I am truly lucky. I discovered my life’s passion at the age of 14 when I first created my Quake clans’ website in Flash. Damn it was good. There was a huge animated gate opening for 20 seconds before it even loaded. Well, we might call it a bit of the UX perfection nowadays but some of you surely felt the same satisfaction creating their first projects. I went “professional” just a couple months later when I got my first assignment — a website for some standup performers. I made it all from modeling clay making my home one very sticky studio and putting my parent’s patience to a severe test. They failed, but nevermind. It was worth it. Boy, I had shivers up my spine during the launch. Here you can see a part of it:
What came after was a 15-year long fantastic and inspiring journey of UI design, animation, coding, web, and mobile development. During this trip I found myself working for the best agencies as a designer, leading design and development teams, consulting UX for Fortune 500 companies, working closely with Adobe, Microsoft, Google and bringing their tools to the market. Constantly learning, curious and always feeling like playing with modeling clay rather than working.
In the early days, I learned from kind people on the Internet. There was no YouTube and you had to literally ask for everything on forums. During that time you could see Jeff Bezos asking for an advice on an affiliate programme for his startup. It felt so natural to give back to the community that made me. I started recording my work as tutorials and shared them with others. Soon I realized that it’s so satisfying and fun and since then I split the time in half — designing and teaching design. I taught hundreds of UX/UI classes, gave around the same amount of lectures at universities and speeches at the industry events. The company I started in my early twenties is now the biggest local training provider for creatives with over 100.000 clients, training facility, studios and more.
The status of UI/UX education
A year ago I read The UX of Learning UX is Broken and I felt: ok, I’m getting the feeling too. Honestly, I don’t think that people attending one-week UX course are confident that they will be job ready afterward. But I understand why there’s a demand for such courses. Sometimes all we need is a quick heads up plus inspiration — we’re smart enough to learn and research on your own later. The problem is that this is just not the most effective way to learn UX, not to mention it’s way too expensive. I’ve taught classes with over 3000 students and here’s what I think:
It’s not perfection in creating personas, performing user labs or eye-tracking studies that makes you great in this field. It’s impossible to be a good UI/UX Designer without practice and experience in the industry you’re in.
Yet the industry experience is sometimes even not expected. You are welcome to learn along with the help of your teammates. There is something you can learn and it will give you an advantage — tools, and processes for modern UI design. Actually, tool proficiency makes a real advantage for both aspiring and advanced designer. This is true that knowing Sketch or Photoshop doesn’t itself make a designer, but NOT knowing the tools disqualifies you for start. Here is the ultimate secret — putting this knowledge on the recruiter’s table with a great presentation of one well-thought design work that you can explain in detail NAILS IT. Sounds simple yet I’ve recruited dozens of designers and very, very few did it. And when they did they gained an advantage over more experienced colleagues who thought their past record and random dribbble shots are enough. They are not. You might not have a striking portfolio nor 5-year expertise, but when you prove the design taste combined with well-prepared presentation and enthusiasm — you are so hired. This is simply because the landscape changes fast and industry specifics are still to be learned — so if you are eager to adapt and show the positive attitude, that is all it takes. Knowing the tools means you can adapt faster and bring fresh workflows to the team. It is a great advantage.
There is a beauty to the process and time to save
I firmly believe in the result. But I care about the process as well. Most experts say you don’t buy a drill but holes. And the software you use doesn’t matter until you deliver a great product. Well, this is just not true for me. Tools matters. The process has the beauty to it. And it’s our day-to-day existence, so why not enjoy the tools and smile each time we discover a new tip or time-saving technique? The professional racing driver obviously cares whether he drives an ordinary racing car or a Ferrari.
Mastering the tools will also save you plenty of time. I’ve heard it many times: “It can even be done in Photoshop CS2”. Sure it can, maybe even in Excel, but it will take forever and a day.
Mastering the Tools
Good news is, tools can be easily learned over the internet. Also, this might be the most effective way to acquire those skills. I know it from experience — one-hour video tutorial transforms to one-day training on site. Meaning, a week-long dive into video courses replaces 12-week on-site training. Knowing this, I’ve been once asked to reference some great UI learning resources for one of the English-speaking group of my students. Here is the list of assumptions of what makes a perfect video course:
- Straight to the point, without any useless talk (aka “please, just say it!”)
- Without the basics, you can easily figure out yourself
- Easy to catch up, but still with quick narration (you can always rewind)
- Based on a real-world example
- Often updated, made with cutting-edge tools
I scanned the web inside out and found out that there is little I can recommend — most courses are not in any way connected to each other, contain much useless information as well as focus only on the basics. The example of great resource I found was Pablo Stanley’s tutorials, which are amazing — fun, easy going, informative. But the second impression is they’re basic and not really linked together, which is, in my opinion, the essence of understanding how and when to use each one of the tools. Still, I recommend them very much. And Pablo if you’re going to charge $5 for Design Digest — I’m second on the list (a friend of mine — Wojciech Dobry, claimed the first spot). Or you can find great general resources for UX such as designbetter.co or User Experience path on Springboard. There are also places that you need to visit often to stay on track, such as uxmag or uxmatters. Anyway, I felt that with my experience I can make this approach a little bit different. And this assumption lead to the most difficult, yet most rewarding work I have ever undertaken…
Follow your dreams
Last year I challenged myself to create a library of video courses that are the essence of both my design and technical skills as well as teaching experience. I appeared simple at first but yet proved to be the hardest task up to date. It took me almost a year of extensive research, planning and preparing, including months of recording which proved to be really complex. I got obsessed to keep everything short, concise and to the point. To cut it short I went into a lot of doubles. Not being a native English speaker made it even harder. I started to have mixed feelings. And then, I had my son, Johny born. From that time I knew it will work out. It is so amazing how much joy, power, and inspiration such a thing brings to life — I’m sure that every mum and dad quite gets that. I feel it happened in just the perfect time for me. Now I know that if you put all your strength, care and effort you will succeed no matter what.
I believe that single most fascinating thing about human is imagination. It makes us who we are and it’s the core of all design, industry, architecture work that we do. Inspiring in any way is nothing else than building up other peoples’ imagination. I so much enjoy listening to the stories of people with the passion of any kind simply because of this. I truly hope the courses I created will charge your imagination and let you do things you love and maybe those you now haven’t even imagined. There is such a great demand for professional UX/UI designers nowadays that I hope the courses will prove useful and help some of you get ahead in UI world. If you find it valuable and support the idea I might have a plan for some more general UX courses as well.
Oh, and yes — the guy on the Unicorn is me. I am having my first holiday in a years time. And what makes me so happy is spending this time with my family — Johny and my dear wife Paula, who supports me all the time. This all would never happen without them.
UPDATE: I’ve launched https://learnux.io on the 10th of October, at events accompanying Adobe MAX conference in Vegas. If you feel you want to take part in the project in any way, just drop me a line at LinkedIn or learnuxio@gmail.com.
Thank you and see you on learnux.io!
