Design career origin stories often sound clean and linear: a degree in Fine Arts, a lucky internship, or a first job that launches a linear, upward path. But what about those whose paths were not so straight? The ones who came from service, retail, construction, or even firefighting — the messy, winding paths that didn’t begin right out of design school — who learned service instincts long before learning design tools?

I earned my Associate in Science way later than planned, after 15 years in fine dining, which I once dismissed as a detour delaying my “real” career. But in hindsight, it was anything but. Those years built skills and instincts I still rely on daily — in meetings, design reviews, and messy mid-project pivots.

Your Past Is Your Advantage

I still have the restaurant dream.

Whenever I’m overwhelmed or deep in a deadline, it comes back: I’m the only one running the restaurant floor. The grill is on fire. There’s no clean glassware. Everyone needs their check, their drink, and their table turned. I wake up sweating, and I ask myself, “Why am I still having restaurant nightmares 15 years into a design career?”

Because those jobs wired themselves into how I think and work.

Those years weren’t just a job but high-stakes training in adaptability, anticipation, and grace under pressure. They built muscle memory: ways of thinking, reacting, and solving problems that still appear daily in my design work. They taught me to adapt, connect with people, and move with urgency and grace.

But those same instincts rooted in nightmares can trip you up if you’re unaware. Speed can override thoughtfulness. Constant anticipation can lead to over-complication. The pressure to polish can push you to over-deliver too soon. Embracing your past also means examining it — recognizing when old habits serve you and when they don’t.

With reflection, those experiences can become your greatest advantage.

Lessons From The Line

These aren’t abstract comparisons. They’re instincts built through repetition and real-world pressure, and they show up daily in my design process.

Here are five moments from restaurant life that shaped how I think, design, and collaborate today.

1. Reading The Room

Reading a customer’s mood begins as soon as they sit down. Through years of trial and error, I refined my understanding of subtle cues, like seating delays indicating frustration or menus set aside, suggesting they want to enjoy cocktails. Adapting my approach based on these signals became instinctual, emerging from countless moments of observation.

What I Learned

The subtleties of reading a client aren’t so different in product design. Contexts differ, but the cues remain similar: project specifics, facial expressions, tone of voice, lack of engagement, or even the “word salad” of client feedback. With time, these signals become easier to spot, and you learn to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, or offer alternate approaches before misalignment grows. Whether a client is energized and all-in or hesitant and constrained, reading those cues early can make all the difference.

Those instincts — like constant anticipation and early intervention — served me well in fine dining, but can hinder the design process if I’m not in tune with how I’m reacting. Jumping in too early can lead to over-complicating the design process, solving problems that haven’t been voiced (yet), or stepping on others’ roles. I’ve had to learn to pause, check in with the team, and trust the process to unfold more collaboratively.

How I Apply This Today

• Guide direction with focused options.
  Early on, share 2–3 meaningful variations, like style tiles or small component explorations, to shape the conversation and avoid overwhelm.
• Flag misalignment fast.
  If something feels off, raise it early and loop in the right people.
• Be intentional about workshop and deliverable formats.
  Structure or space? Depends on what helps the client open up and share.
• Pause before jumping in.
  A sticky note on my screen (“Pause”) helps me slow down and check assumptions.

2. Speed Vs. Intentionality

In fine dining, multitasking wasn’t just helpful, it was survival. Every night demanded precision timing, orchestrating every meal step, from the first drink poured to the final dessert plated. The soufflé, for example, was a constant test. It takes precisely 45 minutes — no more, no less. If the guests lingered over appetizers or finished their entrées too early, that soufflé risked collapse.

But fine dining taught me how to handle that volatility. I learned to manage timing proactively, mastering small strategies: an amuse-bouche to buy the kitchen precious minutes, a complimentary glass of champagne to slow a too-quickly paced meal. Multitasking meant constantly adjusting in real-time, keeping a thousand tiny details aligned even when, behind the scenes, chaos loomed.

What I Learned

Multitasking is a given in product design, just in a different form. While the pressure is less immediate, it is more layered as designers often juggle multiple projects, overlapping timelines, differing stakeholder expectations, and evolving product needs simultaneously. That restaurant instinct to keep numerous plates spinning at the same time? It’s how I handle shifting priorities, constant Slack pings, regular Figma updates, and unexpected client feedback — without losing sight of the big picture.

The hustle and pace of fine dining hardwired me to associate speed with success. But in design, speed can sometimes undermine depth. Jumping too quickly into a solution might mean missing the real problem or polishing the wrong idea. I’ve learned that staying in motion isn’t always the goal. Unlike a fast-paced service window, product design invites experimentation and course correction. I’ve had to quiet the internal timer and lean into design with a slower, more intentional nature.

How I Apply This Today

• Make space for inspiration.
  Set aside time for untasked exploration outside the norm — magazines, bookstores, architecture, or gallery visits — before jumping into design.
• Build in pause points.
  Plan breaks between design rounds and schedule reviews after a weekend gap to return with fresh eyes.
• Stay open to starting over.
  Let go of work that isn’t working, even full comps. Starting fresh often leads to better ideas.

3. Presentation Matters

Presentation isn’t just a finishing touch in fine dining — it’s everything. It’s the mint leaf delicately placed atop a dessert, the raspberry glace cascading across the perfectly off-centered espresso cake.

The presentation engages every sense: the smell of rare imported truffles on your truffle fries, or the meticulous choreography of four servers placing entrées in front of diners simultaneously, creating a collective “wow” moment. An excellent presentation shapes diners’ emotional connection with their meal — that experience directly impacts how generously they spend, and ultimately, your success.

What I Learned

A product design presentation, from the initial concept to the handoff, carries that same power. Introducing a new homepage design can feel mechanical or magical, depending entirely on how you frame and deliver it. Just like careful plating shapes a diner’s experience, clear framing and confident storytelling shape how design is received.

Beyond the initial introduction, explain the why behind your choices. Connect patterns to the organic elements of the brand’s identity and highlight how users will intuitively engage with each section. Presentation isn’t just about aesthetics; it helps clients connect with the work, understand its value, and get excited to share it.

The pressure to get everything right the first time, to present a pixel-perfect comp that “wows” immediately, is intense.

Sometimes, an excellent presentation isn’t about perfection — it’s about pacing, storytelling, and allowing the audience to see themselves in the work.

“

I’ve had to let go of the idea that polish is everything and instead focus on the why, describing it with clarity, confidence, and connection.

How I Apply This Today

• Frame the story first.
  Lead with the “why” behind the work before showing the “what”. It sets the tone and invites clients into the design.
• Keep presentations polished.
  Share fewer, more intentional concepts to reduce distractions and keep focus.
• Skip the jargon.
  Clients aren’t designers. Use clear, relatable terms. Say “section” instead of “component,” or “repeatable element” instead of “pattern.”
• Bring designs to life.
  Use motion, prototypes, and real content to add clarity, energy, and brand relevance.

4. Collaboration Is The Backbone

In fine dining, teamwork isn’t just helpful — it’s essential. Every night, success depends entirely on collaboration. The hostess seats guests, the bartender crafts drinks, the chefs prepare dishes, bussers swiftly clear tables, dishwashers provide spotless glasses — each role is critical, and without one, everything falls apart. You quickly learn there’s no ego or question about whether you could do it better alone. You know that teamwork is the only way, which may mean temporarily stepping outside your role to buss your table or jump behind the dishwasher to get clean glasses. Fine dining is truly a well-oiled machine — everyone must trust and rely on one another entirely.

What I Learned

In product design, it’s easier to slip into a silo inadvertently. Unlike restaurants, it can feel natural to work independently, maintaining biases and assumptions, or pushing work forward without additional feedback. But great design thrives on intentional collaboration and shared accountability, especially within an agency setting. Collaborate early, not alone. Actively embracing your support system — joining a UX call even when you’re not officially invited — can give critical insights far before wireframes or comps are developed, helping you ask better questions and make smarter assumptions.

In restaurant service, stepping in unannounced to address an issue was seen as helpful, even necessary. But in design, jumping in without alignment can confuse roles or interrupt someone else’s process. I’ve learned that collaboration isn’t about taking over but staying connected. I’ve had to get better at asking before helping, syncing instead of assuming, and treating the handoff not as an ending but as an open communication thread.

How I apply This Today

• Stay involved after handoff.
  Check in during engineering and QA (quality assurance) to support implementation.
• Keep workshops flexible.
  Adjust structure based on the client’s energy and decision-making style.
• Invite a fresh perspective.
  Bring in another designer near the end for polish or feedback.
• Capture intent visually.
  Document decisions clearly so downstream teams understand the nuances and not just the layout.

5. Composure Under Pressure

In fine dining, pressure isn’t an occasional event — it’s the default setting. Every night is high stakes. Timing is tight, expectations are sky-high, and mistakes are rarely forgiven. Composure becomes your edge. You don’t show panic when the kitchen is backed up or when a guest sends a dish back mid-rush. You pivot. You delegate. You anticipate. Some nights, the only thing that kept things on track was staying calm and thinking clearly.

“This notion of problem solving and decision making is key to being a great designer. I think that we need to get really strong at problem identification and then prioritization. All designers are good problem solvers, but the really great designers are strong problem finders.”

— Jason Cyr, “How being a firefighter made me a better designer thinker”

What I Learned

The same principle applies to product design. When pressure mounts — tight timelines, conflicting feedback, or unclear priorities — your ability to stay composed can shift the energy of the entire project.

Composure isn’t just about being calm; it’s about being adaptable and responsive without reacting impulsively. It helps you hold space for feedback, ask better questions, and move forward with clarity instead of chaos.

There have also been plenty of times when a client doesn’t resonate with a design, which can feel crushing. You can easily take it personally and internalize the rejection, or you can pause, listen, and course-correct. I’ve learned to focus on understanding the root of the feedback. Often, what seems like a rejection is just discomfort with a small detail, which in most cases can be easily corrected.

Perfection was the baseline in restaurants, and pressure drove polish. In design, that mindset can lead to overinvesting in perfection too soon or “freezing” under critique. I’ve had to unlearn that success means getting everything right the first time. Now I see messy collaboration and gradual refinement as a mark of success, not failure.

How I Apply This Today

• Use live design to unblock.
  When timelines are tight and feedback goes in circles, co-designing in real time helps break through stuck points and move forward quickly.
• Turn critique into clarity.
  Listen for what’s underneath the feedback, then ask clarifying questions, or repeat back what you’re hearing to align before acting.
• Pause when stress builds.
  If you feel reactive, take a moment to regroup before responding.
• Frame changes as progress.
  Normalize iteration as part of the process, and not a design failure.

Would I Go Back?

I still dream about the restaurant floor. But now, I see it as a reminder — not of where I was stuck, but of where I perfected the instincts I use today. If you’re someone who came to design from another path, try asking yourself:

• When do I feel strangely at ease while others panic?
• What used to feel like “just part of the job,” but now feels like a superpower?
• Where do I get frustrated because my instincts are different — and maybe sharper?
• What kinds of group dynamics feel easy to me that others struggle with?
• What strengths would not exist in me today if I hadn’t lived that past life?

Once you see the patterns, start using them.

Name your edge. Talk about your background as an asset: in intros, portfolios, interviews, or team retrospectives. When projects get messy, lean into what you already know how to do. Trust your instincts. They’re real, and they’re earned. But balance them, too. Stay aware of when your strengths could become blind spots, like speed overriding thoughtfulness. That kind of awareness turns experience into a tool, not a trigger.

Your past doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s. It just needs to teach you something.

“

Further Reading

• “If I Was Starting My Career Today: Thoughts After 15 Years Spent In UX Design” (Part One, Part Two), by Andrii Zhdan (Smashing Magazine)
  In this two-part series, Andrii Zhdan outlines common challenges faced at the start of a design career and offers advice to smooth your journey based on insights from his experience hiring designers.
• “Overcoming Imposter Syndrome By Developing Your Own Guiding Principles,” by Luis Ouriach (Smashing Magazine)
  Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a mentor or a guide at the start of the design career, which is why we often have to rely on “working it out” by ourselves. In this article, Luis Ouriach tries to help you in this task so that you can walk into the design critique meetings with more confidence and really deliver the best representation of your ideas.
• “Why Designers Get Stuck In The Details And How To Stop,” by Nikita Samutin (Smashing Magazine)
  Designers love to craft, but polishing pixels before the problem is solved is a time sink. This article pinpoints the five traps that lure us into premature detail and then hands you a rescue plan to refocus on goals, ship faster, and keep your craft where it counts.
• “Rediscovering The Joy Of Design,” by Pratik Joglekar (Smashing Magazine)
  Pratik Joglekar takes a philosophical approach to remind designers about the lost joy within themselves by effectively placing massive importance on mindfulness, introspection, and forward-looking.
• “Lessons Learned As A Designer-Founder,” by Dave Feldman (Smashing Magazine)
  In this article, Dave Feldman shares his lessons learned and the experiments he has done as a multidisciplinary designer-founder-CEO at an early-stage startup.
• “How Designers Should Ask For (And Receive) High-Quality Feedback,” by Andy Budd (Smashing Magazine)
  Designers often complain about the quality of feedback they get from senior stakeholders without realizing it’s usually because of the way they initially have framed the request. In this article, Andy Budd shares a better way of requesting feedback: rather than sharing a linear case study that explains every design revision, the first thing to do would be to better frame the problem.
• “How being a Firefighter made me a better Designer Thinker“ by Jason Cyr (Medium)
  The ability to come upon a situation and very quickly start evaluating information, asking questions, making decisions, and formulating a plan is a skill that every firefighter learns to develop, especially as you rise through the ranks and start leading others.
• “Advice for making the most of an indirect career path to design,” by Heidi Meredith (Adobe Express Growth)
  I didn’t know anything about design until after I graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a degree in English Literature/Creative Writing. A mere three months into it, though, I realized I didn’t want to write books — I wanted to design them.

I want to express my deep gratitude to Sara Wachter-Boettcher, whose coaching helped me find the clarity and confidence to write this piece — and, more importantly, to move forward with purpose in both life and work. And to Lea Alcantara, my design director at Fueled, for being a steady creative force and an inspiring example of thoughtful leadership.

(mb, yk)

When talking about job interviews for a UX position, we often discuss how to leave an incredible impression and how to negotiate the right salary. But it’s only one part of the story. The other part is to be prepared, to ask questions, and to listen carefully.

Below, I’ve put together a few useful resources on UX job interviews — from job boards to Notion templates and practical guides. I hope you or your colleagues will find it helpful.

The Design Interview Kit

As you are preparing for that interview, get ready with the Design Interview Kit (Figma), a helpful practical guide that covers how to craft case studies, solve design challenges, write cover letters, present your portfolio, and negotiate your offer. Kindly shared by Oliver Engel.

The Product Designer’s (Job) Interview Playbook (PDF)

The Product Designer’s (Job) Interview Playbook (PDF) is a practical little guide for designers through each interview phase, with helpful tips and strategies on things to keep in mind, talking points, questions to ask, red flags to watch out for and how to tell a compelling story about yourself and your work. Kindly put together by Meghan Logan.

From my side, I can only wholeheartedly recommend to not only speak about your design process. Tell stories about the impact that your design work has produced. Frame your design work as an enabler of business goals and user needs. And include insights about the impact you’ve produced — on business goals, processes, team culture, planning, estimates, and testing.

Also, be very clear about the position that you are applying for. In many companies, titles do matter. There are vast differences in responsibilities and salaries between various levels for designers, so if you see yourself as a senior, review whether it actually reflects in the position.

A Guide To Successful UX Job Interviews (+ Notion template)

Catt Small’s Guide To Successful UX Job Interviews, a wonderful practical series on how to build a referral pipeline, apply for an opening, prepare for screening and interviews, present your work, and manage salary expectations. You can also download a Notion template.

30 Useful Questions To Ask In UX Job Interviews

In her wonderful article, Nati Asher has suggested many useful questions to ask in a job interview when you are applying as a UX candidate. I’ve taken the liberty of revising some of them and added a few more questions that might be worth considering for your next job interview.

1. What are the biggest challenges the team faces at the moment?
2. What are the team’s main strengths and weaknesses?
3. What are the traits and skills that will make me successful in this position?
4. Where is the company going in the next 5 years?
5. What are the achievements I should aim for over the first 90 days?
6. What would make you think “I’m so happy we hired X!”?
7. Do you have any doubts or concerns regarding my fit for this position?
8. Does the team have any budget for education, research, etc.?
9. What is the process of onboarding in the team?
10. Who is in the team, and how long have they been in that team?
11. Who are the main stakeholders I will work with on a day-to-day basis?
12. Which options do you have for user research and accessing users or data?
13. Are there analytics, recordings, or other data sources to review?
14. How do you measure the impact of design work in your company?
15. To what extent does management understand the ROI of good UX?
16. How does UX contribute strategically to the company’s success?
17. Who has the final say on design, and who decides what gets shipped?
18. What part of the design process does the team spend most time on?
19. How many projects do designers work on simultaneously?
20. How has the organization overcome challenges with remote work?
21. Do we have a design system, and in what state is it currently?
22. Why does a company want to hire a UX designer?
23. How would you describe the ideal candidate for this position?
24. What does a career path look like for this role?
25. How will my performance be evaluated in this role?
26. How long do projects take to launch? Can you give me some examples?
27. What are the most immediate projects that need to be addressed?
28. How do you see the design team growing in the future?
29. What traits make someone successful in this team?
30. What’s the most challenging part of leading the design team?
31. How does the company ensure it’s upholding its values?

Before a job interview, have your questions ready. Not only will they convey a message that you care about the process and the culture, but also that you understand what is required to be successful. And this fine detail might go a long way.

Don’t Forget About The STAR Method

Interviewers closer to business will expect you to present examples of your work using the STAR method (Situation — Task — Action — Result), and might be utterly confused if you delve into all the fine details of your ideation process or the choice of UX methods you’ve used.

• Situation: Set the scene and give necessary details.
• Task: Explain your responsibilities in that situation.
• Action: Explain what steps you took to address it.
• Result: Share the outcomes your actions achieved.

As Meghan suggests, the interview is all about how your skills add value to the problem the company is currently solving. So ask about the current problems and tasks. Interview the person who interviews you, too — but also explain who you are, your focus areas, your passion points, and how you and your expertise would fit in a product and in the organization.

Wrapping Up

A final note on my end: never take a rejection personally. Very often, the reasons you are given for rejection are only a small part of a much larger picture — and have almost nothing to do with you. It might be that a job description wasn’t quite accurate, or the company is undergoing restructuring, or the finances are too tight after all.

Don’t despair and keep going. Write down your expectations. Job titles matter: be deliberate about them and your level of seniority. Prepare good references. Have your questions ready for that job interview. As Catt Small says, “once you have a foot in the door, you’ve got to kick it wide open”.

You are a bright shining star — don’t you ever forget that.

Job Boards

• Remote + In-person
• IXDA
• Who Is Still Hiring?
• UXPA Job Bank
• Otta
• Boooom
• Black Creatives Job Board
• UX Research Jobs
• UX Content Jobs
• UX Content Collective Jobs
• UX Writing Jobs

Useful Resources

• “How To Be Prepared For UX Job Interviews,” by yours truly
• “UX Job Search Strategies and Templates,” by yours truly
• “How To Ace Your Next Job Interview,” by Startup.jobs
• “Cracking The UX Job Interview,” by Artiom Dashinsky
• “The Product Design Interview Process,” by Tanner Christensen
• “10 Questions To Ask in a UX Interview,” by Ryan Scott
• “Six questions to ask after a UX designer job interview,” by Nick Babich

Meet “Smart Interface Design Patterns”

You can find more details on design patterns and UX in Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 15h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.

(yk)

There seemed to be a hot minute when the tech industry understood the value of idle tinkering and made a point of providing ‘side project time’ as an explicit working perk. The concept endures — I’m lucky enough to work somewhere that has it — but it seems to have been outpaced in recent years by the endless charge toward efficiency.

This seems a shame. We can’t optimize our way to quality solutions and original ideas. To try is a self-defeating fantasy. The value of side project time is hard to overstate, and more workplaces should not just provide it but actively encourage it.

Here’s why.

What Is Side Project Time?

Side project time pops up under different names. At the Guardian, it’s 10% time, for example. Whatever the name, it amounts to the same thing: dedicated space and time during working hours for people to work on pet projects, independent learning, and personal development.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin famously highlighted the practice as part of the company’s initial public offering in 2004, writing:

“We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner. For example, AdSense for content and Google News were both prototyped in “20% time.” Most risky projects fizzle, often teaching us something. Others succeed and become attractive businesses.”

— Larry Page and Sergey Brin

The extent to which Google still supports the practice 20 years on is hazy, and though other tech big hitters talk a good game, it doesn’t seem terribly widespread. The concept threatened to become mainstream for a while but has receded.

The Ode

There are countless benefits to side project time, both on an individual and corporate level. Whether your priorities are personal growth or making lines, it ought to be on your radar.

Individuals

On an individual level, side project time frees up people to explore ideas and concepts that interest them. This is good in itself. We all, of course, hope to nurture existing skills and develop new ones in our day-to-day work. Sometimes day to day work provides that. Sometimes it doesn’t. In either case, side project time opens up new avenues for exploration.

It is also a space in which the waters can clear. I’ve previously written about the lessons of zen philosophy as they relate to pet project maintenance, with a major aspect being the value of not doing. Getting things done isn’t always the same as making things better.

The fog of constant activity — or productivity — can actually keep us from seeing better solutions to problems. Side project time makes for clearer minds to take back with us into the day-to-day grind.

“

Dedicated side project time facilitates personal growth, exploration, and learning. This is obviously good for the individual, but for the project too, because where are the benefits going to be felt?

Companies

There are a couple of examples of similar company outlooks I’d like to highlight. One is Pixar’s philosophy — as outlined by co-founder Ed Catmull — of protecting ‘ugly babies’, i.e. rough, unformed ideas:

“A new thing is hard to define; it’s not attractive, and it requires protection. When I was a researcher at DARPA, I had protection for what was ill-defined. Every new idea in any field needs protection. Pixar is set up to protect our director’s ugly baby.”

— Ed Catmull

He goes on to point out that they must eventually stand on their own two feet if they are to step out of the sandbox, but that formative time is vital to their development.

The mention of DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a research and development agency, highlights this outlook, with Bell Labs being one of its shining examples. Its work has received ten Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards over the years.

As journalist Jon Gertner summarised in The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation:

“It is now received wisdom that innovation and competitiveness are closely linked. But Bell Labs’ history demonstrates that the truth is actually far more complicated…creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting new insights than are the forces of competition.”

— Jon Gertner

It’s a long-term outlook. One Bell employee recalled: “When I first came, there was the philosophy: look, what you’re doing might not be important for ten years or twenty years, but that’s fine, we’ll be there then.”

