Gaining Experience as a Junior Product Designer
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What do you show in your portfolio if you have zero experience? Is there some magical place where you can get your hands dirty? What do you do if you are unemployed and the first project you did during the bootcamp or at the university is not enough?
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How about a redesign?
Professional experience is, of course, the most valuable to recruiters and design leads, but breaking into the field is more complicated than it used to be. However, there are a number of options for gaining experience outside and getting ready to conquer the job market.
But before we explore these options, let’s quickly look at what many inexperienced designers do when they try to extend their portfolio. And that would be something you undoubtedly shouldn’t be doing: the redesigns of products and apps used by everybody. Another redesign of Facebook, Apple Music, Spotify, or Nike Run Club. Why should you not follow this path?
Because you use Facebook or Spotify daily, you think you know how to improve it. I’m sorry to break your heart. You are wrong. As you weren’t part of the product team, you don’t know why certain design decisions were made. There’s no data available to tell if something could be done better. You don’t know how the users of these apps behave and what features they use the most. You have no idea what their pain points are and what’s not working for them. It's just your opinion that something could be improved. If you really want to call yourself a UX or product designer, it would be best not to base your decisions on assumptions. Use facts and keep your users in mind when designing.
For the reason that there is no collaboration with engineers or product people, such a redesign is just a visual craft exercise. Nothing more. Don’t forget that our work is beyond pixels, so, as discussed in Chapter 4, showing just a bunch of nice-looking images in your case study might not be the best idea. Recruiters and design leads want to know how you tackle complex design problems and your decision-making process.
There’s no way to validate if such a redesign would positively impact the product–we can be 99% confident it wouldn’t because people hate change. Usually, those redesigns are pretty radical, completely changing the user interface. They are revolutions rather than evolutions, which is almost always a bad strategy for an existing product. Small, iterative changes rolled out smartly will likely have a positive impact on the product rather than a complete overhaul.
Volunteering, freelancing, and hackathons
Instead of doing pointless redesigns of infamous apps, you can reach out to an NGO operating in your local area or country. A considerable number of those organizations are still a bit tech-savvy and would appreciate some help from someone who can reduce complexities with good design, make the user interface look friendly and easy to use, and finally contribute to fulfilling the organization’s goals and mission. Find an NGO–the more their mission resonates with your beliefs, the better, as you’ll have to volunteer your time. Try to learn about their current struggles and pain points. If this would help, build a better website for them. The one that will enable people to find this organization and encourage them to contribute.
Another way of gaining experience outside of work is through freelancing. But not the full-time all the way freelance. Simply look for small local businesses that might benefit from your expertise. Similarly to NGOs, some local firms are not online yet (or their presence is poor) and would grow substantially if they were. Help them build useful websites that improve conversion and bring them some money. You’ll learn much about the business by observing how your design decisions influence the company’s health metrics.
The third option is hackathons. Hackathons are quite different from the two ideas we previously covered, because they are rather short in time. Some would say that you can’t do anything meaningful in 48 hours and include it in your portfolio. However, sometimes the projects that ignited during hackathons are developed further when the party is over (look Twitter, Zapier, or Carousell).
Volunteer now!
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