over the years we’ve been also sharing articles of our own — and most of the time using those articles as a way to challenge a lot of the assumptions we ourselves have as designers. If you want a place to start:
10. Check out Lessons of Design
This is a personal essay by one of our editors, Fabricio Teixeira, about the things he loves about design and what he has learned along the way.
“After almost 20 years of doing the same thing over and over (i.e. designing digital products), I needed to stop for a second and put down on paper what it is that I find compelling about our craft.
Why do I do what I do? What lessons have I learned by doing it? And why, after so many years, do I choose to continue to do it? My hope is that the lessons captured here inspire other designers taking a similar path.”
We hope this is helpful.
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