The cynic might say side project time is research and development for companies without the budget allocation. Even if there is some truth to that, I think the former speaks to a more entwined culture. It’s not innovation over here with these people and business as usual over there with those other people.

Side project time is also a cultural statement: you and your interests are valuable here. It encourages autonomy and innovation. If we only did OKRs with proven value, then original thinking would inevitably fade away.

“

And let’s be frank: even in purely Machiavellian terms, it benefits employers. You’ll be rewarded with happier, more knowledgeable employees and higher retention. You may even wind up with a surprising new product.

Give It A Spin

Side project time is a slow burner but an invaluable thing to cultivate. Any readers in a position to try side project time will reap the benefits in time.

Some of the best things in life come from idle tinkering. Let people do their thing. Give their ideas space to grow, and they will. And they might just be brilliant.

Further Reading

• “Side Project Programs Can Have Major Benefits for Employers” by Tammy Xu
• “What made Bell Labs special?” by Andrew Gelman (PDF)
• “Why Bell Labs Was So Important To Innovation In The 20th Century,” Forbes
• “Google’s ’20% rule’ shows exactly how much time you should spend learning new skills—and why it works,” Dorie Clark
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

(yk)

On Thursday, October 10, 2024, I gave my first talk at an international event, the WordPress Accessibility Day (WPAD) 2024. Just a few months before, I was a newcomer to the world of web accessibility. Yet here I was, speaking to an audience of accessibility specialists and advocates, and they were genuinely interested in what I had to share. How did I get here? Most importantly, how can you get here?

My Journey To Web Accessibility And Public Speaking

I first learned about web accessibility from contributing to caMicroscope as an Outreachy intern. Outreachy offers internships in open source and open science to people underrepresented in tech within their home countries. caMicroscope is basically an open-source tool for studying and analyzing digital images of body tissues.

During my three-month internship, I worked on enhancing the caMicroscope’s accessibility. I conducted accessibility audits to identify areas for improvement and fixed several technical issues to make the web app more accessible. Since this was my first exposure to accessibility, I spent a lot of time researching and learning, gradually building a knowledge base that would later inspire my first talk.

The more I learned about accessibility, the more I realized how important it is to digital product design and user experience, yet few people seemed to be talking about it. Just before my internship ended, I began searching for accessibility events that I could attend to connect with people in the field. That was how I stumbled on the Call for Proposals (CFP) for WordPress Accessibility Day 2024.

Initially, I was hesitant to apply. I wondered,

What do I know about accessibility that people would care to listen to me?

But I also thought,

How often do you find a UX designer not only testing for accessibility but actually implementing technical fixes for the first time?

This was my experience, my story, and no one could tell it better than me. The CFP also encouraged first-time speakers to submit a proposal. That was an additional motivation. I figured,

What’s the worst that could happen?

So, I pushed through my doubts, did extensive research to choose a topic, and finally submitted my proposal.

When I received the email that my proposal was accepted, I was thrilled. But then came the next hurdle — preparing the presentation itself. Now, I had to think deeply about my audience: what message I wanted to convey and how to make it engaging and informative. After all, people were going to spend their time listening to me. I wanted to make it worth their while.

I reworked my slides at least four times. Even the night before my talk, I was still making edits (something I don’t recommend!). Watching the sessions of speakers who presented before me helped me learn some last-minute tips, but it also led to comparing my slides to theirs, wondering if I was missing something. Up until my talk began, I struggled with imposter syndrome. What if I forgot what I was supposed to say? Or don’t know how to answer a question that an attendee asks?

Finally, the moment came. I spent 40 minutes sharing with attendees the importance of manual accessibility testing. Not long into my presentation, I felt my initial anxiety melt away. I was calm and enthusiastic throughout the rest of my talk. It was an amazing experience, one that I’m grateful for.

Since then, I’ve submitted another talk proposal to speak at a different conference. While I still have some doubts, they’re no longer about whether or not I’m qualified to speak but rather about whether or not my talk will be accepted. I’ve grown since my first talk, and if you’re considering a similar path, you can too.

Why We Hold Back

At every tech event I attend, when the hosts introduce the speakers, the introductions typically go something like the following:

“John Doe is the Senior Product Designer at XYZ Company, bringing over seven years of expertise to his role. He serves as Chairman of the Technical Steering Committee for the ABC Community, contributing to its strategic direction and growth. As the founder of LMNOP, John has driven a startup that has generated over $XXXX in revenue and created over 500 jobs, making a substantial impact on the African tech ecosystem.”

Impressive. Inspiring. And for a newbie, maybe even intimidating.

When they’re giving their talk, I often catch myself thinking:

With so many years of experience, no wonder they know so much. When will I ever reach this level?

I was subconsciously beginning to associate “speaker” with “expert.” I started believing that to qualify as a speaker, I needed an impressive title, years of experience, or some remarkable achievement under my belt. And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

How To Deal With Impostor Syndrome

When I first saw the call for speakers for WordPress Accessibility Day, my immediate reaction was to scroll past it. After all, I had only been working with web accessibility for a short time. Surely, they were looking for seasoned professionals with years of experience, right? Wrong. Had I given in to this misconception, I would have robbed myself of an incredible opportunity for growth.

If you’ve ever held back from submitting a talk proposal because you feel you’re not qualified enough to talk on a subject, here are some tips to help you deal with the imposter syndrome:

Embrace Your Newbie Status

The reason you feel like an imposter is probably because you’re cosplaying as an expert that you’re not (yet), and you’re afraid people might see through the facade. So, the fear of failing and the pressure to meet expectations weigh you down. Be proud of your novice status. And who said experts make the best speakers? Even the so-called experts get nervous to speak.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Another reason you may hold back is because you don’t have speaking experience. But how do you gain speaking experience? You guessed right — by speaking. So, speak. Or at least practice speaking. The more prepared you are, the more confident you’ll feel. Start by presenting to your rubber duck, your pet, a friend, or a family member. Each time you practice, you’ll discover ways to explain concepts more clearly and identify areas where you need to strengthen your understanding. Record yourself and watch it back. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s one of the best ways to improve your delivery and body language.

Focus On Your Journey

Your recent learning experience is actually an advantage. You still remember what it’s like to struggle with concepts that experts take for granted. This makes you qualified to help others who are just starting. Think about it: Who better to explain the challenges of learning a new technology than someone who just overcame them?

Focus On Sharing, Not Proving

Shift your mindset from “I need to prove I’m an expert” to “I want to share what I’ve learned.” This subtle change removes the pressure of perfection and places the focus where it belongs — on helping others. Share your mistakes, your “aha” moments, the resources that helped you. These are often more valuable than polished theory from someone who’s forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner.

Share Your Experience

I’m not the first UX designer to dive into accessibility, but out of many contributors who applied to the project, I was the one selected to improve caMicroscope’s accessibility. That’s my unique angle. Your background and experience bring a perspective that others can learn from. Don’t try to compete with comprehensive tutorials or documentation. Instead, share your practical, real-world experience. Focus on sharing:

• Specific problems you encountered and how you solved them;
• Lessons learned from failed approaches;
• Real-world trade-offs and decisions you had to make;
• Insights that surprised you along the way;
• Practical tips that aren’t found in standard documentation.

Remember That The Audience Wants You To Succeed

Conference attendees (and organizers) aren’t there to judge you or catch you making mistakes. They’re there to learn, and they want you to succeed. Many will be grateful to hear from someone who can relate to their current experience level. Your vulnerability and openness about being new to the field can actually make your talk more approachable and engaging.

Why Newbie Voices Matter

You Bring A Fresh Perspective

As an early-career professional, you bring a fresh, unencumbered viewpoint to the table. The questions you ask and the solutions you propose aren’t constrained by the “way things have always been done.”

This reminds me of the story about the truck that got stuck under a bridge. Experts spent hours trying complex maneuvers to free it until a schoolboy suggested a simple solution — deflating the tires. Your recent learning experiences make you uniquely positioned to see solutions that seasoned professionals overlook.

You see, innovation often arises from those not bound by conventional thinking. As a newcomer, you’re more likely to draw parallels from other industries or suggest unconventional approaches that could lead to breakthroughs.

You Inspire Others Like You

Whenever I see a call for speakers for an event, I have a habit of checking the speakers’ lineup from past events to see if there’s anyone like me — Nigerian, female, relatively new to tech, young. If I don’t find anyone similar, I often feel hesitant about submitting a proposal. But if I do, I’m immediately encouraged to apply.

Your Story Has Power

Your story, your ideas, your fresh take — they could be the solution to someone’s problem, ignite a new area of exploration, or simply give another budding professional the confidence to pursue their goals. Your journey could be exactly what someone in the audience needs to hear. So, don’t let imposter syndrome hold you back. The tech community needs your voice.

When you speak at events, you’re not just sharing your own knowledge. You’re inspiring other newcomers to step up and share their voices, too. Representation matters, and you’re contributing to the diversity of perspectives, which is necessary for progress and innovation.

“

Benefits Of Speaking As A Newcomer

Besides the anxiety that comes with speaking, are there benefits that you gain from being a first-time speaker at an event? Short answer: Yes. What are they?

Your Knowledge Grows

You know what they say: If you want to master something, teach it.

When I started preparing for my accessibility talk, I extensively researched not just my topic but also how best to deliver it. I read articles on creating accessible presentations. I was speaking at an accessibility event, after all, so my slides and delivery had to be accessible to all in the audience. The questions from the audience also challenged me to think about accessibility from angles I hadn’t considered before. Trust me, you’ll learn more preparing for a 30-minute talk than you would in months of regular work.

You Become More Confident

Remember that shaky feeling when you first pushed code to production? Speaking at an event is similar — terrifying at first but incredibly empowering once you’ve done it. After my first talk, I found that I became more confident in team meetings, more willing to share ideas, and more comfortable with challenging assumptions. There’s something powerful about standing in front of a room (virtual or physical) and sharing your knowledge that makes other professional challenges seem less daunting.

The Quality And Quantity Of Your Network Increases

Networking hits differently when you’re a speaker. Before my talk, I was just another attendee sending connection requests. After? Industry leaders were reaching out to ME. I remember checking my LinkedIn notifications after my accessibility talk and seeing connection requests from people I’d only dreamed of connecting with.

Now, instead of trying to start conversations at networking sessions (which, let’s be honest, can be awkward), your talk becomes the conversation starter. People approach you with genuine interest in your perspective, and suddenly, you’re having meaningful discussions about your passion with folks who share it.

It Gives Your Career A Significant Boost

Want to know what sets you apart from other candidates with similar years of experience? Speaking credentials. Imagine listing “Speaker at WordPress Accessibility Day” on my resume. It shows initiative and expertise that goes beyond day-to-day work activities.

Plus, conferences often give speakers free or discounted tickets to future events; that’s premium access to learning and networking opportunities that might otherwise be out of reach for early-career professionals. That’s how you get to “that level”.

You Contribute To The Tech Knowledge Base

Often, especially with virtual conferences, a recording of the event is uploaded on YouTube. That means anyone searching the web for a topic related to your talk will find your talk in the search results. Your 30-minute presentation becomes a permanent resource in the vast library of tech knowledge. I can’t count the number of times a conference video addressed a concern I had or served as a resource for a talk or an article I was working on. Now, I get to be on the other side, helping someone else figure things out.

And here’s another bonus: those YouTube videos also work as a portfolio of sorts. So, not only are you contributing to the community, but you’re also building a body of work that showcases your expertise and speaking skills.

You Just Might Get Paid

Here’s something people don’t talk about enough: many conferences pay their speakers or at least cover travel expenses. Not only are you learning and growing, but you might also get paid for it! Even if the event doesn’t offer payment, the experience itself is invaluable for your portfolio.

You Build Your Personal Brand

Every time you speak, you’re building your personal brand. Your talks become content you can share on social media, add to your portfolio, and reference in job interviews. Imagine a recruiter saying to you, “I remember you from your talk at a so-and-so conference.” In an industry as competitive as tech, this kind of recognition is invaluable.

Tips For First-Time Speakers

I found this article by Andy Budd on how to become a better speaker at conferences very helpful when I was preparing for my talk. In addition to his expert advice, here are a few tips I’d like to share from my own experience as a first-time speaker:

Choose A Topic You’re Passionate About

When selecting a topic, pick something you’re genuinely passionate about. Your enthusiasm will shine through your presentation and captivate the audience.

• Recently learned a new skill that simplified your workflow?
• Participated in a workshop that changed how you approach a problem?
• Discovered a clever workaround to a common problem?

Topics like these, drawn from your personal experiences, make for compelling talk ideas.

Here’s a hack I’ve used to uncover potential speaking ideas: instead of racking your brain when a call for proposals goes out, stay alert for inspiration in your day-to-day activities. As you go about your work or scroll through social media, jot down any concepts that pique your curiosity. That seemingly mundane task you were performing when the idea struck could serve as a fascinating hook for your presentation.

Prepare Thoroughly

Once you’ve settled on a topic, it’s time to dive deep into research and practice. Spend time mastering the subject matter from every angle so you can speak with authority. If you followed tip no. 1 (choose a topic you’re passionate about and are drawing from your personal experience), you are already halfway prepared.

But don’t stop there. Rehearse your talk multiple times, refining your delivery and transitions until you feel confident. Watch recordings of similar presentations and critically analyze what worked well and where there’s room for improvement. How did the speakers engage the audience? Were there any areas that could have been explained better? Studying successful talks will help you identify ways to elevate your own performance.

Engage With Your Audience

A speaking engagement is a conversation, not a monologue. Encourage questions and discussion throughout your talk. Be responsive to the audience’s needs and interests. If you notice puzzled expressions or hesitant body language, pause to clarify or rephrase. Making that personal connection will keep people invested and eager to learn from you.

Start With A Virtual Event

If the prospect of speaking in front of a live audience makes you nervous, consider starting with a virtual event. The online format can feel more approachable since you’ll be delivering the talk from the comfort of your home, and you’ll have the flexibility to reference notes or prompts without the audience noticing.

Connect With Other First-Time Speakers

When I was preparing my talk, I spent hours on YouTube searching for talks by people who shared my background. I was particularly interested in their early speaking appearances, so I’d scroll through their video history to find their first-ever talks.

These speakers weren’t polished professionals at the time, and that’s exactly what made their talks valuable to me. Watching them helped me realize that perfection isn’t the goal. I studied their presentations carefully, noted what worked well and what could be improved, and used these insights to strengthen my own talk.

If you’re more outgoing than I am, consider reaching out directly to other new speakers in your community. You can find them on Twitter, LinkedIn, or at local tech meetups. Building a support system of people who understand exactly what you’re going through can be incredibly reassuring. You can practice your talks together and provide feedback to each other.

Be Authentic

Finally, don’t be afraid to let your authentic self shine through. Share personal anecdotes, tell jokes, discuss the challenges you faced, and be vulnerable about your own learning journey.

Your honesty and humility will resonate far more than a polished, impersonal presentation. Remember, the audience wants to connect with you, not just your expertise.

Conclusion

In retrospect, I’m glad that I pushed past my initial doubts and applied to speak at WordPress Accessibility Day. It was a transformative experience that has accelerated my growth in the field and connected me with an incredible community.

To all the newcomers reading this:

Your voice matters. Your perspective is valuable. The tech community needs fresh voices and perspectives. Your “I just learned this” enthusiasm can be infectious and inspiring.

“

So, the next time you see a call for speakers, don’t scroll past it. Take that leap. Apply to speak. Share your knowledge. You never know who you might inspire or what doors you might open for yourself and for others.

Remember, every expert was once a beginner. I hope you’re inspired to take the stage and let your voice be heard.

Further Resources

• “Getting Started in Public Speaking: Global Diversity CFP Day,” Rachel Andrew
• “Complete Guide to Giving Your First Conference Talk,” Gwendolyn Faraday
• “How to Prepare for Your First Conference Talk,” Lisa Wentz M.A.
• “How to Write a Conference Talk Abstract That Will Get Accepted,” Linda Ikechukwu

(yk)

In the previous article in my two-part series, I have explained how important it is to start by mastering your design tools, to work on your portfolio (even if you have very little work experience — which is to be expected at this stage), and to carefully prepare for your first design interviews.

If all goes according to plan, and with a little bit of luck, you’ll land your first junior UX job — and then, of course, you’ll be facing more challenges, about which I am about to speak in this second article in my two-part article series.

In Your New Junior UX Job: On the Way to Grow

You have probably heard of the Pareto Rule, which states that 20% of actions provide 80% of the results.

“The Pareto Principle is a concept that specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. The principle was named after the economist Vilfredo Pareto.”

— “The Pareto Principle, a.k.a. the Pareto Rule”

This means that some of your actions will help you grow much faster than others.

But before we go into the details, let’s briefly consider the junior UX designer path. I think it’s clear that, at first, juniors usually assist other designers with simple but time-consuming tasks. Then, the level of complexity and your responsibilities start increasing, depending on your performance.

So, you got your first design job? Great! Here are a few things you can focus on if you want to be growing at a faster pace.

Chase For Challenges

The simple but slow way to go is to do your work and then wait until your superiors notice how good you are and start giving you more complex tasks. The problem is that people focus on themselves too much.

So, to “cut some corners,” you need to actively look for challenges. It’s scary, I know, but remember, people who invented any new groundbreaking UX approach or a new framework you see in books and manuals now used their intuition first. You have the whole World Wide Web full of articles and lectures about that. So, define the skill you want to develop, spend a day reading about this topic, find a real problem, and practice. Then, share what you did and get some feedback. After a few iterations, I bet you will be assigned the first real task for your practice!

Use Interfaces Consciously

Take the time to look again at the screenshot of the Amazon website (from Part One):

User interfaces didn’t appear in their present form right from the start. Instead, they evolved to their current state over the span of many years. And you all were part of their evolution, albeit passively — you registered on different websites, reset your passwords quite a few times, clicked onboarding screens, filled out short and long web forms, used search, and so on.

In your design work, all tasks (or 99% of them, at least at the beginning) will be based on those UX patterns. You don’t need to reinvent the bicycle; you only need to remember what you already know and pay attention to the details while using the interfaces of the apps on your smartphone and on your computer. Ask yourself:

• Why was this designed this way?
• What is not clear enough for me as a user?
• What is thought out well and what is not?

All of today’s great design solutions were built based on common sense and then documented so that other people can learn how to re-use this knowledge. Develop your own “common sense” skill every day by being a careful observer and by living your life consciously. Notice the patterns of good design, try to understand and memorize them, and then implement and rethink them in your own work.

I can also highly recommend the Smart Interface Design Patterns course with Vitaly Friedman. It provides guidelines and best practices for common components in modern interfaces. Inventing a new solution for every problem takes time, and too often, it’s just unnecessary. Instead, we can rely on bulletproof design patterns to avoid issues down the line. This course helps with just that. In the course, you will study hundreds of hand-picked examples, from complex navigation to filters, tables, and forms, and you will work on actual real-life challenges.

Learn How to Present Your Work

The ability to convey complex thoughts and ideas in the form of clear sentences defines how effectively you will be able to interact with other people.

This is a core work skill — a skill that you’ll be actually using your whole life, and not only in your work. I have written about this topic in much detail previously:

“Good communication is about sharing your ideas as clearly as possible.”

— “Effective Communication For Everyday Meetings” (Smashing Magazine)

In my article, I have described all the general principles that apply to effective communication, with the most important being: to develop a skill, you need to practice.

As a quick exercise, try telling your friends about the work you do and not to be boring while explaining the details. You will feel that you are on the right track if they do not try to change the topic and instead ask you additional questions!

Gather Feedback

Don’t wait for your yearly review to hear about what you were doing right and wrong. Ask people for feedback and suggestions, and ask them often.

To help them start, first, tell them about your weak side and ask them to tell you their own impressions. Try encouraging them to expand their input and ask for recommendations on how you could fix your weaknesses. Don’t forget to tell them when you are trying to apply their suggestions in practice. After all, these people helped you become better, so be thankful.

Learn Business

I see a lot of designers trying to apply all of their experience to every project, and they often complain that it doesn’t work — customers refuse to follow the entire classical UX process, such as defining User Personas, creating the Information Architecture (IA), outlining the customer journey map, and so on. Sometimes, it happens because clients don’t have the time and budget for it, or they don’t see the value because the designer can’t explain it in a proper way.

But remember that many great products were built without using all of today’s available and tested UX approaches &mdahs; this doesn’t mean those approaches are useless. But initially, there was only common sense and many attempts to get better results, and only then did someone describe something as a working approach and specify all the details. So, before trying to apply any of these UX techniques, think about what you need to achieve. Is there any other way to get there within your time and budget?

Learn how the business works. Talk to customers in business language and communicate the value you create and not the specific approach, framework, or tool that you’ll be using.

“Good UX design is where value comes into the picture. We add value when we transform a product or service from delivering a poor experience to providing a good experience.”

— “The Value of Great UX,” by Jared Spool

Learn How to Make Interfaces Nice-looking

Yes, user experience should be first, but let’s be honest — we also love nice things! The same goes for your customers; they can’t always see the UX part of your work but can always say whether the interface is good-looking. So, learn the composition and color theory, use elegant illustrations and icons, learn typography, and always strive to make your work visually appealing. Some would say that it’s not so important, but trust me, it is.

As an exercise, try to copy the design of a few beautifully looking interfaces. Take a look at an interface screen, then close it and try to make a copy of it from memory. When you are done, compare the two and then make a few more adjustments in order to have as close a copy of the interface as possible. Try to understand why the original was built the way it is. I bet this process of reproducing an interface will help you understand many things you haven’t been noticing before.

Save the People’s Time and Efforts

Prepare to get some new tasks in advance. Create a list of questions, and don’t forget to ask about the deadlines. Align your plan and the number of iterations so people know precisely what and when to expect from you. Be curious (but not annoying) by asking or sending questions every few hours (but try to first search for the answers online). Even if you don’t find the exact answer, it’ll help you formulate the right questions better and get a better view of the “big picture.” Remember, one day, you will get a task directly from the customer, so fetching the data you need to complete tasks correctly is an excellent skill to develop.

Structurize Your Knowledge and Create a Learning Plan

When you are just beginning to learn, too many articles about UX design will look like absolute “must-reads” to you. But you will drown in the information if you try to read them all in no particular order. Better, instead of just trying to read everything, try first to find a mentor who will help you build a learning plan and will advise you along the way.

Another good way to start is to complete a solid UX online course. If you can’t, take the learning program of any popular UX course out there and research the topics from the course’s list one by one. Also, you can use such a structured list (going from easier to more complex UX topics) for filtering articles you are going to read.

