5 Practical Hints: Experience Design Job Hunting Journey of a Junior
Let’s put it straight- your very first job hunting process will not last forever. Sometime soon you will get a job as an experience designer or researcher depending on your aspirations. I was in your shoes a couple of months back looking for an experience designer or researcher role abroad. Upon completing my masters in TU Delft’s Design for Interaction, I headed to Berlin by truly following my heart and applied to more than 120 positions with titles Product Designer, UX Designer, UX/UI Designer and UX Researcher. As you might imagine, I received dozens of rejection emails, similar amount of ghosted applications and 12 interviews some of which went till the final stage but couldn’t be concluded with an offer. At the end, with the pandemic, I returned to Istanbul and kept looking for a job that would save my soul from rejections and ambiguities. In this article, I share my learnings to inspire newly graduated designers/researchers who are actively looking for a job. I do this as a person, who got mentally tired for 9 months of job hunting and as a product designer, who does user research, experience and interface design now in Turkey’s leading service marketplace- armut.com
1. Keep it together with your community
Your community is the people that you did projects with, grabbed a beer after submissions or simply the ones who were around working hard like you did and probably had/having a similar experience of what you are going through now. Talking to them on a regular basis will enable you to exchange knowledge and simply share experiences. Especially if you find someone who is as excited and curious as you are [waving to my friends Ece Çelik, Selman Yücetürk and Anniek Moll now], job hunting may become even fun. Chatting about a case that you’re working on, asking for feedback or simply talking about concepts that trigger you as a designer would open multiple different nodes of your brain. So don’t hesitate to talk about your questions, designer or researcher dreams, and exchange opinions.
2. Read, watch, experiment and communicate
The act of applying is not enough on its own, we need to grow our designer self in some ways. I tried this four-stepped growing which helped me to know why I am doing what I am doing. An example: (1) You are reading an article about measuring success of your design iteration, after that (2) watching a video from NN/g about how design is operationalized in an organization, then (3) write an imaginary case for yourself. It would make sense if the context you create is from an industry/product that you’re willing to apply to [or even already applied to]. Then come up with questions, user scenarios, anything that serve you to approach your imaginary case. (4) Communicate your design/research result in whatever form you want -obviously no restrictions about final outcome here unless you put one; it may be a research procedure, a research approach that sets ux measures aligned with product KPIs- and bring it out to the world. While doing this quatro-steps back in the days, I had thoughts like “This is for nothing”, “I am just wasting my time, this is not even real”. Well turns out that the trick is- our ideas are as real as we picture and tangibilize them.
3. Job titles shouldn’t scare you, most probably you will define what you are capable of doing
Designer job titles vary depending on the organization’s structure that you’re applying to. Some sub-issues I observed are how collaborative and interdisciplinary development processes are, how research and design fit in these processes and resource allocation which eventually relate to ux-maturity of an organization. You can sense this by looking at how many interface or experience designers, researchers, writers [list may go on] an organization currently has. Putting this reality aside, what an organization cares about are the ways in which you will feed them that also correspond with the generic requirements defined in the job post. Some questions to further elaborate my point: What are some capabilities of yours which would contribute to that organization in a novel way? How your design/research cause may link with that organization? How do you imagine the design/research vision that particular organization needs to have and how can you help them go there?
4. Think aloud and use your walls while working
Say you are thinking through an article you read about Figma’s last updates, or preparing for an interview and going through some imaginary cases. Naturally what you have is some hypothetical methods/ways of structuring content, or a try-out design with the new Figma feature. Thinking aloud about your process would help you to make clear connections between your points and identify poorly structured ideas so that you can revise. Another thing that I did was to document both my job hunting process and content I generated for the interviews [imaginary cases, redesigns, research methods…] on my living room’s walls. This helped me to remember what I’ve been researching, designing and how the thinking process behind connects with each other.
5. See this process as your first design/research project
Alright- think of your job hunting process as your first design/research project; some sort of an Inception. You have a problem/opportunity in your hand [you are looking for a job which is not easy and you want to find your way out] so you need to design a process for this job hunt. What are your users’ [yes, it’s you] aspirations, desires or what are their pain-points, concerns? Which motivators you need to use to flip these pain-points into opportunities? How would you approach designing a job search process for this persona? Trying to answer these questions may be a different way of looking at your own experience.
These are some hints/inspirations that I figured out along the way which may support you in your own process. I am pretty sure there are many more waiting to be explored by you.
Cheers ✌🏽
