I was invited to be a guest speaker at General Assembly’s User Experience (UX) Design immersive course. The UX Design immersive is a 10-week full-time course where students learn some of the core skills that make up the user experience design process. The last couple of weeks of the course are spent working with a real client on a project as part of a team. By the end of the 10 weeks, the student is ready to become an apprentice or junior UX designer.
General Assembly often attracts people who are already working and looking to learn some new skills and maybe switch careers. Most of the students in this class have already been working in an area of design – including an advertising creative director, illustrator and print designer… and there was also a psychology graduate and developer. It was encouraging to see a diverse mix of guys and girls, ages and cultures. I look forward to seeing how everyone goes kicking off their UX careers!
I thought I’d talk about some of the things I think are really important to focus on as you progress through your design career… and some of the things it would’ve been good to know when first starting out. I decided to collect and share some wisdom from a few friends who are some of the most experienced designers and design leaders in Australia. I posed this question on Facebook:
Hire or work with new UX designers? What do you wish they knew or did differently? Designers, what do you wish you knew when you were starting out?
A great Facebook discussion with plenty of wise words followed. Thanks to Katja Forbes, Anthony Quinn, James Breeze, Ash Donaldson, Matt Gardan, Stephen Cox, Lisa Railey, Dave Mallam, Joe Ortenzi, Steve Baty, Morgane Borzee, Erin McIlroy, Rache Jayne and Vince Ryan for their input!
It was great to meet the class, share the wisdom from some great designers and have a chat about a few things they might want to know…
The Slides
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At Dynamic4, we partner with our clients to design and build business, brand, product and service ideas. Human-centred design and experience design is core to the way we work. We apply human-centred design and lean startup principles when we’re designing and building websites and other digital solutions and on our strategy and design consulting engagements.
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