There are many excellent courses out there, and here are a few suggestions:

• “Selection of free UX design courses, including those offering certifications,” by Cheshta Dua
  In this article, the author shares a few free UX design courses which helped her get started as a UX designer.
• “Best free UX design courses — 2024,” by Cynthia Vinney (UX Design Institute)
  This is a comparison of a few free UX design courses, both online and in-person.
• “The 10 Best Free UX Design Courses in 2024,” by Rachel Meltze (CareerFoundry)
  A selection of free UX design courses — using these you can learn the fundamentals of UX design, the tools designers use, and more about the UX design career path.
• “The HTML/CSS Basics (.dev),” by Geoff Graham
  The Basics is an excellent online course that teaches the basic principles of front-end development. It’s a good “entry point” for those just coming into front-end development or perhaps for someone with experience writing code from years ago who wants to jump into modern-day development.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Bruce Lee once said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

— Bruce Lee

You may have read a lot about some new revolutionary UX approaches, but only practicing allows you to convert this knowledge into a skill. Our brain continually works to clear out unnecessary information from our memory. Therefore, actively practicing the ideas and knowledge that you have learned is the only way to signal to your brain that this knowledge is essential to be retained and re-used.

On a related note, you will likely remember also the popular “10,000-hour rule,” which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller book Outliers.

As Malcolm says, the rule goes like this: it takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials, like playing the violin or getting as good as Bill Gates at computer programming. Turns out, practice is important, and it’s surprising how much time and effort it may take to master something complicated. But later research also suggests that someone could practice for thousands of hours and still not be a master performer. They could be outperformed by someone who practiced less but had a teacher who showed them just what to focus on at a key moment in their practice.

So, remember my advice from the previous section? Try to find a mentor because, as I said earlier, learning and practicing with a mentor and a good plan will often lead to better results.

Conclusion

Instead of a conclusion (or trying to give you the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything), only a few final words of advice.

Remember, there doesn’t exist a single correct way to do things because there are no absolute criteria to define “things done properly.” You can apply all your knowledge and required steps in the classical design process, and the product may fail.

At the same time, someone could quickly develop a minimum viable product (MVP) without using all of the standard design phases — and still conquer the market. Don’t believe me?

The first Apple iPhone, introduced 17 years ago, didn’t have even a basic copy/paste feature yet we all know how the iPhone conquered the world (and it’s not only the iPhone, there are many other successful MVP examples out there, often conceived by small startups). It’s because Apple engineers and designers got the core product design concept right; they could release a product that didn’t yet have everything in it.

So yes, you need to read a lot about UX and UI design, watch tutorials, learn the design theory, try different approaches, speak to the people using your product (or the first alpha or beta version of it), and practice. But in the end, always ask yourself, “Is this the most efficient way to bring value to people and get the needed results?” If the answer is “No,” update your design plan. Because things are not happening by themselves. Instead, we, humans, make things happen.

You are the pilot of your plane, so don’t expect someone else to care about your success more than you. Do your best. Make corrections and iterate. Learn, learn, learn. And sooner or later, you’ll reach success!

Further Reading

A Selection Of Design Resources (Part One, Part Two)

• Photoshop CS Down & Dirty Tricks, a book by Scott Kelby
  Bestselling author Scott Kelby shares an amazing collection of Photoshop tricks, including how to create the same exact effects you see every day in magazines, at the movies, on the Web, and more. These are real-world techniques, the same ones you see used by leading Photoshop photographers, designers, and special effect masters.
• “Why Designers Aren’t Understood,” by Vitaly Friedman (Smashing Magazine)
  How do we conduct UX research when there is no or only limited access to users? Here are some workarounds to run UX research or make a strong case for it. (This article is an upcoming part of the “Smart Interface Design Patterns.” — Editor’s Note)
• “UXchallenge,” by Yachin You
  This website will help you learn how to solve real problems that customers face and present case studies that are related to these problems.
• “Kano analysis: The Kano model explained” (Qualtrics)
  Kano analysis (also known as the “Customer Delight vs. Implementation Investment” approach) is a tool that helps you enhance your products and services based on customer emotions. This guide will help you understand what is Kano analysis and how you can use it in practice.
• “Kano Model: What It Is & How to Use It to Increase Customer Satisfaction” (Userpilot)
  The Kano model uses quick and powerful data analysis to design your product roadmap. In this article, you will learn a brief history of the Kano model, a practical explanation of how it works, five categories of potential customer reactions to new features, and a four-step process for effective Kano analysis.
• “The Pareto Principle” (Investopedia)
  The Pareto Principle is a concept that specifies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes, asserting an unequal relationship between inputs and outputs. Named after the economist Vilfredo Pareto, this principle serves as a general reminder that the relationship between inputs and outputs is not balanced. The Pareto Principle is also known as the Pareto Rule or the ⁸⁰⁄₂₀ Rule.
• “Figma Portfolio Templates & Examples” (UX Crush)
  A curated selection of portfolio templates for Figma Design.
• “How to Define a User Persona,” by Raven Veal (CareerFoundry)
  As you break into a career in UX, user personas are one tool you’ll certainly want to have available as you gather user research and find design solutions to solve problems and create more human-friendly products and experiences.
• “How to design a customer journey map,” by Emily Stevens (UX Design Institute)
  A customer journey map is a visual representation of how a user interacts with your product. This detailed guide will teach you how to create such a customer journey map.
• “Building Components For Consumption, Not Complexity” (Part 1, Part 2),” by Luis Ouriach (Smashing Magazine)
  In this two-part series of articles, Luis shares his experience with design systems and how you can overcome the potential pitfalls, starting from how to make designers on your team adopt the complex and well-built system that you created to what are the best naming conventions and how to handle the auto-layout of components, indexing/search, and more.
• “Effective Communication For Everyday Meetings,” by Andrii Zhdan (Smashing Magazine)
  Before any meeting starts, we often have many ideas about what to say and how it should go. But when the meeting happens, reality may “crash” all of our plans. This article is about conducting productive meetings. The author will give you a step-by-step guide on preparing a solid meeting structure that will let you follow the original plan and reach the meeting goals.
• “The Value of Great UX,” by Jared Spool
  This crossover from poor UX design to good UX design is where value comes into the picture. We add value when we transform a product or service from delivering a poor experience to providing a good experience.
• “How Designers Should Ask For (And Receive) High-Quality Feedback,” by Andy Budd (Smashing Magazine)
  Designers often complain about the quality of feedback they get from senior stakeholders. In this article, Andy Budd shares a better way of requesting feedback: rather than sharing a linear case study that explains every design revision, the first thing to do would be to better frame the problem.
• “Designing A Better Design Handoff File In Figma,” by Ben Shih (Smashing Magazine)
  Practical tips to enhance the handoff process between design and development in product development, with provided guidelines for effective communication, documentation, design details, version control, and plugin usage.
• “The HTML/CSS Basics (.dev),” by Geoff Graham
  The Basics is an online course that teaches the basic principles of front-end development, focusing specifically on HTML and CSS. A good “entry point” for those just coming into front-end development and perhaps for someone with experience writing code years ago who wants to jump into modern-day development.
• “Selection of free UX design courses, including those offering certifications,” by Cheshta Dua
  In this article, the author shares a few free UX design courses that helped her get started as a UX designer.
• “Best free UX design courses — 2024,” by Cynthia Vinney (UX Design Institute)
  Check this comparison of several free UX design courses currently on the market, both online and in-person.
• “The 10 Best Free UX Design Courses in 2024,” by Rachel Meltze (CareerFoundry)
  A selection of free UX design courses where you can learn the fundamentals of UX design, the tools designers use, and the UX design career path. This guide provides a range of courses, from micro-tutorials to full-featured UI/UX courses.
• “Researcher Behind ‘10,000-Hour Rule’ Says Good Teaching Matters, Not Just Practice,” by Jeffrey Young (EdSurge Magazine)
  It takes 10,000 hours of intensive practice to achieve mastery of complex skills and materials, like playing the violin or getting as good as Bill Gates at computer programming. Turns out, a study also shows that there’s another important variable that Gladwell originally didn’t focus on: how good a student’s teacher is.
• “An Apple engineer details why the first iPhone didn’t have copy and paste,” by Filipe Espósito (9to5Mac)
  Apple introduced the first iPhone 17 years ago, and a lot has changed since then, but it’s hard to believe that long ago, the iPhone didn’t even have copy-and-paste options. Now, former Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda has revealed details about why the first iPhone didn’t have such features.
• “Fifteen examples of successful MVPs,” Ross Krawczyk (RST Software)
  Startups need to get their products to the market faster than ever in an increasingly competitive world. The minimum viable product is the way to achieve this, but you must be really able to provide the right key features that give value to a wide customer base in order to attract clients and investors on time.

(mb, yk)

My design career began in 2008. The first book that I read on the topic of design was Photoshop Tips And Tricks by Scott Kelby, which was a book about a very popular design tool, but not about user experience (UX) design itself. Back at the time, I didn’t know many of the approaches and techniques that even junior designers know today because they weren’t invented yet, and also because I was just beginning my learning journey and finding my way in UX design. But now I have diverse experience; I’m myself hiring designers for my team, and I know much more.

In my two-part series of articles, I’ll try to share with you what I wish I knew if I was starting my career today.

“If you want to go somewhere, it is best to find someone who has already been there.”

— Robert Kiyosaki

The two-part series contains four sections, each roughly covering one key stage in your beginner career:

1. Master Your Design Tools
2. Work on Your Portfolio
3. Preparing for Your First Interviews: Getting a First Job
4. In Your New Junior UX Job: On the Way to Grow

I’ll cover the first three topics in this first article and the fourth one in the second article. In addition, I will include very detailed Further Reading sections at the end of each part.

When you’re about to start learning, every day, you will receive new pieces of evidence of how many things you don’t know yet. You will see people who have been doing this for years and you will doubt whether you can do this, too. But there is a nuance I want to highlight: first, take a look at the following screenshot:

This is the Amazon website in 2008 when I was about to start my design career and received my first paycheck as a beginner designer.

And this is how Amazon looked like even earlier, in 2002:

In 2002, Amazon made 3.93 billion US dollars in profits. I dare say they could have hired the very best designers at the time. So today, when you speak to a designer with twenty years of experience and think, “Oh, this designer must be on a very high level now, a true master of his craft,” remind yourself about the state of UX design that existed when the designer’s career was about to start, sometime in the early 2000s!

A lot of the knowledge that I have learned and that is over five years old is outdated now, and the learning complexity only increases every year.

It doesn’t matter how many years you have been in this profession; what matters are the challenges you met in the last few years and the lessons you’ve learned from them.

“

Are you a beginner or an aspiring user interface/user experience designer? Don’t be afraid to go through all the steps in your UX design journey. Patience and a good plan will let you become a good designer faster than you think.

“The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.”

— H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

This was the more philosophical part of my writing, where I wanted to help you become better motivated. Now, let’s continue with the more practical things and advice!

Getting Started: Master Your Design Tools

When I was just beginning to learn, most of us did our design work in Adobe Photoshop.

In Photoshop, there were no components, styles, design libraries, auto layouts, and so on. Every screen was in another PSD file, and even making rounded corners on a rectangle object was a difficult task. Files were “heavy,” and sometimes I needed to wait thirty or more seconds to open a file and check what screen was inside while changing a button’s name or label in twenty separate PSD files (each containing only one design screen, remember?) could take up to an hour, depending on the power of your computer.

There were many digital design tools at the time, including Fireworks — which some professionals considered superior to Photoshop, and for quite a few reasons — but this is not the main point of my story. One way or another, Photoshop back then became very popular among designers and we all absolutely had to have it in our toolset, no matter what other tools we also needed and used.

Now computers are much faster, and our design tools have evolved quite a bit, too. For example, I can apply multiple changes to multiple design screens in just a few seconds by using Figma components and a proper structure of the design file, I can design/prototype responsive designs by using auto-layout, and more.

In one word, knowing your design tool can be a real “superpower” for junior UX designers — a power that beginners often ignore. When you know your tool inside-out, you’ll spend less time on the design routine and you’ll have more time for learning new things.

Master your tool(s) of choice (be it Figma Design or Illustrator, Sketch, Affinity Designer, Canva, Framer, and so on) in the most efficient way, and free up to a couple of extra hours every day for reading, doing tutorials, or taking longer breaks.

Learn all the key features and options, and discover and remember the most important hotkeys so you’ll be working without the need to constantly reach for your mouse and navigate the “web” of menus and sub-menus. It’s no secret that we, designers, mostly learn through doing practical tasks. So, imagine how much time it would save you within a few years of your career!

Also, it’s your chance: developers are rolling out new features for beginner designers and pro designers simultaneously, but junior designers usually have more time to learn those updates! So, be faster and get your advantage!

Getting Started: Work On Your Portfolio

You need to admit it: your portfolio (or, to put it more precisely, the lack of it) will be the main pain point at the start.

You may hear sometimes statements such as: “We understand that being a junior designer is not about having a portfolio…” But the fact is that we all would like to see some results of your work, even if it is your very early work on a few design projects or concepts. Remember, if you have something to show, this would always be a considerable advantage!

I have heard from some juniors that they don’t want to invest time in their portfolio because this work is not payable and it’s time-consuming. But sitting and waiting and getting rejected again and again is also time-consuming. And spending a few of your first career years in the wrong company is also time-consuming (and disappointing, too). So my advice is to spend some time in advance on showcasing your work and then get much better results in the near future.

In case you need some extra motivation, here is a quote from Muhammad Ali, regarded as one of the most significant sports figures of the 20th century:

“I hated every minute of training, but I said to myself, ‘Do not quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’”

— Muhammad Ali

Ready to fire but have no idea where to start? Here are a few options:

• Find a popular product with a rather difficult-to-use or not very elegant interface and research what the users of this product are complaining about the most. Then, as an exercise, design a few interface screens for this product, with their core features explained, publish them on social media, and tag that company. (This approach may not always work, but it’s worth a try.)
• Sign up for and actively participate in hackathons. As a result, it’s possible that you may get not just a few screens redesigned in Figma but a real working product you can show (and be proud of). Also, you can meet nice people there who may recommend you if you apply for a job at one of the companies they work for.
• Complete UXchallenge challenges and present how you solved them on LinkedIn.
  Note: You’re not limited to LinkedIn, of course; you can also use Instagram, Facebook, Behance, Dribbble, and so on. But keep in mind that many recruiters prefer LinkedIn.
• Pick up a website that you use often and check whether it meets the “Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.” Create a detailed report that lists everything that can be (re)designed better. Publish the report on LinkedIn and also send it to the company that made this website. Don’t forget to tell them why you did that report for their website specifically and that you’re learning UX design, practicing, and actively looking for a job.
• Visit some popular developer conferences where you would be one of the only designers attending. Talk to people and propose your help for their startups. Who knows, you may become the co-creator of some future cool startup!
• Choose an area where digitalization hasn’t propagated yet and create a design concept using very modern technologies. For instance, people have been growing plants for thousands of years, but data analysis and visualization dramatically changed the efficiency of that process only lately. The agricultural industry has undergone a remarkable transformation thanks to UX design — a crucial element in ensuring that agricultural applications are not just functional but also intuitive and user-friendly. From precision farming to crop monitoring systems, digital tools have revolutionized the way farmers manage their operations.
  Note: You can check the following article for details: “The Evolution of UX Design in Agricultural Applications.”

Don’t wait until someone hands you your chance on a “silver platter.” There are many projects that need the designer’s hands and help but can’t get such help yet. Assist them and then show the results of your work in your first portfolio. It gives you a huge advantage over other candidates who haven’t worked on their portfolios yet!

Preparing For Your First Interviews: Getting A First Job

From what I’ve heard, getting the first job is the biggest problem for a junior designer, so I will focus on this part in more detail.

Applying For A Job

To reach the goal, you should formulate it correctly. It’s already formulated in this case, but most candidates understand it wrong. The right goal here is to be invited to an interview — not to get an offer right now or tell everything about your life in the CV document. You just need to break through the first level of filtering.

Note: Some of these tips are for absolute beginners. Do they sound too obvious to you? Apologies if so. However, all of them are based on my personal experience, so I think there are no tips that I should omit.

• Send your CV and motivational letter (if required in the job description) from the correct email address. It’s always strange to receive a job application from an email such as ‘sad.batman2006@gmail.com’. Seniors are always responsible for the tasks that junior designers complete, and we want to know that you are a seriously-minded and responsible person to help us do our work. Small details, such as the email address you would use to get in touch, do matter.
• Use your real name. I’ve had cases where people have used different names in their emails and CVs. I think it’s too obvious why this will look very strange, so I won’t spend time describing it in detail.
• Skill representations. Use the well-accepted standards. I have seen some CVs created with the help of services such as CV Maker where skills (level of English, how well you know Figma, Illustrator, and other design tools, and so on) were represented as loaders or diagrams. But there are existing standards, so use them in order to be understood better. For instance, if you describe your level of English knowledge, use the CEFR levels (A1/A2, B1/B2, C1/C2). Don’t make people interpret a diagram instead.
• Check/proofread the text in your email, CV, and portfolio. We expect that you may not know everything about design, but spelling errors don’t demonstrate exactly your desire to learn and your attention to detail. You can use Grammarly or ChatGPT to check your text, but you should not try to substitute your thoughts with some AI-“generated” ideas. Also, make sure to structure well the content of your CV and to format it properly.
• Read the job description carefully, find matches with your skills, and reflect these in the CV. Recruiters cannot review all the CVs thoroughly. Remember, the goal is to break through the first level of filtering — the recruiter is not a designer and can’t evaluate you and your skills. However, the recruiter can decide whether your CV is relevant to the job description, so it’s very important to tweak the CV by making sure you mention all the skills that you possess and that match the ones found in the specific job description.
• Don’t count solely on the job application form posted on the company’s website. There were cases when I had no reply after filling out and submitting the official application form but then got an offer after trying to reach a recruiter from that company directly on LinkedIn or via some other available communication channel. So don’t be shy to get in touch directly.
• Avoid using PDF documents for portfolios or anything else that people need to download before opening. The more time it takes to open and review your portfolio, the less time people will spend checking what’s in it. A link to your portfolio on the web will always work better, and it’s also a much more professional approach! You can use platforms such as Behance (or similar), or you can create your case studies in Figma and paste the shareable link into your CV.

Note: There are many ways to show your portfolio, and Figma is only one of them. For ideas, you can check “Figma Portfolio Templates & Examples” (a curated selection of portfolio templates for Figma). Or even better, you can self-host your portfolio on your own domain and website; however, this may require some more advanced technical skills and knowledge, so you can leave this idea for later.

Completing A Test Task

The test task aims to assess what we can expect from you in the workplace. And this is not just about the quality of your design skills — it’s also about how you will communicate with others and how you will be able to propose practical solutions to problems.

What do I mean by “practical solutions”? In the real world, designers always work within certain limitations (constraints), such as time, budget, team capacity, and so on. So, if you have some bright ideas that are likely very hard to implement, keep these for the interview. The test task is a way to show that you are someone who can define the correct problems and do the proper work, e.g. find the solutions to them.

A few words of advice on how to do exactly that:

• If you have a chance to speak to the target audience, do it, especially if the test task is to make an existing product better. You don’t have to do complete research, but if it’s a popular product that everyone uses, you can ask your friends about their experience of using it. If it’s not, check what people say on Reddit, in reviews on the Apple App Store, or on Google Play. Find video reviews of this product on YouTube and analyze the comments under the video. Also, take a look at similar products and what people say about them. Defining real problems is a key skill for designers.
  Note: How can we we conduct UX research when there is no or only limited access to users? Vitaly Friedman outlines a few excellent strategies in his article on this topic: “Why Designers Aren’t Understood.”
• Prioritize features that you see and can reflect on in the test task. You can use the Kano model or another framework, but don’t skip this step! It is sometimes puzzling to see candidates spending a lot of time on dark mode UI mockups but failing to work on the required key features instead.
  Note: The Kano Analysis model is a tool that enables you to understand how customer emotional responses to products or features can be measured and explored.
• If you need more time, say so. It also will show what your behavior will be when working on a real project. Speaking about the problem at the last moment can bring big troubles to the team. Also — happened in my practice in a few cases — it’s strange to hear:
  • “I didn’t fully complete the test task because I was busy.”
  • OK, if you are too busy (with other things?), then we will have to interview some other candidates.
    My advice is to show dedication and focus toward your current job application assignment.
• In some cases, the candidates try to go the “extra mile” by doing more things than were initially asked of them, but with lower quality. Unfortunately, It doesn’t work this way. Instead, you need to do less but better. Of course, there could be exclusions in some cases, like when you do sketching and prototyping, where showing rough ideas is perfectly OK. So, try to find the balance between the volume and quality of your work. Showing many (but weak) mockups in order to impress with the volume of your work (instead of the quality) is not a good idea.
• Sometimes, we ask to redesign a screen as a test task. This is not about using better/shinier UI components. Instead, try to understand the user goals on that screen and then think about the most suitable UI components that you can use to serve these user goals.

Recommendations For The Interview

The interview is the most challenging part because the most optimal way to prepare for it depends on the specific company where you’re applying for the job and the interviewer’s experience. But there are still a few “universal” things you can do in order to increase your chances:

• If I was restricted to giving only one piece of advice, I would say: Be sincere! It’s not an exam, so don’t try to guess the answer if you don’t know it. No one knows everything, and it’s OK — be honest and it will pay off.
• Research the company and the role before the interview. Check the company’s portfolio, cases, products, and so on, and even look up the names and titles of designers working there.
  Note: It will help a lot if the company has an About → The Team page on its website; but if not, using LinkedIn will probably help, too.) When you have researched the role in detail, it will help you define which of your skills will be a good match and you could then highlight them during the interview.
• The core questions in a UX design interview are not a secret. Usually, it’s about the design phases, your experience, hobbies, motivation, and so on. Work on these questions and clarify the answers before going to the interview. Just write them down and read them out loudly. Try to check how it sounds. Converting your design experience into exact words requires brain energy, especially if somebody in front of you is waiting for the answer, so do it beforehand, and you’ll feel much better prepared — and calmer.
• Listen carefully to the questions you are being asked. Ask the interviewer to clarify if you do not understand a question completely. It’s always weird when the candidate gives an answer that is not related to the question you asked.
• Don’t be late. Do your best to be on time.
  • If it’s an online interview, check the time zones, the communication tools, and everything else. There’s nothing worse than starting Zoom (or another app that you know you’ll need) at the last minute and discovering that it needs an urgent update. Precious minutes will be lost during the update process while the other party will be patiently waiting for you to come online. And you better also check your headphones, microphone, camera, and Bluetooth connection before the start of the meeting.
  • Similarly, if it’s an in-person interview, plan your trip in advance and add some extra time for something unexpected; better if you arrive early than late. The problem is not only about wasting someone’s time; it’s about your emotional balance. If you are late, you will be nervous and make mistakes that you otherwise wouldn’t.
• Don’t look for a job in the companies of your dreams right from the start. First, pass a few interviews with other companies, get feedback, do some retrospectives, gain some real experience, and be prepared to show your best when you get your chance.
• Be yourself, but also clearly communicate who you are going to be as people with goals and a plan always make a better impression. Most companies don’t hire juniors — they hire future middle-level and senior designers. And if you feel a certain company where you’re applying for a job would not support you in this way, better try another one. The first few years are the foundation of your future career, so do your best to get into a company where you can grow as a designer.

Conclusion

Thank you for following me so far! Hopefully, you have learned your design tools, worked on your portfolio, and prepared meticulously for your first interviews. If all goes according to plan, sooner or later, you’ll get your first junior UX job. And then you’ll face more challenges, about which I will speak in detail in the second part of my two-part article series.

But before that, do check Further Reading, where I have gathered a few resources that will be very useful if you are just about to begin your UX design career.

Further Reading

Basic Design Resources

• “UX Crash Course: 31 Fundamentals,” Joel Marsh
• “UX Crash Course: 30 Stupid Questions,” Joel Marsh
• “UX Crash Course: User Psychology,” Joel Marsh
• “What’s The Perfect Design Process?,” Vitaly Friedman
• “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design,” Jakob Nielsen
• “10 Advanced Tips For A Design Portfolio,” Slava Shestopalov

A List of Design Resources from the Nielsen Norman Group

• Context Methods, Kate Moran and Mayya Azarova
• Design Pattern Guidelines, Samhita Tankala and Alita Joyce
• Design Thinking, Kate Moran and Megan Brown
• DesignOps, Kate Kaplan
• Facilitation, Kate Kaplan
• Information Architecture, Page Laubheimer
• Intranet & Enterprise Design, Kara Pernice
• Lean & Agile, Anna Kaley
• Mobile UX, Raluca Budiu
• Omnichannel & Customer Experience, Kim Salazar
• Personas, Kate Kaplan
• Psychology for UX, Tanner Kohler
• ResearchOps, Kate Kaplan
• Remote Usability Testing, Kate Moran
• Service Design, Sarah Gibbons
• UX Basics, Tim Neusesser
• UX Careers, Taylor Dykes
• UX Mapping Methods, Kate Kaplan
• UX Stakeholders, Sarah Gibbons
• UX Writing, Anna Kaley
• Qualitative Usability Testing, Kate Moran
• Quantitative Research, Kate Moran
• Visual Design in UX, Kelley Gordon

(mb, yk)

Many job openings in UX assume very specific roles with very specific skills. Product designers should be skilled in Figma. Researchers should know how to conduct surveys. UX writers must be able to communicate brand values.

This article is part of our ongoing series on UX. You might want to take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns 🍣 and the upcoming live UX training as well. Use code BIRDIE to save 15% off.

The Many Roles In UX

Successful candidates must neatly fit within established roles and excel at tools and workflows that are perceived as the best practice in the industry — from user needs to business needs and from the problem space to the solution space.

There is nothing wrong with that, of course. However, many companies don’t exactly know what expertise they actually need until they find the right person who actually has it. But too often, job openings don’t allow for any flexibility unless the candidate checks off the right boxes.

In fact, typically, UX roles have to fit into some of those rigorously defined and refined boxes:

“V”-Shaped Designers Don’t Fit Into Boxes

Job openings typically cast a very restrictive frame for candidates. It comes with a long list of expectations and requirements, mostly aimed at T-shaped designers — experts in one area of UX, with a high-level understanding of adjacent areas and perhaps a dash of expertise in business and operations.

But as Brad Frost noted, people don’t always fit squarely into a specific discipline. Their value comes not from staying within the boundaries of their roles but from intentionally crossing these boundaries. They are “V”-shaped — experts in one or multiple areas, with a profound understanding and immense curiosity in adjacent areas.

In practice, they excel at bridging the gaps and connecting the dots. They establish design KPIs and drive accessibility efforts. They streamline handoff and scale design systems. But to drive success, they need to rely on specialists, their T-shaped colleagues.

Shaping Your Own Boxes

I sincerely wish more companies would encourage their employees to shape their own boxes instead of defining confined boxes for them — their own unique boxes of any form and shade and color and size employees desire, along with deliverables that other teams would benefit from and could build upon.

🏔️ Hiring? → Maybe replace a long list of mandatory requirements with an open invitation to apply, even if it’s not a 100% match — as long as a candidate believes they can do their best work for the job at hand.

🎢 Seek a challenge? → Don’t feel restricted by your current role in a company. Explore where you drive the highest impact, shape this role, and suggest it.

✅ Searching for a job? → Don’t get discouraged if you don’t tick all the boxes in a promising job opening. Apply! Just explain in fine detail what you bring to the table.

You’ve got this — and good luck, everyone! ✊🏽

Meet Smart Interface Design Patterns

If you are interested in UX and design patterns, take a look at Smart Interface Design Patterns, our 10h-video course with 100s of practical examples from real-life projects — with a live UX training later this year. Everything from mega-dropdowns to complex enterprise tables — with 5 new segments added every year. Jump to a free preview.

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(yk, il)

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the basics of web development. Actually, I’ve been thinking about them for some time now, at least since I started teaching beginning web development in 2020.

I’m fascinated by the basics. They’re an unsung hero, really, as there is no developer worth their salt who would be where they are without them. Yet, they often go unnoticed.

The basics exist in some sort of tension between the utmost importance and the incredibly banal.

You might even think of them as the vegetable side on your dinner plate — wholesome but perhaps bland without the right seasoning.

Who needs the basics of HTML and CSS, some say, when we have tools that abstract the way they’re written and managed? We now have site builders that require no technical knowledge. We have frameworks with enough syntactic sugar to give your development chops a case of cavities. We have libraries packed with any number of pre-established patterns that can be copy-pasted without breaking a sweat. The need to “learn” the basics of HTML and CSS is effectively null when the number of tools that exist to supplant them is enough to fill a small galaxy of stars.

Rachel Andrew wrote one of my all-time favorite posts back in 2019, equating the rise of abstractions with an increase in complexity and a profound loss of inroads for others to enter the web development field:

“We have already lost many of the entry points that we had. We don’t have the forums of parents teaching each other HTML and CSS, in order to make a family album. Those people now use Facebook or perhaps run a blog on wordpress.com or SquareSpace with a standard template. We don’t have people customising their MySpace profile or learning HTML via Neopets. We don’t have the people, usually women, entering the industry because they needed to learn HTML during that period when an organisation’s website was deemed part of the duties of the administrator.”

— Rachel Andrew, “HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points”

There’s no moment more profound in my web development career than the time I changed the background color of a page from default white to some color value I can’t remember (but know for a fact it would never be dodgerblue). That, and my personal “a-ha!” moment when realizing that everything in CSS is a box. Nothing guided me with the exception of “View Source,” and I’d bet the melting Chapstick in my pocket that you’re the same if you came up around the turn of the 21st century.

Where do you go to learn HTML and CSS these days? Even now, there are few dedicated secondary education programs (or scholarships, for that matter) to consider. We didn’t have bootcamps back in the day, but you don’t have to toss a virtual stone across many pixels to find one today.

There are excellent and/or free tutorials, too. Here, I’ll link a few of ’em up for you:

• Learn HTML / Learn CSS by web.dev
• Getting Start With the Web by MDN
• HTML & CSS Crash Course by Kevin Powell
• Introduction to HTML and CSS by The Odin Project
• Learn HTML / Learn CSS by W3Docs

Let’s not even get into the number of YouTube tutorials. But if you do, no one beats Kevin’s incredible archive of recorded gems.

Anyway, my point is that there are more resources than ever for learning web development, but still painfully few entry points to get there. The resources we have for learning the basics are great, but many are either growing stale, are quick hits without a clear learning path, or assume the learner has at least some technical knowledge. I can tell you, as someone who has hit the Publish button on thousands of front-end tutorials, that the vast majority — if not all — of them are geared toward those who are already on the career path.

It was always a bit painful when someone would email CSS-Tricks asking where to get started learning CSS because, well, you’d imagine CSS-Tricks being the perfect home for something like that, and yet, there’s nothing. It’s just the reality, even if many of us (myself included) cut our chops with sites like CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and A List Apart. We were all learning together at that time, or so it seemed.

What we need are more pathways for deep learning.

Learning Experience Design (LXD) is a real thing that I’d position somewhere between what we know as UX Design and the practice of accessibility. There’s a focus on creating delightful experiences, sure, but the real aim of LDX is to establish learning paths that universally account for different types of learners (e.g., adults and children) and learning styles (e.g., visual and experiential). According to LDX, learners have a set of needs not totally unlike those that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs identifies for all humans, and there are different models for determining those needs, perhaps none more influential than Bloom’s Taxonomy.

These are things that many front-end tutorials, bootcamps, videos, and programs are not designed for. It’s not that the resources are bad (nay, most are excellent); it’s that they are serving different learners and learning types than what a day-one beginner needs. And let’s please not rely on AI to fill the gaps in human experiences!

Like I said, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Like, a lot a lot. In fact, I recently published an online course purely dedicated to learning the basics of front-end development, creatively named TheBasics.dev. I’d like to think it’s not just another tutorial because it’s a complete set of lessons that includes reading, demonstrations, videos, lab exercises, and assessments, i.e., a myriad of ways to learn. I’d also like to think that this is more than just another bootcamp because it is curricula designed with the intention to develop new knowledge through reflective practices, peer learning, and feedback.

Anyway, I’m darn proud of The Basics, even if I’m not exactly the self-promoting type, and writing about it is outside of my comfort zone. If you’re reading this, it’s very likely that you, too, work on the front end. The Basics isn’t for you exactly, though I’d argue that brushing up on fundamentals is never a bad thing, regardless of your profession, but especially in front-end development, where standards are well-documented but ever-changing as well.

• Visit The Basics

The Basics is more for your clients who do not know how to update the website they paid you to make. Or the friend who’s learning but still keeps bugging you with questions about the things they’re reading. Or your mom, who still has no idea what it is you do for a living. It’s for those whom the entry points are vanishing. It’s for those who could simply sign up for a Squarespace account but want to actually understand the code it spits out so they have more control to make a site that uniquely reflects them.

If you know a person like that, I would love it if you’d share The Basics with them.

Long live the basics! Long live the “a-ha!” moments that help us all fall in love with the World Wide Web.

(yk)

August 2021 marks a milestone for me. That’s when we signed an acquisition agreement to sell Chatra, a profitable live chat platform. I co-founded it after shutting down my first startup after a six-year struggle. Chatra took me and the team six years to finish — that’s six years of learning, experimenting, sometimes failing, and ultimately winning big.

Acquisitions happen all the time. But what does it look like to go through one, putting the thing you built and nurtured up for sale and ceding control to someone else to take over? Sometimes, these things are complicated and contain clauses about what you can and can’t say after the transaction is completed.

So, I’ve curated a handful of the most valuable takeaways from starting, growing, and selling the company. It took me some time to process everything; some lessons were learned immediately, while others took time to sink in. Ultimately, though, it’s a recollection of my personal journey. I hope sharing it can help you in the event you ever find yourself in a similar pair of shoes.

Keeping The Band Together

Rewind six years before the Chatra acquisition. My first startup, Getwear, ran out of steam, and I — along with everyone else — was ready to jump ship.

But we weren’t ready to part ways. My co-founder-partner was a close childhood friend with whom I would sell pirated CDs in the late 90s. Now, I don’t think it’s the most honest way to make a living, but it didn’t bother us much in high school. It also contributed to a strong bond between us, one that led to the launch of Getwear and, later, Chatra.

That partnership and collaboration were too precious to let go; we knew that our work wasn’t supposed to end at Getwear and that we’d have at least one more try together. The fact that we struggled together before is what allowed us to pull through difficult times later. Our friendship allowed us to work through stress, difficulties, and the unavoidable disagreements that always come up.

That was a big lesson for me: It’s good to have a partner you trust along for the ride. We were together before Chatra, and we saw it all the way through to the end. I can’t imagine how things would have been different had I partnered with someone new and unfamiliar, or worse, on my own.

Building Business Foundations

We believed Getwear would make us millionaires. So when it failed, that motivation effectively evaporated. We were no longer inspired to take on ambitious plans, but we still had enough steam to start a digital analog of a döner kebab shop — a simple, sought-after tech product just to pay our bills.

This business wasn’t to be built on the back of investment capital; no, it was bootstrapped. That means we made do with a small, independent, fully-remote team. Remember, this is in 2015. The global pandemic had yet to happen, and a fully remote team was still a novelty. And it was quite a change from how we ran Getwear, which was stocked with an R&D department, a production office, and even a factory in Mumbai. A small distributed team seemed the right approach to keep us nimble as we set about defining our path forward as a company.

Finding our purpose required us to look at the intersection of what the market needs and what we know and can do well. Building a customer support product was an obvious choice: at Getwear, we heavily relied on live chat to help users take their body measurements and place their orders.

We were familiar with existing products on the market. Besides, we already had experience building a conversational support product: we had built an internal tool to facilitate communication between our Mumbai-based factory and an overseas customer-facing team. The best thing about that was that it was built on a relatively obscure framework offering real-time messaging out of the box.

There were maybe 20 established competitors in the space back in 2015, but that didn’t dissuade us. If there was enough room for 20 products to do business, there must be enough for 21. I assumed we should treat competition as a market validation rather than an obstacle.

Looking back, I can confidently say that it’s totally possible to compete (and succeed) in a crowded market.

Product-wise, Getwear was very innovative; no one had ever built an online jeans customizer as powerful as ours. We designed the UX from scratch without relying much on the best practices.

With Chatra, we went down a completely different route: We had improved the established live chat product category via features that were, at that time, commonly found in other types of software but hadn’t made their way to our field. That was the opportunity we seized.

The existing live chat platforms felt archaic in that the interfaces were clunky and reminiscent of Windows 95, the user flows were poorly thought out, and the dated user experience resulted in lost conversation histories.

Slack was a new product at this time and was all the rage with its fresh approach to user interfaces and conversational onboarding. Products like Facebook Messenger and Telegram (which is popular in Eastern Europe and the Middle East) were already standard bearers and formed user expectations for how a messaging experience should work on mobile. We learned a lot from these products and found in them the blueprint to design a modern chat widget and dashboard for agents.

We certainly stood on the shoulders of giants, and there’s nothing wrong with stealing like an artist: in fact, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates did it.

The takeaway?

A product does not have to be new to redefine and disrupt a market. It’s possible to lead by introducing modern standards and designs rather than coming up with something radically different.

“

Making A Go-To-Market Strategy

Once we were clear about what we were building and how to build it, the time came to figure out a strategy for bringing our product to market.

Two things were very clear and true to us up front:

1. We needed to launch and start earning immediately — in months rather than years — being a bootstrapped company and all.
2. We didn’t have money for things like paid acquisition, brand awareness, or outbound sales representatives to serve as the front line for customer engagement.

Both conclusions, taken together, helped us decide to focus our efforts on small businesses that need fewer features in a product and onboard by self-service. Marketing-wise, that meant we’d need to find a way around prohibitively expensive ads.

Enter growth hacking! The term doesn’t resonate now the way it did in 2015: fresh, aggressive, and effective. As a user-facing website widget, we had a built-in acquisition channel by way of a “powered by Chatra” link. For it to be an effective marketing tool, we had to accumulate a certain number of customers. Otherwise, who’s going to see the link in the first place?

We combined unorthodox techniques to acquire new customers, like web-scraping and email address discovery with cold outreach.

Initially, we decided to go after our competitors’ customers. But the only thing we got out of targeting them with emails was their rightful anger.

“

In fact, a number of customers complained directly to the competitors, and the CEO of a prominent live chat company demanded we cease communicating with their users.

More than that, he actually requested that we donate to a well-known civil liberty NGO, something we wholeheartedly agreed to, considering it was indeed the right thing to do.

So, we decided to forget about competition and target potential customers (who owned e-commerce websites) using automation for lead research, email sending, and reply processing. We managed to do it on a massive scale with very few resources. By and large, cold outreach has been the single most effective marketing tool we have ever used. And contrary to common assumption, it is not a practice reserved purely for enterprise products.

Once we acquired a significant user mass, the widget link became our Number One acquisition channel. In lean startup terminology, a viral engine of growth is a situation when existing customers start generating leads and filling the marketing funnel for you. It’s where we all want to be, but the way to get there is often murky and unreliable. But my experience tells me that it is possible and can be planned.

For this strategy to work, it has to be based on natural user interactions. With widgets, the mechanic is quite apparent, but not so much with other products. Still, you can do well with serious planning and running experiments to help make informed decisions that achieve the best possible results.

For example, we were surprised that the widget link performed way better in tests when we changed it from “Powered by Chatra” to “Get Chatra!”. We’re talking big increases with minor tweaks. The small details really do matter!

Content marketing was another avenue we explored for generating leads. We had already done the cold outreach and had a good viral engine going with the widget link. Content marketing, in contrast, was an attempt to generate leads at the “top” of the funnel, independent of any outbound marketing or our customers’ websites. We produced books and guides that were well-researched, written, and designed to bring in potential customers while supporting existing ones with resources to get the most out of Chatra.

Sadly, these efforts failed to attract many new leads. I don’t want to say not to invest in quality content; it’s just that this is not a viable short-term growth strategy.

Increasing Lifetime Customer Value

It took six months of development to launch and another year to finally break even. By then, we had achieved a product-market fit with consistent organic growth; it was time to focus on metrics and unit economics. Our challenge was to limit customer churn and find ways to increase the lifetime value of existing customers.

If there’s an arch-enemy to SaaS, it’s churn. Mitigating churn is crucial to any subscription business, as longer subscriptions generate more revenue. Plus, it’s easier to prevent churn than it is to acquire new customers.

We found it helpful to distinguish between avoidable churn and unavoidable (i.e., “natural”) churn. The latter concerns customer behavior beyond our control: if an e-commerce store shuts down, they won’t pay for services. And we had nothing to do with them shutting down — it’s just the reality of life that most small businesses fail. No quick-fix strategy could ever change that; we just had to deal with it.

Chatra’s subscription pricing was fairly inexpensive, yet we enjoyed a relatively high customer lifetime value (cLTV). Many customers tended to stay for a long time — some, for years. Our high cLTV helped us justify higher customer acquisition costs (CAC) for paid ads in the Shopify app store once we decided to run them. Running the ads allowed us to improve our Shopify app store search position. And because of that, we improved and kept our position as a top app within our category. That, I believe, was one of the factors that the company Brevo considered when they later decided to acquire our business.

We tried improving the free-to-paid subscription conversion rate by targeting those who actively used the product but remained on a free plan for an extended period. We offered them an upgraded plan subscription for just one dollar per year. And to our surprise, that failed to convince many people to upgrade. We were forced to conclude that there are two types of customers: those who pay and those who do not (and will not).

From that point forward, things got even weirder. For example, we ran several experiments with subscription pricing and found that we could increase subscription prices from $11 per seat to $19 without adversely affecting either the visitor-to-user or the free-to-paid conversion rates! Apparently, price doesn’t matter as much as you might think. It’s possible to raise prices without adversely affecting conversions, at least in our experience with a freemium pricing model.

We also released additional products we could cross-sell to existing customers. One was Livebar, an app for in-browser notifications on recent online shopping purchases. Another was Yeps, a simple announcement bar that sticks to the top of a webpage. Product-wise, both were good. But despite our efforts to bring awareness to them in all our communications with Chatra customers, they never really took off. We’ve closed the first and sold the second for a price that barely justified the development and ongoing support we were putting into it. We were wrong to assume that if we have a loyal audience, we could automatically sell them another product.

Contemplating An Exit

Chatra was a lean company. As a SaaS business, we had a perfect cost-revenue ratio and gained new customers mainly through viral dynamics and self-onboarding. These didn’t increase our costs much but did indeed bring in extra subscription dollars. The engine worked almost without any effort on our side.

After a few years, the company could mostly function on auto-pilot, giving us — the founders — time and resources to pay our bills and run business experiments. We were enjoying a good life. Our work was a success!

We gave up on an exit strategy even before starting, so we didn’t pay much attention to the acquisition offers we routinely received; most weren’t enticing enough to pull us away. Even those sent by people known in the industry were way too small: the best offer we got was a valuation of 2.5 times our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), which was a non-starter for us.

Then, we received an email with another offer. The details were slim, but we decided to at least entertain the idea and schedule a time to chat. I replied that we wouldn’t consider anything lower than an industry-standard venture-backed SaaS valuation (which was about eight times ARR at the time). The response, surprisingly, read: “Let’s talk. Are you ready to sign a non-disclosure agreement?”

My biggest concern was that transferring ownership might lead to the Chatra team being laid off and the product termination. I didn’t want to let down our existing customers! The buyer understood the situation and assured us that Chatra would remain a separate line of business, at least for an extended period. No one on the team would lose their job. The buyer also planned to fork Chatra rather than close it, at least initially.

Still, letting go of it was difficult, and at times, I even felt the urge to blow up the negotiations.

So, why sell at all? We did it for three reasons:

• First, we felt stuck in the mature stage of the business lifecycle and missed the feeling of creating new things.
• Second, we (rightfully) knew that the good times could not last forever; we would be wise to avoid putting all our eggs in one basket.
• Third was a bit of pride. I genuinely wanted to go through the acquisition process, which has always seemed like a rite of passage for entrepreneurs.

Chatra was growing, cash-flow positive, and economic tailwinds seemed to blow our way. On the flip side, however, we had little left to do as founders. We didn’t want to go upmarket and compete with massive players like Intercom and Drift. We were happy in our niche, but it didn’t offer enough growth or expansion opportunities. We felt near the end of the line.

Looking back, I see how fortunate we were. The market took a huge hit soon after the acquisition, to the extent that I’m sure we would not have been able to fetch equally enticing offers within the next two years.

I want to stress that the offer we got was very, very generous. Still I often kick myself for not asking for more, as a deep-pocketed buyer is unlikely to turn away simply because we were trying to increase the company’s valuation. The additional ask would have been negligible to the buyer, but it could have been very meaningful for us.

Different acquisitions wind up looking different in the end. If you’re curious what a transaction looks like, ours was split into three payouts:

1. An initial, fixed payment on the closing date;
2. Several flexible payouts based on reaching post-acquisition milestones;
3. An escrow amount deposited with an escrow agent for the possibility of something going wrong, like legal claims.

We assumed this structure was non-negotiable and didn’t try to agree on a different distribution that would move more money to the initial payment. Why? We were too shy to ask and were sure we’d complete all requirements on time. Accepting a significant payment delay essentially credited the buyer for the amount of the payouts while leaving me and my co-founder vulnerable to uncertainty.

We should’ve been bold and negotiated more favorable terms. After all, it represented the last time we’d have to battle for Chatra. I consider that a lesson learned for next time.

Conclusion

Parting ways with Chatra wasn’t easy. The team became my second family, and every product pixel and bit of code was dear to my heart. And yes, I do still feel nostalgia for it from time to time. But I certainly enjoy the freedom that comes with the financial gains.

One thing I absolutely want to mention before closing this out is that

Having an “exit” under my belt actually did very little to change my personal well-being or sense of self-worth. The biggest lesson I took away from the acquisition is that success is the process of doing things, not the point you can arrive at.

“

I don’t yet know where the journey will take me from here, but I’m confident that there will be both a business challenge and a way of helping others on their own founder journey. That said, I sincerely hope that my experience gives you a good deal of insight into the process of selling a company. It’s one of those things that often happens behind closed doors. But by shedding a little light on it — at least this one reflection — perhaps you will be more prepared than I was and know what to look for.

(gg, yk)

My journey in front-end web development started after university. I had no idea what I was going into, but it looked easy enough to get my feet wet at first glance. I dug around Google and read up on tons of blog posts and articles about a career in front-end. I did bootcamps and acquired a fancy laptop. I thought I was good to go and had all I needed.

Then reality started to kick in. It started when I realized how vast of a landscape Front-End Land is. There are countless frameworks, techniques, standards, workflows, and tools — enough to fill a virtual Amazon-sized warehouse. Where does someone so new to the industry even start? My previous research did nothing to prepare me for what I was walking into.

Fast-forward one year, and I feel like I’m beginning to find my footing. By no means do I consider myself a seasoned veteran at the moment, but I have enough road behind me to reflect back on what I’ve learned and what I wish I knew about the realities of working in front-end development when starting out. This article is about that.

The Web Is Big Enough For Specializations

At some point in my journey, I enrolled myself in a number of online courses and bootcamps to help me catch up on everything from data analytics to cybersecurity to software engineering at the same time. These were things I kept seeing pop up in articles. I was so confused; I believed all of these disciplines were interchangeable and part of the same skill set.

But that is just what they are: disciplines.

What I’ve come to realize is that being an “expert” in everything is a lost cause in the ever-growing World Wide Web.

“

Sure, it’s possible to be generally familiar with a wide spectrum of web-related skills, but it’s hard for me to see how to develop “deep” learning of everything. There will be weak spots in anyone’s skillset.

It would take a lifetime masterclass to get everything down-pat. Thank goodness there are ways to specialize in specific areas of the web, whether it is accessibility, performance, standards, typography, animations, interaction design, or many others that could fill the rest of this article. It’s OK to be one developer with a small cocktail of niche specialties. We need to depend on each other as much as any Node package in a project relies on a number of dependencies.

Burnout And Imposter Syndrome Are Real

My initial plan for starting my career was to master as many skills as possible and start making a living within six months. I figured if I could have a wide set of strong skills, then maybe I could lean on one of them to earn money and continue developing the rest of my skills on my way to becoming a full-stack developer.

I got it wrong. It turned out that I was chasing my tail in circles, trying to be everything to everyone. Just as I’d get an “a-ha!” moment learning one thing, I’d see some other new framework, CSS feature, performance strategy, design system, and so on in my X/Twitter feed that was calling my attention. I never really did get a feeling of accomplishment; it was more a fear of missing out and that I was an imposter disguised as a front-ender.

I continued burning the candle at both ends to absorb everything in my path, thinking I might reach some point at which I could call myself a full-stack developer and earn the right to slow down and coast with my vast array of skills. But I kept struggling to keep up and instead earned many sleepless nights cramming in as much information as I could.

Burnout is something I don’t wish on anyone. I was tired and mentally stressed. I could have done better. I engaged in every Twitter space or virtual event I could to learn a new trick and land a steady job. Imagine that, with my busy schedule, I still pause it to listen to hours of online events. I had an undying thirst for knowledge but needed to channel it in the right direction.

We Need Each Other

I had spent so much time and effort consuming information with the intensity of a firehose running at full blast that I completely overlooked what I now know is an essential asset in this industry: a network of colleagues.

I was on my own. Sure, I was sort of engaging with others by reading their tutorials, watching their video series, reading their social posts, and whatnot. But I didn’t really know anyone personally. I became familiar with all the big names you probably know as well, but it’s not like I worked or even interacted with anyone directly.

What I know now is that I needed personal advice every bit as much as more technical information. It often takes the help of someone else to learn how to ride a bike, so why wouldn’t it be the same for writing code?

Having a mentor or two would have helped me maintain balance throughout my technical bike ride, and now I wish I had sought someone out much earlier.

“

I should have asked for help when I needed it rather than stubbornly pushing forward on my own. I was feeding my burnout more than I was making positive progress.

Start With The Basics, Then Scale Up

My candid advice from my experience is to start learning front-end fundamentals. HTML and CSS are unlikely to go away. I mean, everything parses in HTML at the end of the day, right? And CSS is used on 97% of all websites.

The truth is that HTML and CSS are big buckets, even if they are usually discounted as “basic” or “easy” compared to traditional programming languages. Writing them well matters for everything. Sure, go ahead and jump straight to JavaScript, and it’s possible to cobble together a modern web app with an architecture of modular components. You’ll still need to know how your work renders and ensure it’s accessible, semantic, performant, cross-browser-supported, and responsive. You may pick those skills up along the way, but why not learn them up-front when they are essential to a good user experience?

So, before you click on yet another link extolling the virtues of another flavor of JavaScript framework, my advice is to start with the essentials:

• What is a “semantic” HTML element?
• What is the CSS Box Model, and why does it matter?
• How does the CSS Cascade influence the way we write styles?
• How does a screenreader announce elements on a page?
• What is the difference between inline and block elements?
• Why do we have logical properties in CSS when we already have physical ones?
• What does it mean to create a stacking context or remove an element from the document flow?
• How do certain elements look in one browser versus another?

The list could go on and on. I bet many of you know the answers. I wonder, though, how many you could explain effectively to someone beginning a front-end career. And, remember, things change. New standards are shipped, new tricks are discovered, and certain trends will fade as quickly as they came. While staying up-to-date with front-end development on a macro level is helpful, I’ve learned to integrate specific new technologies and strategies into my work only when I have a use case for them and concentrate more on my own learning journey — establish a solid foundation with the essentials, then progress to real-life projects.

Progress is a process. May as well start with evergreen information and add complexity to your knowledge when you need it instead of drinking from the firehose at all times.

There’s A Time And Place For Everything

I’ll share a personal story. I spent over a month enrolled in a course on React. I even had to apply for it first, so it was something I had to be accepted into — and I was! I was super excited.

I struggled in the class, of course. And, yes, I dropped out of the program after the first month.

I don’t believe struggling with the course or dropping out of it is any indication of my abilities. I believe it has a lot more to do with timing. The honest truth is that I thought learning React before the fundamentals of front-end development was the right thing to do. React seemed to be the number one thing that everyone was blogging about and what every employer was looking for in a new hire. The React course I was accepted into was my ticket to a successful and fulfilling career!

My motive was right, but I was not ready for it. I should have stuck with the basics and scaled up when I was good and ready to move forward. Instead of building up, I took a huge shortcut and wound up paying for it in the end, both in time and money.

That said, there’s probably no harm in dipping your toes in the water even as you learn the basics. There are plenty of events, hackathons, and coding challenges that offer safe places to connect and collaborate with others. Engaging in some of these activities early on may be a great learning opportunity to see how your knowledge supports or extends someone else’s skills. It can help you see where you fit in and what considerations go into real-life projects that require other people.

There was a time and place for me to learn React. The problem is I jumped the gun and channeled my learning energy in the wrong direction.

If I Had To Do It All Over Again…

This is the money question, right? Everyone wants to know exactly where to start, which classes to take, what articles to read, who to follow on socials, where to find jobs, and so on. The problem with highly specific advice like this is that it’s highly personalized as well. In other words, what has worked for me may not exactly be the right recipe for you.

It’s not the most satisfying answer, but the path you take really does depend on what you want to do and where you want to wind up. Aside from gaining a solid grasp on the basics, I wouldn’t say your next step is jumping into React when your passion is web typography. Both are skill sets that can be used together but are separate areas of concern that have different learning paths.

So, what would I do differently if I had the chance to do this all over again?

For starters, I wouldn’t skip over the fundamentals like I did. I would probably find opportunities to enhance my skills in those areas, like taking the FreeCodeCamp’s responsive web design course or practice recreating designs from the Figma community in CodePen to practice thinking strategically about structuring my code. Then, I might move on to the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures course to level up basic JavaScript skills.

The one thing I know I would do right away, though, is to find a mentor whom I can turn to when I start feeling as though I’m struggling and falling off track.

Or maybe I should have started by learning how to learn in the first place. Figuring out what kind of learner I am and familiarizing myself with learning strategies that help me manage my time and energy would have gone a long way.

Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

Front-end development is full of opinions. The best way to navigate this world is by mastering the basics. I shared my journey, mistakes, and ways of doing things differently if I were to start over. Rather than prescribing you a specific way of going about things or giving you an endless farm of links to all of the available front-end learning resources, I’ll share a few that I personally found helpful.

In the end, I’ve found that I care a lot about contributing to open-source projects, participating in hackathons, having a learning plan, and interacting with mentors who help me along the way, so those are the buckets I’m organizing things into.

Open Source Programs

• 20+ Open Source Internship Programs (Navendu Pottekkat)
• Reinforcement Learning Open-Source Fest (Microsoft)
• Hacktoberfest
• GirlScript Summer of Code

Hackathons

• DevPost
• HackerEarth
• Major League Hacking

Developer Roadmaps

• The Frontend Engineer Growth Tracker (Notion Template)
• Roadmap.sh

Mentorship

• Coding Coach
• ADPList
• Frontend mentor

Whatever your niche is, wherever your learning takes you, just make sure it’s yours. What works for one person may not be the right path for you, so spend time exploring the space and picking out what excites you most. The web is big, and there is a place for everyone to shine, especially you.

(gg, yk, il)

During my time curating the UX London and Leading Design events, I used to watch a few hundred presentations each year. I’d be looking at a range of things, including the speaker’s domain experience and credibility, their stage presence and ability to tell a good story, and whether their topic resonated with the current industry zeitgeist.

When you watch that many presentations, you start to notice patterns that can either contribute to an absolutely amazing talk or leave an audience feeling restless and disengaged. But before you even start worrying about a delivery, you need to secure yourself a spot on the stage. How? Follow me along, and let’s find out!

Choosing What To Speak About

I think one of the biggest misunderstandings people have about public speaking is the belief that you need to come up with a totally new and unique concept — one that nobody has spoken about before. As such, potentially amazing speakers will self-limit because they don’t have “something new to share.” While discovering a brand new concept at a conference is always great, I can literally count the number of times this has happened to me on the one hand. This isn’t because people aren’t constantly exploring new approaches.

However, in our heavily connected world, ideas tend to spread faster than a typical conference planning cycle, and the type of people who attend conferences are likely to be taped into the industry zeitgeist already. So even if the curator does find somebody with a groundbreaking new idea, by the time they finally get on stage, they’ve likely already tweeted about it, blogged about it, and potentially spoken about it at several other events.

I think the need to create something unique comes from an understandable sense of insecurity.

“Why would anybody want to listen to me unless I have something groundbreaking to share?”

The answer is actually more mundane than you might think. It’s the personal filter you bring to the topic that counts. Let’s say you want to do a talk about OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results) or Usability Testing — two topics which you might imagine have been “talked to death” over the years.

However, people don’t know the specific way you tackled these subjects, the challenges you personally faced, and the roadblocks you overcame. There’s a good chance that people in your audience will already have some awareness of these techniques. Still, there’s also a good chance that they’ve been facing their own challenges and want nothing more than to hear how you navigate your way around them, hopefully in an interesting and engaging manner.

Also, let’s not forget that there are new people entering our industry every day. There are so many techniques I’ve made the mistake of taking for granted, only to realize that the people I’m talking to have not only never practiced them before but might not have even come across them; or if they have, they might have only the scantest knowledge about them, gleaned from social media and a couple of poorly written opinion pieces.

In fact, I think our industry is starting to atrophy as techniques we once thought were core ten years ago barely get a mention these days. So just because you think a subject is obvious doesn’t mean everybody feels the same, and there isn’t room for new voices or perspectives on the subject.

Another easy way to break into public speaking is to do some kind of **case study**. So think about an interesting project you did recently. What techniques did you use, what approach did you take, what problems did you encounter, and how did you go about solving them? The main benefit of a case study type talk is that you’ll know the subject extremely well, which also helps with the nerves (more on this later).

During the past few years, there were published many excellent, very detailed case studies on Smashing Magazine — take a look at this list for some inspiration.

Invest The Right Amount of Time Doing Prep

Another thing people get wrong about public speaking is feeling the need to write a new talk every time. This also comes from insecurity (and maybe a little bit of ego as well). We feel like once our talk is out in the world, everybody will have seen it. However, the sad reality is that the vast majority of people won’t be rushing to view your talk when the video comes online, and even if they do, there’s a good chance they’ll only have taken in a fraction of what you said if they remember any of it at all.

It’s also worth noting that talks are super context-sensitive. I remember watching a talk from former Adaptive Path founder Jeff Veen at least five times. I enjoyed every single outing because while the talk hadn’t changed, I had. I was in a different place in my career, having different conversations and struggling with different things. As such, the talk sparked whole new trains of thought, as well as reminded me of things I knew but had forgotten.

It should be mentioned that, like music or stand-up comedy, talks get better with practice. I generally find that it takes me three or four outings before the talk I’m giving really hits its stride. Only then have I learnt which parts resonate with the audience and which parts need more work; how to improve the structure and cadence, moving sections around for a better flow, and I’ve learnt the bits which people find funny (some international and some not), and how to use pacing and space to make the key ideas land. If you only give a talk once, you’ll be missing out on all this useful feedback and delivering something that’s, at best, 60% of what it could potentially be.

On a practical level, a 45-minute talk can take a surprisingly long time to put together. I reckon it takes me at least an hour of preparation for every minute of content. That’s at least a week’s worth of work, so throwing that away after a single outing is a huge waste. Of course, that’s not what people do. If the talk is largely disposable, they’ll put a lot less effort in, often writing their talk “the night before the event.”

Unless you’re some sort of wunderkind, this will result in a mediocre talk, a mediocre performance, and a low chance of being asked to come back and speak again. Sadly this is one of the reasons we see a lot of the same faces on the speaker circuit. They’re the ones who put the effort in, deliver a good performance, and are rewarded with more invites. Fortunately, the quality bar at most conferences is so low that putting a little extra time into your prep can pay plenty of dividends.

Nailing The Delivery

As well as 45 minutes being a lot of content to create, it’s also a lot of content to sit through. No matter how interesting the subject is, a monotone delivery will make it very hard for your audience to stay engaged. As such, nailing the delivery is key. One way to do this is to see public speaking for what it is — a performance — and as the performer, you have a number of tools at your disposal.

First of all, you can use your voice as an instrument and try varying things like speed, pitch, and volume. Want to get people excited? Use a fast and excitable tone. Want people to lean in and pay attention? Slow down and speak quietly. Varying the way you speak gives your talks texture and can help you hold people’s attention for longer.

Another thing you can use is the physical space. While most people (including myself) feel safe and comfortable behind the lectern, the best speakers use the entire stage to good effect, walking to the front of the stage to address the audience in a more human way or using different sides of the stage to indicate different timelines or parts of a conversation.

Storytelling is an art, so consider starting your talk in a way that grabs your audience’s attention.

“

This generally isn’t a 20-minute bio of who you are and why you deserve to be on the stage. One of the most interesting talks I ever saw started with one such lengthy bio causing a third of the audience to get up and walk out. I felt really bad for the speaker — who was visibly knocked — so I stuck with it, and I’m so glad I did! The talk turned out to be amazing once all the necessary cruft was removed.

“When presenting at work or [at a conference or] anywhere else, never assume the audience has pledged their undivided attention. They have pledged maybe 60 seconds and will divide their attention as they see fit after that. Open accordingly.”

— Mike Davidson

A little trick I like to use is to start my talk in the middle of the story: “So all of a sudden, my air cut out. I was in a cave, underwater, in the pitch black, and with less than 20 seconds of air in my lungs.” Suddenly the whole audience will stop looking at their phones. “Wait, what?” they’ll think. What’s happening? Who is this person? Where are they? How did he get there? And what the hell does this have to do with design? You’ve suddenly created a whole series of open questions which the audience desperately wants to be closed, and you’ve just bought yourself five minutes of their undivided attention where you can start delivery.

Taking too long to get to the meat of the talk is a common problem. In fact, I regularly see speakers who have spent so long on the preamble that they end up rushing the truly helpful bits. One of the reasons folks get stuck like this is that they feel the need to bring everybody up to the same base level of knowledge before they jump into the good stuff.

Instead, it’s much better to assume a base level of knowledge. If the talk stretches your audience’s knowledge, that’s fine. If it goes over some people’s heads, it might encourage them to look stuff up after the event. However, if you find yourself teaching people the absolute basics, there’s a good chance the more experienced members of the audience will zone out, and capturing their interest will become that much harder later on.

When speakers don’t give themselves enough time to prepare a good narrative, it’s easy to fall back on tried and tested patterns. One of these is the “listicle talk” where the speaker explains, “Here are twelve things I think are important, and I’m going to go through them one by one.” It’s a handy formula, but it makes people super-conscious of the time. (“Crikey, they’re still only at number five! I‘m not sure I’m going to make it through another seven of these points.”)

In a similar vein are the talks, which are little more than a series of bullet points that the speaker reads through. The problem is that the audience is likely to read through them much quicker than the speaker, so people basically know what you’re going to say in advance. As such, keep these sorts of lists in your speaker notes and pick some sort of title or image that illustrates the points you’re about to make instead.

Tame The Nerves

Public speaking is unnatural for us, so everybody feels some level of stress. I have one friend who is an absolutely amazing speaker on stage — funny, charming, and confident — but an absolute wreck moments before. In fact, it’s fairly common before going on stage to think, “Why the hell am I doing this to myself?” only to come off the stage 45 or 60 minutes later thinking, “That was great. When can I do it again!”.

One way to minimize these nerves is to memorize the first five minutes of your talk. If you can go on the stage with the first five minutes in the bag, the nerves will quickly subside, and you’ll be able to ease into your presentation some more. This is another reason why starting with a story can be helpful, as they’re easy to remember and will give you a reasonable amount of creative license.

A sure way to tame the nerves is to feel super-prepared and practiced; as such, it’s worth reading your talk out loud a bunch of times before you deliver it to an audience. It’s amazing how often something sounds logical when you say it in your head, but it doesn’t quite flow properly when said out loud. Practicing in front of people is very helpful, so consider asking friends or colleagues if you could practice on them. Also, consider doing a few dry runs with a local group before getting on a bigger stage. The more you know your material, the less nervous you’ll feel.

While some speakers like to brag about how little prep they’ve done or how little sleep they’ve got the night before, don’t get tricked into thinking that this is the standard approach. Often these folks are actually very nervous and are saying things like this in an attempt to preempt or excuse potential poor performance.

It reminds me of the kids at school who used to claim they didn’t study and revise the material and ended up getting a B-. They almost certainly did some revision, albeit probably not enough. But this posturing was actually a way for them to manage their own shortcomings. “I bet I could have gotten an A if I’d put some extra work in.” Instead, make sure you’re well prepared, well rested, and set yourself up for success.

It’s worth mentioning that most people get nervous during public speaking, even if they like to tell you otherwise. As such, nerves are something you just need to get better at managing. One way to do this is to re-frame “nerves” (which have negative connotations) to something more positive like “excitement.” That feeling of excitement you get before giving a talk can actually be a positive thing if you don’t let it get out of hand. It’s basically your body’s way of getting you ready to perform.

However, this excess energy can bleed out in some less helpful ways, such as the “speaker square dance.” This is where speakers either shift their weight from one foot to the other or take a step forwards, a step to the side, and a step back, like some sort of a caged zoo animal. Unfortunately, this constant shifting can feel very unsettling and distracting for the audience, so if you can, try to plant your feet firmly and just move with deliberate intent when you want to make a point.

It’s also great if you can try to minimize the “ums” and “ahs.” People generally do this to give themselves pause while they’re thinking about the next thing they want to say. However, it can come across as if you are a little unprepared. Instead, do take actual breaks between concepts and sentences. At first, it can feel a bit weird doing this on stage, but think of it as an aural whitespace, making it easier for your audience to take in one concept before transitioning on to the next.

Note: I feel comfortable calling these behaviors out as they’re both things I personally do, and I’m working on fixing them — with mixed results so far.

Avoid The Clichés

At least once during every conference I attend, a speaker will say something jokingly along the lines of “I’m the only one standing between you and tea/lunch/beer.” It’s meant as a wry apology, and the first time I heard it, I gave a gentle chuckle.

However, I’ve been at some conferences where three speakers in a row had made the same joke. Apart from a lack of originality, this also shows that the speakers haven’t actually been listening to the other talks, probably because they’ve been in their room or backstage, tweaking their slides. Sometimes this is necessary, but I always appreciate speakers who have been engaged with the content, make references to earlier talks, and don’t trot out the same old clichés as the previous speakers.

Note: I should also add that personally, I find the joke (“the only thing between you and beer”) by the last speaker of the day somewhat problematic, as it implies that people are here for the drink rather than the conference content, and because it also somewhat normalizes overconsumption.

One thing some speakers do in order to calm their nerves (and also to increase people’s engagement, as a side-effect) is through audience participation. If you get people from the audience interacting with each other for five minutes, it takes some of the pressure and focus off of you. It’s also five fewer minutes of content you need to prepare.

However, I see audience participation go wrong far more often than it goes right. This happens especially in front of Brits and Northern Europeans who would rather curl up into a ball and die rather than risk the social awkwardness of talking to their neighbors.

“

I remember seeing one American speaker walk up the aisle at a European conference encouraging the audience to whoop and cheer while they high-fived everybody or at least attempted to high-five everybody. Although this sort of hype-building might have worked well in Vegas, the assembled audience of Northern Europeans found the whole episode deeply embarrassing, and the speaker never truly recovered for the rest of the talk.

And, on the opposite side of things, if you do get your audience interacting, it can be quite hard to get them to stop a few minutes later! I have seen far too many speakers asking people to introduce themselves to their neighbors, only to cut them off 30 or so seconds later. So if you have such an activity planned, make sure you leave enough time for it to become a meaningful connection, and have a strategy on how you’re going to bring people’s focus back to you.

Another (negative) thing I see a lot of speakers do is make jokes about how they didn’t write their talk till last night or didn’t get to bed till late because they were out drinking. While it’s good to appear to be vulnerable and human, if played wrong, the message you might actually be sending is that you don’t really care about the audience, so be careful.

How To Get Invited Back?

Organizing conferences can be stressful work. You’re trying to coordinate with a bunch of different people with widely different workloads, communication styles, and response times. People are super quick to say “Yes!” to a speaking gig, but then they might go dark for months on end. This is really difficult if you’re trying to get enough information to launch your event site and start selling tickets. It’s even harder if you’re trying to organize things like travel and accommodation and you are seeing the price of everything going up.

As such, you can make conference organizers’ lives a lot easier by responding to their emails in a timely manner, sending them your talk descriptions, bio information, and headshots when asked, and confirming or booking your travel details enough time in advance so that the prices don’t double in size.

Speakers who are a pleasure to work with get recommended and invited back. Speakers who don’t respond to emails, send in overly-short descriptions or leave booking travel to the last minute often don’t. In fact, I’m a member of several conference organiser Slack groups where this sort of behaviour is regularly talked about, causing invites for certain speakers to dry up quickly.

This is, sadly, another reason why you see the same speakers talking at events time and again. Not necessarily because they’re the best speakers, but because they’re reliable and don’t give the organizers a heart attack.

Conclusion

I know this article has covered a lot of public speaking do’s and don’t’s. But before wrapping things up, it’s worth mentioning that speaking is also a lot of fun. It’s a great way to attend conferences you might not have otherwise been able to afford; you get to meet speakers whose work you might have been following for years and learn a ton of new things. It also provides a great sense of personal accomplishment, being able to share what you’ve learnt with others and “pay it forward.”

While it’s easy to assume that all speakers are extroverts, (the art of) speaking is actually surprisingly good for introverts, too. A lot of people find it quite awkward to navigate conferences, go up to strangers, and make small talk. Speaking pretty much solves that problem as people immediately have something they can talk to you about, so it’s super fun walking around after your talk and chatting with people.

All that being said, please don’t feel pressured into becoming a speaker. I think a lot of people think that they need to add a “conference speaker” to their LinkedIn bio in order to advance their careers. However, some of the best, most successful people I know in our industry don’t speak at public events at all, so it’s definitely not an impediment.

But if you do want to start sharing your experience with others, now is a good time. Sure, the number of in-person conferences has dropped since the start of the pandemic, but the ones that are still around are desperate to find new, interesting voices from a diverse set of backgrounds. So if it’s something you’re keen to explore, why not put yourself out there? You’ll have nothing to lose but potentially a lot to gain as a result.

Further Reading

Here are a few additional resources on the topic of speaking at conferences. I hope you will find something useful there, too.

• “Breaking into the speaker circuit,” by Andy Budd
  Here are some more thoughts on breaking into public speaking by yours truly. As somebody who both organizes and often speaks at events, I’ve got a good insight into the workings of the conference circuit. This is probably why I regularly get emails from people looking for advice on breaking into the speaking circuit. So rather than repeating the same advice via email, I thought I’d write a quick article I could point people to.
• “Confessions of a Public Speaker,” by Scott Berkun
  In this highly practical book, author and professional speaker Scott Berkun reveals the techniques behind what great communicators do and shows how anyone can learn to use them well. For managers and teachers — and anyone else who talks and expects someone to listen — the Confessions of a Public Speaker provides an insider’s perspective on how to effectively present ideas to anyone. It’s a unique and instructional romp through the embarrassments and triumphs Scott has experienced over fifteen years of speaking to audiences of all sizes.
• “Demystifying Public Speaking,” by Lara Hogan (A Book Apart), with foreword by Eric Meyer
  Whether you’re bracing for a conference talk or a team meeting, Lara Hogan helps you identify your fears and face them so that you can make your way to the stage, big or small.
• “Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Presentation Design,” by Nancy Duarte
  No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you’ve delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. This book fills that void.
• “Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery,” by Garr Reynolds
  A best-selling author and popular speaker, Garr Reynolds, is back in this newly revised edition of his classic, best-selling book in which he showed readers there is a better way to reach the audience through simplicity and storytelling and gave them the tools to confidently design and deliver successful presentations.
• “How To — Public Speaking,” a video talk by Ze Frank
  You may benefit a lot from this video that Ze Frank made several years ago.
• “Getting Started In Public Speaking: Global Diversity CFP Day,” by Rachel Andrew (Smashing Magazine)
  The Global Diversity CFP Day (Call For Proposals, sometimes also known as a Call For Papers) is aimed to help more people submit their ideas to conferences and get into public speaking. In this article, Rachel Andrew rounds up some of the best takeaways along with other useful resources for new speakers.
• “Getting The Most Out Of Your Web Conference Experience,” by Jeremy Girard (Smashing Magazine)
  To be a web professional is to be a lifelong learner, and the ever-changing landscape of our industry requires us to continually update and expand our knowledge so that our skills do not become outdated. One of the ways we can continue learning is by attending professional web conferences. But with so many seemingly excellent events to choose from, how do you decide which is right for you?
• “Don’t Pay To Speak At Commercial Events,” by Vitaly Friedman (Smashing Magazine)
  The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. What lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right and shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.
• “How to make meaningful connections at in-person conferences,” by Grace Ling (Figma Config)
  This is an excellent Twitter post about how to make meaningful connections at in-person conferences — a few concise, valuable, and practical tips.

(mb, yk, il)

Many millions of people dream of flying the coop and spending time working abroad.

The opportunity to work abroad is a popular prospect, one undimmed by the years of restriction due to the pandemic and made only more accessible thanks to hybrid working and the rise of the digital native.

However, despite the still-growing desire to work abroad, many people — including professionals in the IT sphere — don’t know where to start. With that in mind, I wanted to write the ultimate guide for finding international employment opportunities.

The article primarily aims at seasoned developers, focusing on where to look for jobs, how to apply, and how to prepare a resume to get called for interviews. I will explore the dos and don’ts during international job interviews and hopefully provide the right sort of advice that should be able to help any IT professional, at any stage of their career, be able to seek out career options abroad.

So, let’s dive in!

Table of Contents:

• How To Prepare Your Resume
• Where Do You Find An International Developer Job?
• Your Primary Considerations
• Relocation, Preparation, And Moving

How To Prepare Your Resume For Getting A Developer Job Abroad

Let’s start with the basics — your resume.

The critical thing to remember about creating a resume for an international employer is the relevance and flexibility of skills to match your target company’s needs and their specific market.

While there are some hard and fast rules to resume writing that apply no matter where you’re sending an application, your resume needs to be tailored to your new market. This is where a little research goes a long way.

I’ll give you an example: In Malaysia, it’s considered good practice to include your personal details like marital status or date of birth on your resume. However, in other markets, these sorts of details (especially around age, sex, or marital status) are unnecessary or, in some cases, considered inappropriate.

So choose the information you share wisely! Your resume has to reflect your desire to relocate to your chosen market/region, it has to be hyper-personalized in approach, and it needs to sound like you’re passionate about your work.

Resume Length, Format, And Size

• Depending on your skill set and experience, the details in a developer resume will vary, but I stand by my rule of not making a resume more than 2 pages.
• Your resume should be formatted in a simple, easy-to-read font (Lato, Merriweather, or Helvetica, for example).
• You should also include succinct summaries in sections like About Me or Key Achievements. Keep it short, keep it direct, and don’t repeat information.

Achievements

• Instead of giving generic lists of tasks/duties/responsibilities, I advise you to clearly communicate your achievements and accomplishments, with statistics to back them up. This will help you stand out from other applicants.
  

For example, if you helped develop an app, make sure you include a variety of proven KPI deliverables, such as engagement KPI metrics, UX KPI metrics, and revenue metrics, rather than just a final product showcase:

Developed a social sharing feature using Android Studio, which increased downloads by 150% in the first three months.

Language

• Use strong action verbs, such as built, led, deployed, reduced, developed, automated, managed, re-architected, implemented, designed, overhauled, and so on to describe your experience/accomplishments. They will bring a confident tone to your resume.
• Use industry-specific adjectives like scalable, fault-tolerant, multi-threaded, and robust (to name a few) to highlight your expertise.

Tailoring

• Tailoring doesn’t mean changing every line of your resume. It means adapting the direction and desire of your resume for a specific employer and their market.
• Tailoring your application can take many forms: you can write a personalized cover letter, adapt your introductory paragraph to reflect your desire to work at a specific company, add specific terminology used in the job listing you’re applying for, or angle your achievements to the market and needs of a particular employer. It shows you’ve done your research and are willing and able to adapt your skill set to the needs of an employer abroad.

For some great advice on writing an effective developer resume, head to Stack Overflow and FreeCodeCamp for a further deep-dive.

Where Do You Find An International Developer Job?

My advice is to build a strategy based around four key international job-seeking means:

• Job boards and aggregators;
• Networking and network news;
• International recruitment agencies;
• Boolean search logic on Google.

Jumping onto Google and leaving your international career in the hands of algorithmic fate is not the way to approach getting a developer job abroad.

“

Job Boards And Aggregators

Job boards and job aggregators (the differences between the two are sometimes vague but transformative to the scale of your international job search) are a popular and effective first port of call for job hunters.

I suggest using job boards for specificity (specific markets and employers in certain countries) and aggregators as overview searches (a generalist overview of where employers are hiring the most and in what sectors).

It’s also important to utilize international job boards that have filters for “relocation” and “visa sponsorship.” In other words, fish in the right pond. Here are some sites I recommend:

• AngelList Talent is now one of the go-to websites for finding a tech job with a startup.

You need to sign up and complete the mandatory profile information in order to filter for positions that offer visa sponsorship. Once you’re all set up on the site, you can enter your search parameters at https://angel.co/jobs.

If you open the Filters tab, you’ll find a section called “Immigration.” Choose “Only show companies that can sponsor a visa” to narrow your search appropriately.

If you don’t turn on this filter, you’ll find all jobs that meet your other criteria, regardless of whether they offer visa sponsorship.

• Relocate.me is a job board for IT professionals (mainly software engineers) that is designed with relocation in mind.

You can see job opportunities in Europe, Asia, and North America from verified employers who offer relocation benefits. The listings include specific details about the relocation packages, making it easy to compare your options.

• Japan Dev is a job board for finding a variety of tech jobs in Japan.

This site features hand-curated jobs from companies that have immediate openings. You can search for positions that offer relocation benefits by clicking the “Jobs with Relocation” button on the home page. You’ll be taken to the Jobs page, where you can further refine your search.

Most of the listings are for software developers and programmers, but other positions for those who work directly with developers are listed as well.

• TokyoDev is another site that helps foreign developers find positions in Japan.

You’ll be able to filter your search with labels such as “No Japanese Required,” “Apply From Abroad,” “Residents Only,” and so on.

• Landing.Jobs is specifically for tech jobs in Europe, with a focus on Portugal.

When you’re looking for jobs through this site, be sure to find the “Visa & work permit” filter section and select the options you need.

• SwissDevJobs is, as the name indicates, specifically for IT jobs in Switzerland.

The site is well-designed, with a modern and easy-to-navigate UI. In the advanced filters, you can narrow your search down to only show jobs that provide visa sponsorship with a simple checkbox.

• Arbeitnow is based in Berlin and features positions in Germany. It makes it simple to filter for jobs that provide visa sponsorship and many other options.

Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs, SimplyHired, and Monster are major job aggregators that can be very effective when searching for developer jobs abroad if you use the appropriate keywords.

When searching on LinkedIn, for example, you should add “relocation,” “visa support,” or “visa sponsorship” into the keywords tab, and select the city/country/region that’s your choice for relocation. Of course, some searches can come back with opportunities not quite suited to your situation, but using relevant keywords does a good job of filtering them out.

The same method works for Indeed, Monster, and other similar aggregators. Include “relocation,” “visa sponsorship,” or “visa support” along with your job title (or other keywords) in your search.

Networking And Network News

Networking takes time but is a highly effective source of referral recommendations. Utilizing social networks (LinkedIn, GitHub, Twitter, and even Instagram) is a highly personal and effective way of making connections with hiring teams and business leaders worldwide.

But I also urge the eagle-eyed developer to look at the market and network leaders like Hacker News’ Ask HN: Who is hiring? and TechCrunch to see where the movers and shakers are in the tech world and where upticks in hiring are occurring. You can then use these media-led referrals to directly approach companies and hiring managers online, via social media channels, and through their own websites.

International Recruitment Agencies

For a complete end-to-end application handling service, specialist developer support is available for those looking for a little more hands-on guidance via international recruitment agencies.

My suggested best first ports of call are international talent acquisition agencies like Global Skills Hub, Zero to One Search, Toughbyte, Orange Quarter, and TechBrainJobs, amongst others.

Tech companies often outsource hiring international talent to recruitment agencies, so going through a recruitment agency can be very beneficial. In addition to helping you find the right position, a good recruiter can fill you in on all of the relevant information on a company, including company relocation policy, benefits, and more.

Boolean Search

The trick to finding unadvertised yet very alive jobs is by using a rarely-utilized search tool strategy called Boolean logic.

Boolean logic refers to an algebraic formula that creates a clear “true” or “false” value to a data type by using “operator” terms while searching for jobs. For job seekers, “data type” refers to a job vacancy query, and “operator” terms refer to the words used to search for the jobs!

So, applying Boolean logic to a job search very quickly gives you a highly relevant shortlist of live jobs from your chosen country, region, or industry and even from targeted companies’ applicant tracking systems like Lever, Workable, and Greenhouse!

It sounds complex (and the theory behind it is), but the search terms are super effective and simple to deploy. As Reed highlights in their piece on Boolean job searches, “You can use keyword searching almost everywhere, ranging from big search engines through to search functions within smaller sites.”

So, how does it work?

You add the relevant “operator” terms into your search platform or site that refer to specific jobs, skills, or criteria you’re looking for. It’s not as complex as it sounds!

These operator terms are the following:

• AND: for job searches containing multiple keywords, for example, developer AND javascript AND python will guarantee search results with only those primary keywords as priority indexed terms.
• OR: for job searches where one of several keywords are prioritized, but not all of them need to be. For example, web developer OR software developer will bring you back jobs with both web and software developer in the title or text, but no other jobs.
• "" marks: used in searches for a particular phrase or term. For example, putting "mobile developer" into a job search will only bring back mobile rather than other developer roles.
• *: for searches where you want to start with a certain term. For example, *Engineer will return all jobs that start with the term Engineer, such as Engineering Manager.
• ( ): when you want to group certain job criteria together. For example, software developer (startup and python) will only bring back specific jobs that fit the startup and tech stack mold you’re looking for.

Example: (site:https://jobs.lever.co OR site: https://apply.workable.com) (engineer OR developer) AND android AND (relocation assistance OR relocation support OR relocation package OR visa sponsorship OR visa support)

Ex-Amazoner Kip Brookbank has a great article on LinkedIn about using Boolean searches to source a job. Make sure to check it out!

Put It All Together

The end result of using all four strategies above is a highly targeted, specific, niche, and personal job search that utilizes the best of digital job searching tools and the international recruitment consultant market.

But above all else, the above four points should drive home the feeling that you can get the perfect international tech job with a bit of patience and consideration using these very effective, free tools at your disposal.

By using each specific search platform’s own location tools, you can narrow down the right sort of opportunities for you. Recruiters offer advice, targeted recruitment support, and hands-on help finding a role. Through networking, you can get job referrals. Finally, using Boolean search removes a lot of the stress of sifting through hundreds of jobs.

Your Primary Considerations When Looking For A Developer Job Abroad

Now you’ve got your resume sorted, and you’re utilizing a raft of different strategies to source your new developer role abroad. So what are your primary considerations beyond clicking the “apply” button?

My advice is to start by building an application strategy (or multiple strategies) that will handle the complexity of relocation and which will keep you focused on building a foundation of credible, flexible professionalism in the eyes of your new employer.

These strategies include some of the points raised above and further details on referral systems, social media approaches, and watching out for red flags!

Application Strategies

My top 5 applications strategies are:

1. Apply through specific job boards or aggregators.
   As mentioned above, utilize all digital options at your disposal.
2. Apply with information from company websites.
   Go directly to your chosen company or use Boolean search terms to shortlist your chosen jobs better.
3. Seek referrals.
   One of the most versatile and personal job search channels, referrals are found via your network and network news.
4. Contact your target companies’ HR departments through LinkedIn or email.
   Utilizing social media is no bad thing, and LinkedIn is your primary weapon.
5. Watch out for red flags.
   Get yourself savvy about what constitutes a poor job advert (Workable provides some eye-opening advice on bad job ads), and use Glassdoor and Blind to sift through companies with bad reviews. You might dodge a career bullet by doing so.

Interview Preparation

In my experience working with incredibly exacting tech talent, sometimes the basics of interview prep can get lost in the melting pot of assessment testing and high-value candidate handling.

There are some absolutely crucial dos and don’ts for getting a developer job abroad you must adhere to:

Do:

• Learn about the company.
  Do your research, understand your employer’s journey, and get under the skin of their company’s purpose and mission.
• Look up interview questions that the company may ask and consider your answers.
  Prepare for any and every question, from coding to critical thinking, from teamwork to timekeeping.
• Prepare your own questions to ask to show your interest.
  Your research should guide the types of questions you want to ask your prospective new employer. This is your one chance to mine them for information!
• Be on time. A basic interview must is not be late.
• Reiterate your desire to relocate and your plans to do so.
  Although I do go into more detail on this below, international employers will want to know how you plan to factor in a relocation into your application. Better to be prepared than caught out.

Don’t:

• Criticize or otherwise speak poorly about former or current employers.
  It’s not a good look, shows a lack of professionalism, and will reflect poorly on your exit strategies.
• Imply that your main interest in the job is relocation.
  Although relocation is important, it shouldn’t be the main reason for moving as it makes the job sound like a means to an end.
• Say “I don’t know” during the interview.
  Contrary to popular belief, you are allowed to make mistakes in an interview. But rather than so you don’t know, say you’d be happy to provide an answer for it in a follow-up interview or post-interview as you don’t have the right information to hand or something to that effect. In short, indicate you may not know now, but you can find out easily.
• Ask about salary, bonuses, and benefits during the interview.
  Interviews are designed to determine whether you have the character, skills, drive, and determination for a role. The salary and bonus conversation will come later. It’s not a conversation for now unless an interviewer asks you directly. My advice is to be prepared and know your worth!
• Forget details on your resume.
  You will be asked about certain points on your resume, and your interview will ask you to elaborate on key points. You must know your resume back to front. If you don’t, you run the risk of looking half-prepared and out of your depth.

How To Negotiate A Job Offer And Navigate Discussions About Your Salary

Contract, salary, and compensation negotiation is a vital moment in your international developer job search. This discussion is not just about money alone; this is your opportunity to talk about everything from relocation packages to IP rights, expat taxes, and more.

• First things first, do your research.
  Understand the expectations for tech talent in the market (and for the size of the company) you wish to relocate to, and formulate an idea of what you’d want from your pay packet commensurate with the situation of your ideal employer.
• Be careful about offering salary expectations.
  The best way to approach a discussion around salary is to ask for an offer first rather than put in your expectations based on your research. See if the offer meets your idea of fair pay and relocation package (if offered).
• Relocation packages
  Does your new employer help with relocation, and if so, by how much and at which stage?
• Negotiate perks and benefits
  From subsidized travel to commute costs, your employer needs to put a whole package in writing.

Other negotiation considerations should be:

• Factor in expat taxes: do you pay more tax while working abroad?
• Discuss intellectual property rights: do you retain any IP in the course of product creation, or are there other options available?
• Ensure agreement is enforceable: international employment contracts can be a foggy minefield to navigate through, so do your research regarding everything from employer’s rights to e-signing capability.

Relocation, Preparation, And Moving To Your New Developer Job

Relocation is a complex, emotional, and risky endeavor, and never one a developer should take lightly. I advise relocating developer talent to run through a pre-travel hitlist to guarantee smooth sailing:

• Learn everything you can about your destination.
  The first thing you should do is deep-dive into the place you’re moving to, from intercity travel to the nuances of the local language. It’ll help reduce the culture shock of the first few weeks and months in a new place.
• Visit your new location before your move.
  I appreciate international travel isn’t cheap, but if it’s possible to visit pre-move, you’ll benefit from a bit of a headstart with getting around and making some local connections. It’s also beneficial when it comes to meeting potential landlords, work colleagues, and so on.
• Determine the cost of living in your new location.
  Cost of living fact-finding will be done around the negotiation stage. Still, it’s worthwhile understanding how far your salary will stretch and any nuances around pay and tax bandings, cost of living, rent, food, travel, and the like. That’s where websites like Numbeo come in handy.
• Understand what’s included in your relocation package.
  This is vital. How much of your travel, accommodation, or relocation will be subsidized, if at all, by a new employer? This is a cornerstone of your financial planning arrangements.
• Consider your family’s requirements in your planning.
  Finally, although it should never be far from your mind and it no doubt won’t be, your family is an important factor in your relocation. I urge you to include them as much as possible in the process and remember the emotional toll of moving away from home to a new country, as much as the physical and financial.

Finding a developer job abroad is a labor of love — one that has to take stock of everything from financial planning to tweaking and perfecting your resume for an international audience.

“

It takes a lot of preparation, but the results of a well-planned international job search are incredibly rewarding.

Moving abroad for work is one of the most rewarding and life-changing things you can do, especially if you’re a talented worker with an in-demand skill set like software development.

The world is your oyster!

(vf, yk, il)

This article is sponsored by Uxcel

Web design is full of people who value open collaboration and knowledge sharing. It’s a career in which you can be completely self-taught, using affordable — if not free — resources from experts and like-minded people around the world. This is worth celebrating!

But with so much to learn, how do we decide what to focus our time on? How do we maintain our existing skills? Where should a beginner start? How do we become hireable? Let’s take a look at how Uxcel (pronounced “You Excel”) goes about answering these questions.

The Three Pillars

Uxcel believes its platform can help you become a better web designer using three core pillars. These essentially involve an iterative process of learning and practicing, with the aim to use progress enough (and have something to show for it) to improve our job prospects over time.

1. Improve Your Design Skills With Interactive Learning

We start with learning — no surprise there! Uxcel has courses specific to individual areas of web design, each one consisting of many interactive bite-sized lessons. This removes the time that gets wasted when you don’t know what to focus on next. Each lesson is small enough to fit in during the spare time. With all the courses being available at the same time, without needing to register for a specific course, you are able to dip your toes into any areas of design without committing to an entire course.

2. Test And Measure Your Design Knowledge

Closely linked to interactive learning is the importance of testing yourself. Alongside the courses, Uxcel also has an entire section of skill tests and assessments dedicated to measuring your progress as you improve. Particularly intriguing is that you can only take these tests once a month! This is a clever mechanism for ensuring you don’t cheat yourself and are able to see a real indication of your improvement over time rather than just practicing to pass tests.

3. Build Your Professional Profile And Get Hired

After learning and measuring come improving your professional profile and hireability. Getting the roles you want can be hard, especially at the early stage of your career. It’s often a catch-22 situation between needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience. So showing that you have a clear focus on the steps, you need to take and are regularly practicing can help to elevate your profile when applying for a new role.

Theory, practice, and getting a job. This may sound idealistic; however, it’s a framework that, when done regularly with purpose, is bound to help you go in the right direction. One thing is clear though: whether you use Uxcel or Bootcamps, YouTube or University, you’ve got to put the work in.

Don’t Cheat Yourself

Osmosis. Have you ever bought a book that is full of valuable information and somehow felt good about seeing it on your bookshelf but never actually ended up reading it? Or maybe you keep a gym membership even when you haven’t been in a while? I’m guilty, too; it’s such a natural thing to do even when we all know full well you need to put the work in!

Uxcel’s Skill Tests can only be completed once a month. At first, this felt like the antithesis of not cheating yourself; it felt lazy. But when you think about it, learning shouldn’t be a chore or something you feel bad about if you miss a day. The technique of stopping for a moment and looking back at your progress over the past month is a really useful tool that you can use.

In fact, completing these skill tests once a month helps to prevent you from cheating yourself. You cannot go back and change your answers; your ranking against the other designers on the site for that assessment will stay the same for an entire month. So you’re going to feel the encouragement to do it well and to focus and take pride in what you’re doing.

This is a concept we can apply to much of what we do. How often have you marked an article as “Read later” and never did it? I do it all the time, but it’s just a subconscious attempt at osmosis.

Improve Your Skills In Five Minutes

According to Uxcel, even just 5 minutes per day over the course of a month is enough time to see measurable improvement in anything you’re trying to learn. This might sound in direct contrast to not cheating; five minutes is hardly any time at all. But — as with any fad diet — if you try to deep dive, you may learn a lot in a short amount of time, but it will not become part of your routine, and it will not be a long-lasting habit.

• Build a habit.
  Bad habits are hard to break, and good habits are hard to make. To build a habit, we need to keep up the momentum, which means it’s better to have low expectations and minimal effort. The more we see progress on achievable goals, the more rewarding it is, and the more we can maintain the habit.
• Anyone can find five minutes in a day.
  It’s really easy to persuade ourselves against learning. Maybe it’s too expensive or too hard. By keeping the aim manageable, it becomes easy to fit around our daily lives.
• Interactivity is fun!
  If your experience of education to date has not been so great, perhaps even five minutes of concerted learning a day sounds tedious to you. But let me promise you, this is a fun way to learn! It’s so easy to get carried away completing the skill tests and reading the theory.

Building up a mechanism for knowing how to learn efficiently will always help with everything we do going forward. We can take these approaches of keeping small manageable chunks per day to achieve anything we want.

How Do I Know What I Don’t Know?

So you’ve decided to learn a new area of web design. You have set aside 5 minutes a day. You know it will require effort on your part there’s no point in cheating yourself. Now, the question is where to start?

Let’s make one thing clear. You will never be able to know everything, and you don’t need to. It’s impossible. Technologies and best practices that feel like they are the final solution quickly become old hats. Entire new disciplines crop up, sometimes seemingly out of the blue. Trends and opinions flow in and out like the tide.

There are countless ways to successfully navigate challenges in order to learn just enough about the right thing at the right time.

“

If you’re anything like me, it can feel like a ping-pong ball. One minute you can feel like an expert, and the next, as if you’ve started back at square one. Even knowing how and where to start learning it is full of choices, and not every solution is as suitable as another.

Let’s take a quick look at Smashing Magazine, for example. This is a website full to the brim of content written by all kinds of people in the industry. It’s completely free to read and browse more than a decade of articles. As I said in my introduction, we are incredibly lucky to be in a situation like this. However, browsing aimlessly through thousands of articles is a lovely thing to do, and of course, there is so much to learn. We do need some kind of structure to effectively be productive in our learning.

Uxcel structures the courses in a very clear way. Each course is clear from the title what it covers at the high level, for example, “Design Accessibility,” “UX Design Foundations” and “HTML for designers”. This helps the initial overwhelming sensation that is so common when looking for information as it feels like a small list to choose from despite each containing a large amount of information. Then when you go into the course, it’s again broken down into very easily digestible chunks such as “Common Designer Roles”, “Atomic Design by Brad Frost” and “Design Grids”.

This structure provides the best of both worlds. It gives you both the freedom to explore and the structure to be guided further.

Am I Really Making Progress?

My favorite way to learn something new has always been to apply it to a side project. This complements the courses in Uxcel very well as having little side projects you can apply the lessons learned in the courses will help to cement the knowledge, and you’re likely to see the difference when measuring your progress each month.

Unfortunately, side projects can feel like a disappointment. I start a new project thinking it’s a great idea, and I then realize how much time I’ve spent on something that no one else will ever see. It’s easy to feel disheartened by this and feel like these projects have been a waste of time. I know I’m not the only one!

To change this mindset, I’ve been going through old projects and making notes of what I learned from them. In theory, I would write an in-depth case study each time. But that hardly ever happens, So setting a goal of a few bullet points for each project is much more achievable and helps to see the benefit from the effort I’ve put in over time.

I noticed a similar approach with Uxcel. The monthly skill tests are just like my bullet points; a low-pressure way to check in with your progress without high expectations. I see there being two kinds of progress to test and measure: specific goals that you have a strong focus on, and general stuff that you learn as you go. I often had specific goals for the side projects, but even if I didn’t achieve those goals, I was still able to find benefits from looking at the things I did learn, even if I had not intended to.

Learning Through Play

Children learn everything from coordination to social skills through play. It is interesting to see a platform that specializes in self-development have a section of these games in their navigation alongside Courses, Skill Tests and Job Board. Uxcel treats games as a first-class citizens on their platform.

In fact, gamification is a key part of Uxcel across the entire platform. In the skills tests, it doesn’t tell you which answers you got wrong but it does say how you compared against everyone else. I have to admit, as a developer that has always had an informal interest in design, to be placed in the “top 10% of designers” (humble brag!) is rather motivational!

What makes these games useful? They are specifically targeted at practical skills that will benefit you as a web designer. And so it comes back to the second pillar “Test and measure your design knowledge”; having these informal games that you can play as often as you want means there’s a way for you to continuously test and measure yourself on these hyper-focussed practical tasks. It’s great to understand the theory of design, but you need to be able to put it into practice and these small games give you practice for skills that you will be using time and time again.

Another key point is that it’s fun and challenging; there’s something healthily addictive about trying to get a high score in comparing color contrasts.

Getting Hired

The third pillar is to build a professional profile and to make it easier to be hired. I considered skipping this pillar entirely — thinking it is not related to learning. I’ve come to the realization that this isn’t true. One main reason for learning is to improve your career. If I look back at things I’ve learned over time, I can see a clear correlation between the stuff I focussed on learning and the roles I later got because of it.

Uxcel understand this. While it may not be as simple as “Course + Test = Job”, the platform is organized in such a way that your profile is being updated as you go through the courses and skill tests. Without even necessarily realizing it, you’re building a picture that shows the things you are focusing your time on. You’re building your professional profile — you’re breaking out of the Catch-22 situation. Say, for example, you’ve been working in a visual design role but want to move into a UX role. You can use this profile as a way to prove that alongside your work experience, you also have a keen focus on UX.

No matter where you are in your career, the idea of using stepping stones to plan your journey is important. Seeds that can be sown, knowing where you want to get to and how you can go about it. Learning and career improvement is intrinsically related.

Learning As A Team

Taking it a step further, Uxcel provides tools for companies to use Uxcel within their teams. Many companies already use a Skill Matrix to see which areas of knowledge and experience are well covered within the team and how it’s distributed across members.

If a team of designers is using Uxcel as a learning platform, then it gives a consistent approach to managing this skill matrix as the strengths and weaknesses can be easily measured. This is not to judge employees but to assist in the development of skills across the team.

In Conclusion

Building a career will always be hard, but we’ve seen that by applying a focus on how we learn, we are able to give ourselves the best possible start. This is true for anyone with an ambition of improving their skill set, no matter how far along the journey you already are. Uxcel has a clear vision for its platform; the three pillars are being implemented in everything they do. This is something we can take forward ourselves, whether using the platform or not. The key is to make purposeful choices, have a structure to fall back on, put the effort in, and measure our progress throughout.

(il)

This article is sponsored by Storyblok

In this episode, we ask how you can affect change to UX design in large organizations stuck in their ways. Vitaly talks to Marko Dugonjić to find out.

Show Notes

• Marko on Twitter
• TypeTester

Weekly Update

• Article vs. Section : How To Choose The Right One written by Olushuyi Olutimilehin
• Testable Frontend: The Good, The Bad And The Flaky written by Noam Rosenthal
• Fluid Sizing Instead Of Multiple Media Queries? written by Ruslan Yevych
• Migration From jQuery to Next.js: A Guide written by Sam Robbins
• Rethinking Authentication UX written by Vitaly Friedman

Transcript

Vitaly Friedman: For him, everything started with a passionate love for CSS and typography in early 2000s. He used to be a front-end developer and UX designer, then moved to the role of user experience director. Working with plenty of clients, such as Deutsche Telekom, SGS, Hrvatski Telekom, Font Bureau, L, National Geographics, and so many others. He also built a tool called Typetester, which has gained quite a momentum in the 2000s and even beyond that, allowing designers and developers to test their topography in the browser.

Vitaly: Now, five years ago, he moved from Zagreb, Croatia, where he’s originally from, to Sacramento, California, where he now is working as a Director of User Experience at SymSoft Solutions. So we know he’s an expert in UX, but did you know that he has been an avid fan of Acapulco Beaver’s Handball team from Zagreb since the age of seven and remains one up until today? My Smashing friends, please welcome Marko Dugonjic. Hello, Marko. How are you doing today?

Marko: Great… I mean smashing, I guess.

Vitaly: Excellent. That’s wonderful to hear. It’s interesting because we have these conversations every now and again, talking about the meaning of life and so many other things. But one thing that really excites me, and I think it deserves a bit of attention, I have this incredible story of how you actually just fell in love with the web many, many years ago, where you used to do something very, very different. And look at you now, work on enterprise applications for a pretty fancy company. Can you tell us a bit of that backstory?

Marko: Sure. It’s a weird story in a way, but maybe it’ll give someone an idea about how to start with completely different expectations about your career in life and end up in, as you said, in California. And so my story really began when I tried to build a website for, believe it or not, my dogs, my kennel because I used to breed dogs. And at that time, my full-time job was as a fitness trainer.

Marko: So as I was working with people who would have rehabilitation needs or any type of permanent or temporary disability, I also learned about how people who don’t have the visual ability to use the web by listening to the web pages. And so one thing led to another, and I was thinking about, “I have this website for my dogs. Is this even accessible?”

Marko: And so what do you do in early 2000s? You find a web forum where real web professionals reside, and you start asking questions about how to improve the accessibility of your website. And it was really just my hobby website, and it’s almost something that I’ve built out of my front-end or front page software, Microsoft FrontPage. I don’t know if you remember that one.

Vitaly: Who doesn’t, Marko? Who doesn’t?

Marko: And I don’t know how, but I never used tables for layout, but I did. And this is probably the first time after almost 20 years that I’m saying it, “I didn’t use tables, but I did use a bunch of frames.” It was a frameset that pretty much I used to create the header and the sidebar, and the footer. So I had four frames on that page.

Marko: And of course, it didn’t validate and everything was really horrible from [inaudible 00:03:45] perspective. But I was hoping that the web design community would help me. And I started researching and learned about CSS positioning, and that was the first thing that I fixed. And then, I learned about Internet Explorer because at the time, I was using Mozilla. I don’t know what was even before Firefox. Maybe Phoenix or something like that.

Vitaly: There was Netscape Navigator, of course.

Marko: Netscape Navigator, yeah. I knew about it, but I think I onboarded with the Mozilla type of browser. But what happened is that at some point, the web forums really weren’t enough for, I guess, my obsession with making things perfect. So I started reading web standards from the W3C website, and I read the specs because I thought, “This is probably what every web professional does.” And so this is how I learned about accessibility and web standards and all the stuff.

Marko: So that was 2002, 2003. And then one thing led to another, again. I was participating in these web communities, and eventually, people from what today is called Human Design Agency from Zagreb, had a call just like this one. And they said, “Hey, would you like to be paid for what you know?” And I was like, “What are you talking about? I’m a fitness trainer.”

Marko: But they did convince me, and then I joined that incredible team. We just had so much fun back in the day. And stayed with them for a couple of years, then moved on to an in-house position, and everything else is pretty much standard. But I think that moment when I realized, “I know something that somebody’s willing to pay for,” was incredible for me. Again, at that time, it was still almost like a hobby to me. But soon enough, it became a profession.

Vitaly: Right. And then, of course, you also ended up having your own studio, which then eventually, after a couple of years, moved you to this decision of maybe it’s a time to move to or try to move to the US. How did that happen?

Marko: Well, I think what has always been following me is that I didn’t really have any general plan. I knew what I wanted to do day-to-day. I knew what I felt about projects and work and skills and all that stuff, but I didn’t really have a general plan of moving from this company to another company and then to that company. It was really about maybe selecting good projects, and good people to work with.

Marko: And so when I had my studio, we became pretty international. And you know that we also collaborated on a couple of projects in Europe. And for me, it was really for the past couple of years in Croatia; it was really just 100% international. And so one of our clients, and through a good friend, Christina Portner, who also participated in some of the Smashing activities, I think she gave a talk and had a couple of articles for you guys.

Vitaly: That’s right.

Marko: She introduced me to Savita Faruki, who owns SymSoft Solutions with her husband. And it’s a nice, small, family-run business. And looking at the projects that they had and still have, it just made sense for me to move over here, and so I accepted the offer that they extended to me after that visit. Where I really didn’t plan to get employed, but we were just discussing some of the collaboration and maybe working on some projects together, but it ended up being me becoming a director of the user experience here at SymSoft.

Vitaly: Right. That’s an interesting story, and also chose a journey that one can take from one place to a very different place. Now you’ve been all around UX for now 15 or 20 years now. I don’t even know. Who counts at this point anymore at this point? And of course, you’ve seen quite a lot of stuff happening in terms of just UX, I would say.

Vitaly: We’ve been fighting, as you could probably find thousands of articles stating that we need to have a seat at the table. And it seems like now, at this point in 2022, we have a pretty solid seat at a table. Do you think that we are in a place where we wanted to be 15 years ago? Is there still something missing? Where do you see us as a community and just as an industry, I guess, in terms of the state of UX today?

Marko: So I think the there’s a couple of things right in there. It’s an interesting and also complex topic. So I think we do have a seat at a table; however, the horizon is now different. Because as you travel, you just discover other things are behind the horizon. And so once you climb that first peak, then you reveal more peaks to climb. So I think this is where we are right now.

Marko: And a huge thing that nobody really talks about is that even IT or digital as a whole has had that problem in the past, of the seat at the table. And so we just now joined the crowd of people who might have better access to decision-making, but it’s still not at the level where we can really immediately influence any decision, especially in big companies and enterprises.

Marko: Obviously, this is where I work at. Startups and younger companies are slightly different there. But enterprises or anything massive, like big insurance companies or big telecoms or financial institutions, or the government, 90% of my clients are now the government… these organizations have been around for years and hundreds of years, even.

Marko: So old ways and things that led to the success that they have right now are not necessarily something that you have to change, but very often, you can also change them by applying correct organizational change management principles. So I would say the challenge that we have nowadays is just general organizational change management. That’s a hot topic.

Marko: And again, it’s not just the UX people. I think it’s the technologies in general or anyone who just have this new way of managing things. I would say digital marketers as well. So all of us, we have to sit at the table, but there’s just this huge job of driving and steering the organization into whatever is next, whatever is the future.

Vitaly: Right. That’s interesting. Maybe we should dive into this a little bit more in a little bit more detail. Just because, of course, we read and see and hear a lot of articles around UX, and many of them are very much focused on traditional, I would say, good all startups, digital products, and so on and so forth.

Vitaly: But at the same time, I find it quite difficult to even find case studies about enterprise UX. So maybe you could actually share those insights about if you do have this situation where you might have a seat at the table, but you actually need to change the organization. And organizations of that size are usually very reluctant to those changes, and people don’t like to change their habits quickly.

Vitaly: So what would be then your process to make it all a reality, to establish a user-centric approach in a relatively tight and conservative and maybe even quite dated, let’s say, environment?

Marko: Well yeah, sure. I wouldn’t say necessarily that the organization is resistant to change or that people are not willing to change. Just, I would say the volume or the size of the organization is really your biggest enemy because you can influence only so many people in your immediate circle in the organization. And then some organizations are lucky enough to have a big enough UX team or, more broadly digital team that would also have a bunch of developers, solution architects, business analysts, and any type of role that you can think of in IT.

Marko: So it’s just a matter of how many people you can touch within the organization with the new principles, how many people are actually in a UX type of project, user-centered service, something like that. So the change doesn’t happen in the way of infecting people. You cannot just spread the UX type of virus to people, and they’ll all get it. It requires a lot of effort. It requires a custom-tailored approach to communication.

Marko: Someone who has a desk job and is in departments that are understaffed, for that matter, they don’t necessarily have enough bandwidth or capacity. And it has nothing to do with the personal preference of the individual person, but just the organizational structure is such that you don’t have access maybe, to everyone that you would like to. And of course, it would require a lot of, a lot of time out of the regular day-to-day desk job for people to even get educated.

Marko: So I think the biggest enemy is the size of the organization. So you have to strategically pick and choose your champions within the organization. People who, whoever shows up on your open office or office hours, whatever you call it, meeting, that’s a good champion. Even if they have low maturity in UX, these are people who have the intent to change something. And so strategically picking and choosing people, and then helping them become almost like a mentor within the organization to the people around them. And maybe you’ll have that department embracing more of an interactive approach to understanding end customers.

Marko: I think this is the way to go. But again, I don’t think people should be discouraged with that because even 1% improvement in the business process or in conversions or in optimization is… Vitaly, you and I work with web performance and conversions and E-commerce and all the stuff, and 1% can be a huge improvement.

Vitaly: Of course. I’m wondering, though, just what your way of dealing with a situation is when you have people in front of you, maybe higher up the ladder in senior management, who just have a very different view on things. Who very strongly look, of course, at their data and their KPIs, at their business metrics, and try to move them.

Vitaly: And how would you then, in a case where you, again, have to work with a company that might not have a user-centric approach at all and maybe don’t think about the customer experience as much as they think about the financial benefit by the end of the year? How would you then argue in those kinds of environments about the role of UX or the importance of UX, or the importance of customer experience?

Marko: Well, I think the best way to sell something is to show them with a live example, with a practical example. And you also know that whenever we would come to an organization and say, “Hey, let’s see what’s the problem there.” And you and I worked with a major German retailer couple of years back, and they were saying, “Hey, mobile is not performing really well. Desktop is much better.” And then we realized that the average visit to a mobile E-commerce solution that they had was about 50 years or something like that.

Marko: And so once you start showing off these numbers and say, “This website is now faster,” or, “This software will shorten the time from idea to conversion,” just, I think performance is such an easy-to-use tool to convince people to invest into it, that it’s just unbelievable… Because you can measure the before and offer, and this is something that my team at SymSoft always does. We always do the baseline measurement, whether that’s the conversion rates, satisfaction, whatever, you name it, seconds to load.

Marko: And then we test and retest and retest and retest, and then you have hard facts that you can actually tie back to dollar value. And this is how you convince people that this is a good investment. And again, just starting small; almost like when you work with a new chemical that’s dangerous, on your car or whatever… they say, “Hey, try somewhere where it won’t mess anything up, like in a corner that nobody sees.” And so we can also pick a pilot project, a really small case study, prove that it works, and then scale it up to something larger.

Vitaly: Would you say that it’s important to have a buy-in at this point? Or would you say, “Just go ahead, experiment. Build a little prototype, maybe even a little bit in your spare time,” just to convince that this is working? Or do you think that commitment from management and green light and approval is critical here?

Marko: So I would say that, and again, this is my experience. I don’t necessarily think this is something that happens in every organization… But for me, whatever worked, whenever I was proactive and more on the side of, “Hey, let me do something in my spare time,” or, “Let me finish the main task earlier so that I can actually work on the fun stuff.”

Marko: Also, signaling to the management that you are proactive, that you are self-driven, that you are self-motivated, that you’re not waiting for someone to approve, that you’re not waiting to be served or approved or given the space. So I think management definitely likes people who are just thinking that way.

Marko: And so you basically have two benefits. You don’t have to ask anyone for permission; you can figure out what is the scope and what is space available for you and just decide to do it. And then, if it doesn’t work, you are not even embarrassed. Nobody needs to know. But if it works out, if it’s a nice prototype, if it’s a nice concept, you can definitely present it to the upper management.

Marko: And then again, you get double credit. You create something fun, but you also show that you care and that you are proactive and self-driven, and all these qualities that everybody ever always writes on the job posts, I guess.

Vitaly: Right. Well, you did mention scope, and of course, it’s a wonderful keyword for me because, of course, I can almost hear the voices in the back asking about how to deal with scope creep. I mean, you are working with very different organizations and, well, of really big size. And eventually, I’m sure there will be situations where late changes come in, poor specifications are in there, communication issues, delays, and all of that.

Vitaly: So what would be your way to prevent things like this from happening, where you’re missing deadlines because of the scope creep or poor estimates? What’s your process in there to make sure that we don’t get in trouble for delays and maybe underestimating the effort needed?

Marko: That’s really a great topic. I think there are two things in there. So definitely, if we underestimate, it’s completely on us, and there’s no… That’s very clear. It’s on us. We should have had our due diligence before the discovery stage of the project when we were estimating. But these things happen, I guess, in the beginning for everyone, until you have enough experience to move from a one-page contract into a 50-page contract.

Marko: And my friend, Eva Lucas from NetGAN, from Croatia, he said once to me, “Hey, we started with one page for a contract. Now we have 70 pages,” or something like that. So as you are more experienced, you just put more things in the contract and you, I guess, put more things into researching and estimating, and you probably track your hours, and you know how much time for each feature is required. So as you grow more mature in the field, there’s less surprising when it comes to estimates.

Marko: Now, the second topic, which is the scope creep, usually in enterprise organizations, they already have this type of… they mitigate that with, again, other contractual clauses. Maybe something that you can communicate early on is the unanticipated effort budget. So that might be 10 or 20% of the budgets that’s allocated to the project, that we don’t have to spend, but this is our contingency plan.

Marko: And then another thing that’s very, very useful, and this is what my director of project management always enforces, is regular meetings. Every week, we have at least weekly meetings. If not, daily stand-ups with the project management on the client side. And we have a really detailed status report that we carry over week after week after week. And we update it, and share it with everyone.

Marko: And we are not really afraid to raise any old risks. So whenever we see that there’s a delay in reviewing and providing feedback, we will put it out in the status report, change the green light to yellow light, and just say to everyone, “Hey, we think that this is something that can get out of control.”

Vitaly: Yeah. So that’s a very interesting point for me as well because I was working with a company where this turned out to be quite a helper. So really having a more clear overview, I guess, of what our expectations are, what the process is going to be, when we expect some feedback and what kind of feedback we expect as well. And one thing that was really critical and useful at this point was to actually explain to clients that late changes are expensive.

Vitaly: Late changes are difficult to implement, and they are expensive because if you’re coming from a very different industry and you’re expecting a product to be delivered, you might not know just how expensive, how difficult it is to actually make those changes later on because you don’t have this technical knowledge necessary. So explaining this early on, having this clear communication channel is indeed, I think, quite useful in many ways actually.

Vitaly: From my end, I think, and one thing I actually definitely wanted to cover today is, because this is something that comes up quite a bit and most recently is… you’ve been, again, in this industry for quite some time and you had your own head where you had your own agency, and now you are working for a company. What do you think, especially for people who might have just a few years of experience in UX… looking back, what do you think would be the right way to just guarantee personal growth in the company? Negotiate salary, get more ownership, all those things.

Vitaly: How would you say, what would you recommend maybe to people listening to this today, if they want to maybe improve their salary, maybe grow over time, maybe take more leadership position? What skills would be required, and what would be the right strategy to get where you want to be?

Marko: That’s a great question. And so maybe from a manager position now, I can talk about people that I had in my teams, and what qualifies a successful UX designer or professional in general is, it’s always, I guess people who are able to manage-up are more successful. Managing-up meaning that understanding that your supervisor or whoever you report to also has their life and their problems and their different, different tasks. And just understanding your overall environment, it’s leading peer-to-peer.

Marko: So the understanding is that if you’re in UX, there’s another person at the same level in your organization in frontend or backend or marketing or project management. So just being aware of who’s above, below, on the side from you and just understanding that these are also people. And then, what can you do to really move everyone, together, forward? And so this is, I guess, the attitude, being proactive, something that we talked about a few minutes ago.

Marko: Just not asking for permission because it’s not true that you need weeks and weeks to create a concept. Maybe you can just catch something and say, “Hey…” You wake up one morning, and you don’t necessarily have to open up your company laptop or anything like that. But just put it on a Post-it, and when it’s office time, you just can say, “Hey, I have this idea. Let’s do this.”

Marko: And that really cost you nothing, I mean, you had that idea anyway. But you’re building up your muscle of generating and communicating, and suggesting. And of course, it goes without saying, if you hear crickets every time you have an idea in your company, you should just change the company. But if you have a good environment and receipting environment where you can voice your ideas, that’s a great place to be.

Marko: And so what happened is that, once you build up your credit and you look like someone who cares, not necessarily about the company… and I don’t want to fool myself thinking that people want to stay here forever, but caring about the quality of work, caring about your teammates, caring about leaving some kind of impact after you leave. And there’s another topic that we can also talk about. What do you do when you decide to leave the company? So are you that type of person who thinks about these moments?

Marko: And so once you have that, then salary negotiations are just straightforward because you opened up the communications channels, and then you can just come and sit and say, “Hey, what about the raise?” And then we can talk about that. But if your communication is completely blocked and you’re just doing whatever you’re told, and you’re checking out the tickets, then that conversation about the salary is just difficult because you didn’t really create an environment where you have this dialogue anyway, in the first place.

Marko: So I think practicing talking to your boss, good times or bad times, and just not necessarily sharing everything that’s happening in your life, but just having this more proactive, I guess, communication. When nothing’s really happening, you can just drop by and say, “Hey, this is what I’m working on. It’s nothing special, but here it is.” And then maybe having this regular cadence.

Marko: And if you don’t have one-on-ones, and by the way, which is something that you should have with your boss… because that cadence in one-on-ones really allows you the space at some point to say, “Hey, I would like to work on something else.” Or “I would like to have a better impact.” Or, “I would like to have a better salary.” Or, “Hey, I’m actually looking for a new job. Can you support me while I’m looking for something else?” Just being fair, I guess, to the people that you’re working with. So that would be my advice about negotiating salary and these types of things.

Vitaly: Yeah. I think that many people are struggling with finding themselves in companies where there is just no culture for this kind of feedback. I mean, in some good companies, you will likely have maybe 360-degree feedback or 360-view feedback, whatever it is called, where you get feedback from everyone. And then you would have a dedicated time to bring up any issues with your manager once every three months, four months, two months, six months, I don’t know…

Vitaly: But this is probably an important part to have or an important asset, I guess, to have at least. I think that many people just are afraid maybe a little bit to ask these questions, to bring this up, because I think that it might create a wrong attitude around them and that they’re there in the company for the money alone. But I mean, looking at inflation rates happening right now around the world, it’s probably important to have that conversation later or earlier. Right?

Marko: Yeah, definitely.

Vitaly: So maybe also building up on top of that, there’re quite a few conversations happening in Europe, at least around salaries. And of course, everybody’s looking at salaries in San Francisco thinking about, “Wow! Those salaries. This is incredible compared to the pay you get in Europe. Even if you’re living in London or in Berlin, it’s just much, much, much higher in San Francisco.”

Vitaly: You happen to be in Sacramento, in California, and you happen to have moved from Croatia to the US, and shared the story about how you did that. So now being there, can you tell us maybe a little bit more about how different everything is for you? So do you feel like the culture, the way companies are run, the way people are working together that it’s influenced you in some way, surprised you in some way, disappointed you in some way? What was your experience overall in these five years?

Marko: That’s a good question. I think looking back, what really was new for me is how people over here are really focused. Organizations, not necessarily individuals, really focus on processes and repeatability of the process. So if you have certain steps, we can talk about the process… In design, we have double-diamond or triple-I or 5-Ds, or design sprint or design thinking.

Marko: And the reason for all of that, which is not very common in Europe… In Europe, we have a problem and solution. These are two steps that we have in Europe or have had in Europe. But here, it has to be detailed a little more with applicable tools and a decision-making diagram. So this is different over here. When it comes to San Francisco or Sacramento, I think in Sacramento, what happens is that we have a government here, so I’m not in a position to compare our environment in the projects to maybe the Bay Area, where there’s a lot of just private companies and startups.

Marko: And there’s a start difference even here. A two-hour drive from San Francisco. So I would even think, and this is completely my personal opinion, that Sacramento is closer just to the rest of the US than to San Francisco, compared to Europe. But another thing that’s really different here is that the whole communication piece is just much more intentional because a lot of people are landing in California specifically from all over the world, and then you have a mix of cultures. And this is something that I definitely didn’t think about when I was working in Europe, however internationally, but still, Europe, which is super tiny, by the way, as a piece of land.

Marko: And then we didn’t have so many differences in the sense of just different cultural backgrounds, different educational backgrounds, how people have just different school systems in the first place. And so all of these people come over here, they’re talented, they have certain talents; otherwise, they couldn’t make it here. But then you have these different communication styles, and you have cultures that are just very generally speaking…

Marko: Far Eastern countries have high context conversations. And then you go more to the west; you have low context, which means that you have to always reiterate what the last conversation was. While in some cultures, it’s implied. Everybody knows what we were talking about in the last meeting. So just these types of, I guess, communications skills that we develop now are really… that was really eye-opening.

Marko: I think especially Croatia for that matter, compared to California, is super monocultural. It’s just unbelievable… That contrast is just super visible for me now, mowing from one to another.

Vitaly: Right. So having moved to the US now, do you feel like at any point you could consider moving back?

Marko: I think so, yeah. That’s not off the table. I think what we like here, my family and me, and this was really a more collective move, not just necessarily for projects or work, is the access to nature here is just incredible. The way you can consume nature in California specifically is just unbelievable. It’s just geared towards families. And over here, everybody’s outside all the time, which is our family style anyway. So these are some of the fun things over here.

Marko: The good thing about Europe is that everything is very close. The furthest away is, I don’t know, Spain from Croatia, which is a two to three-hour airplane flight. And, of course, I can fly to LA to visit Disney Land or something like that, but it’s a drag to even think about the distances over here. So these are some of the differences that we notice. But again, I wouldn’t say it’s different or better; it’s just, I guess, down to every person’s personal preferences.

Vitaly: Right. Okay. Well, now, if you actually could recommend something to yourself when you were breeding dogs back, what? 20, 25-ish, 22 years ago, when you were just starting out with UX and all of that, well frontend and all that… what would you recommend to yourself?

Marko: I guess I would enjoy it more. I would joy the ride more. I was lucky enough to meet really, really great people along the way. I mean, such as yourself included.

Vitaly: Oh, that’s very kind of you.

Marko: Yeah. But also coworkers and other speakers and just professionals. I think at certain points; I could have enjoyed it more, I guess. Just being more relaxed and having more faith in the future that things will work out the way they actually eventually did. So I guess, just more patience.

Vitaly: Okay. That sounds good. So we’ve been learning about UX in this episode of Smashing Podcast. So what have you been learning about lately, Marko? Any podcasts, books, TV shows, anything that drew your attention?

Marko: Well yeah, that’s a good point. And you know me, I’m all over the place. Right? So I think lately-

Vitaly: You surely are, Marko. You definitely are.

Marko: … lately, I’m really into mental health and just on all levels. So personal level, family level, organizational level. Just thinking about all the consequences of COVID, and just remote versus in-person. This is something that I’m really thinking about, not necessarily as something that we have to deal with right now, but what will be the outcomes in the years to come? So just getting ready for that, I guess.

Vitaly: All right. Well, I’m very much excited to actually meet you in person after all these years. In four days, we’re going to meet in San Francisco for SmashingConf San Francisco. This is going to be very exciting. Quality time, family quality time, isn’t it?

Marko: Yeah. It’s going to be smashing.

Vitaly: That’s kind. If you, dear listener, would like to hear more from Marko, you can find him on Twitter, where he’s @Markodugonjic. And you can also check on Typetester, which is still kicking and still around, on typetester.org. Well, thanks so much for joining us today, Marko. Do you have any parting words of wisdom that will be staying with people listening to this, I don’t know, decades from now?

Marko: No. Yeah. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. And I think the best advice that I can have is to keep reading Smashing Magazine.

Further Reading

• Lessons Learned After Selling My Startup
• An Ode To Side Project Time
• Why You Should Speak At Events As An Early-Career Professional
• If I Was Starting My Career Today: Thoughts After 15 Years Spent In UX Design (Part 1)

(il, mrn)

Design is one of those disciplines that has a very low barrier to entry, and this is amazing! What isn’t so easy is acquiring the softer skills that you’ll need when entering this job market.

Working on designs is just so much fun! But to become better designers, it’s also crucial to understand what makes a great team member and how to present your work to colleagues. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to a mentor, guide, or whatever word you’d like to use to describe advice from a more senior person in the design industry, which is why we often have to rely on “working it out” by ourselves.

This may be intimidating at first, but I firmly believe that if we take a step back from the pixels on the screen and reflect on who we want to be and what our core principles are, we can walk into these design critique meetings with more confidence and really deliver the best possible representation of our ideas.

“Yes, I’d Love To Present My Work At The Next Meeting!”

“Yes, I’d love to present my work at the next meeting!” This has probably been you at some point during the past few months. Your boss has praised your design work, and you’ve been asked to share your design with the wider team. The thing is, you’re really not sure if you even like your work. You can see the inconsistent padding between the labels and the icons, the misalignment of the chevron, the lack of canvas organization, a glaring omission of meaningful layer names, and more.

Unfortunately, we’re raised in a world where seniority demands respect regardless of whether that is justified, and we need to be seen to grow within an organization. This means that we need to be able to present for the job we want in most cases, which is a fair ask for progression and, ultimately, also… money.

You know what? What you’re experiencing is within us all. The unfortunate side effect of being a creative is that you will never be satisfied with what you’ve produced and you’re not alone.

“It’s not uncommon for me to love the direction a design is going at the start of a project, but by the time it’s complete, I’m cringing and wishing I’d done so many little things better. And it’s not just imposter syndrome, it’s also that you have a gap between your vision and your skills. You can picture something in your mind — or you see inspiration elsewhere that you know you can match — but when it comes down to executing that vision, your skills and experience fall short of what you were aiming for.”

— Benek Lisefski, “Why Good Designers Can Never Do Their Best Work”

“I’ve been designing for almost two decades, and I can tell you that I feel like a total amateur at least once a day.”

— Daryl Ginn

Unless, like I have tried to force myself to do, you’ve resigned to the fact that 80% done is more often than not good enough to convince those at the table you’ve been desperate to sit at that we can produce good work and, ultimately, sell our product.

Presenting your work is fundamental to career growth, at least on every career ladder I’ve seen. This means we need to either become excellent actors or learn some coping mechanisms to handle that pressure. Weirdly enough, presenting work to your team should — and is often — the least pressured environment we will find ourselves in at work. Still, because we know each other and are unfortunately in competition with one another, it can feel like the most daunting task of them all.

This is where I can try to offer some help! Over the past many years, I’ve landed on a formula that works for me, and I’m happy to share what I have learned. Creating your own goals, rituals, and methods will help you succeed, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to start.

The Experience Paradox

You may be looking at your more experienced colleagues in awe, wondering how they present so well and seemingly without a bead of sweat. The funny thing, though, is that as your experience level increases, so does your self-doubt.

This oxymoron keeps us all sprinting along in blind panic, not stopping for air, burning out, and wondering what went wrong. But as Car Seat Headrest’s lead singer Will Toledo sings, “It doesn’t have to be like this”.

A second side effect of being a creative is that we get kicks out of focusing on the wrongs in the world, rather than appreciating what we have or what’s going well. This means that as we progress, become more successful, earn more money, buy that new iPhone, or spend $500 on some digital art, we will always fall into a slump at the first sniff of negative feedback. It’s in this slump that we are the most vulnerable, and here is where we need to rely on our personal values to keep our chins up and our spirits high.

Personal Principles

This is where I should probably coin a catchy marketing phrase like “The 5 P’s of Personal Principles,” but this isn’t the movie Dodgeball or an overpriced email course that you paid for (but could’ve Googled for free). So, let’s just pretend it has a catchy hook.

Principles also have a bit of a woo-woo reputation thanks to the boom in personal reflection over the past few years. But essentially, it’s about knowing yourself and understanding what you’re in control of and what you’re not. Control is a strong word and probably elicits some negative feelings, but it basically means “what we have within our reach.”

Knowing what you can and cannot control is incredibly important. Once you’ve grasped this, you will understand where you can win, and — you’ve guessed it — where you cannot. Knowing where you can win will present you with an endless amount of marginal gains that, once properly planned for, may turn you into a superstar. (Of course, there’s no such thing as a “superstar designer” or a “front-end ninja.” Although you’d be surprised at the number of hits if you Google one of these terms!)

What Are “Principles”?

If you’re like me, your mind probably went straight to something spiritual or religious when reading the word “principles,” but I promise you it’s not that.

Believing in yourself is more powerful than you think, and if you can stay humble whilst knowing your worth, you will become the best kind of colleague.

“

I’m not encouraging you to write down a list of commandments or commit to an “every day I will do this or that” type of routine here because we all know forced routine often fails.

What I would like you to do is start considering whether there is anything you find yourself repeating. Do you have a “motto” or a phrase that resonates with you particularly well? I have a few:

• Always be two steps ahead.
  I try to work extra hard at being one further step in front so that when I fail, I’m still in the pole position. This also encourages me to anticipate scenarios and tension to prepare my responses in advance and build solutions to address them. In Shane Parrish’s “Decision by Design” course, he teaches us to “make our best decisions in advance,” and I strongly agree with this philosophy.
• Expectations lead to disappointment.
  If we constantly set either ourselves, our peers, or our colleagues to out-of-reach expectations, we will more often than not feel let down. It’s easy for our minds to get away with themselves, and the best way to avoid this is to accept that we can’t bank on people doing what we think they will. The easiest way to address this is to be comfortable with knowing that people are human, will make good and bad decisions, and that it’s not something we are in control of. Removing that tension will help us to be more relaxed and in command of our own results.

I’m also not encouraging you to read more books. Take one look around where you live and count how many books you’ve bought over the years and still didn’t read. I’m going to bet there are at least five or ten unread books there, or probably more. This isn’t about reading what someone else thinks you should be but relying on what you believe to be true. No one can write or describe how you want your outlook to be, so let’s leave the books aside for a moment. (Note: The irony of this message arriving via an article is not beyond me.)

Much like reading someone else’s opinion on how to live your life, I’m also not telling you to steal or borrow principles from somewhere else. I can’t tell you how to think, but I can help get you into a frame of mind to encourage that discovery.

So, let’s do it.

Thinking Through Your Principles

What would it be if you were to boil down what you love the most about your current work into one short statement? This is hard for some people because there are moments when it can feel like nothing is enjoyable about work — which is kind of the point! Maybe it’s about the moments when you are not working that you enjoy the most, and this could form a statement, too.

Let’s make it harder. Try and trim that down into a tweet-sized amount.

Harder again, remove all of the descriptive words and see if you can get it under ten words.

Got there? If yes, well done, you have a principle or at least the beginning of one. You might need to shape and mold it into something catchy that you can remember. Important! This isn’t a principle that needs to be “sold” to others — it’s something you’d be comfortable repeating often. So, if it’s something like “I love it when I’m the best in the room,” no, this won’t work. Let’s think about how this can be shaped into something a little more comfortable, meaningful, and practical. Perhaps it’s “I love educating others”? This flips the point on its head and allows you to focus on the part you find enjoyable from an outwardly perspective, rather than being insular.

If you haven’t found your principle yet, here are some other questions you can ask yourself:

• When do I feel most comfortable at work?
• When do I feel least comfortable?
• When was the last time I received praise, and what was it for?
• Do I know where I’d like to be in six months from now? A year? Two years?
  • If the answer is “No, I don’t know,” this could help you spot a gap and a growth opportunity.
• How would someone else describe you?
  • Pick out the keywords and try to expand them into a phrase.
• What makes you distinctly unique?
  • Again, if the instinct here is to be negative, let’s try and flip that on its head.
• What is my working style?
  • Am I most happy in the morning or in the evening? When do I produce my best work?
• How do I prefer to communicate?
  • In person, via messages, email, or social media?

Jot down these answers onto a piece of paper if it helps. Or maybe in a new note on your phone if that’s how you prefer to take notes. (Again, the way you write down things is also something to be aware of).

Did that work for you?

Working With The Team

If this is something you’d prefer to do visually, I’ve shared a resource in the Figma community with some prompts to hopefully get you into “the zone.” This is something you can do yourself, or better yet, as a team. Finding these things out together actually offers an opportunity to spot each other’s strengths and weaknesses, encouraging a more open communication style and collaborative atmosphere as a unit.

When running this exercise with your team, you should hopefully find each other’s working styles and spot points where you can improve efficiency together. This encourages ownership by those that want it, domain expertise by those that specialize, and an acknowledgment of difference (this is the most important one!).

Now What?

You’ve read quite a few words so far, and you’re maybe wondering what to do with them from the practical side of things. Hopefully, by now, you’ve spotted a few potential principles to align with, so the moment has come when you should try to put them to work!

Remember the imposter syndrome scenario, where you have to present your work to the team, and you are, simply put, frightened? Let’s think about the principles that we defined earlier.

• Taking the example “I love educating others” from above, you can quickly see how the tension can be relieved. This is what you love doing! Even though “presenting” isn’t at the top of your list, the ability to talk through why you’ve made certain decisions, the research you did to get there, and what others can learn from your work, are all enabling you to become that educator that you love so much to see helping others.
• If your principle is that you work best in the morning, maybe you should encourage the critique/presentation session when you’re at the top of your game at 10 am? You can see how once you settle on something to guide you, your stress can definitely be managed more effectively.
• Let’s say you really don’t enjoy the presentation side of your job because you find it hard to concentrate or remember everything you want to share. So, maybe the principle can become “Take notes about everything!” And you can litter your desk (or room) with notes about what it is you want to cover throughout. Or, even better, you can provide everyone at the meeting with a handout explaining the core concepts you want to discuss; the presentation will practically explain itself at this point.

I’ve written about this before, and here are the most important things to keep in mind when presenting projects internally to stakeholders:

• Agenda! Create and share in advance a concise (important!) agenda way ahead of the time of the meeting.
• Prepare your guests. Depending on how far out you schedule the meeting, make sure to nudge people before it to remind them of what’s coming up and whether you require anything from them.
• Frame it. Whether you have the luxury of presenting to your immediate team or the potential pain of external stakeholders, context is everything so work on your short list of actionable points.
• Work backwards. If you’re presenting something completely new and for the first time, let’s not start from the ground up. Show the finished design first, then go through your early scoping and decision-making.

I find that we become stressed most when we are trying to become someone we think other people want and expect (remember my point about expectations?). By trying to understand who it is that we are as individuals and not trying to double-think untrue expectations set by others, it provides us with a platform to shine.

Conclusion

We did it! We went through the first pass at crafting personal principles that should (or so I hope) leave you feeling stronger and more confident in yourself as you think about progressing as a designer in the industry.

The core messages that I want you to take away here are, first, that you are great at what you do, second, that sometimes we have to take control of our own paths, grabbing opportunities when they arise, and third, that you probably had no idea that you were that confident about your own methodologies before reading this article. I promised that I wouldn’t try to trick you!

I’d love to hear what principles you did manage to create during this process. You know where to find me — either leave a comment here or message me on Twitter.

Other Resources

• “Why Good Designers Can Never Do Their Best Work,” Benek Lisefski
• “How to Make Smart Decisions Without Getting Lucky,” a course by Shane Parrish (The course is about learning how to make effective decisions, with principles which are both practical and time-tested. Recommended!)
• “How to run a successful design meeting — four tips,” Luis Ouriach
• “Team trading cards – FigJam template,” a Figma Design template (by Luis Ouriach)

Further Reading

• Web Components Vs. Framework Components: What’s The Difference?
• An Ode To Side Project Time
• How To Build A Business Case To Promote Accessibility In Your B2B Products
• The Scent Of UX: The Unrealized Potential Of Olfactory Design

(mb, yk, il, mrn)