There is no dedicated path to entering the field of User Experience (UX) design. While a degree or certification can be helpful, it isn’t necessary. If you prefer, you can certainly become a self-taught UX designer – it just takes some time and dedication. We’ve compiled 3 main areas to study for those of you who are interested in learning more about UX. 

‍

1. Master the Basics of Visual Design 

Before jumping into UX design, you need to understand the basics of visual and web design; these skills will be carried over to the UX field. Having a solid understanding of color theory, typography, color, and balance is absolutely essential to becoming a skilled UX designer. Thankfully, there are plenty of resources for learning about these areas. We highly recommend reading Smashing Magazine; they produce high-quality content for their community of designers. Their series on color theory is an excellent place to begin.

‍

2. Study the Design Process

A crucial aspect to becoming a UX designer is understanding the philosophy, methods, and process inherent to UX. While the process is flexible (there is no order of phases to adhere to), these are the general steps of “Design Thinking”: 

• Empathize – Get to know the users and their needs. One great way to do this is with FlowMapp’s Personas tool. You can create a persona, define and gain a deep understanding of their goals, and build precise user flows — all from one feature-rich interface.
• Define – Analyze your observations and define key UX problems.
• Ideate – Generate potential solutions to the identified key problems. This can be done by bodystorming, mindmapping, brainstorming, and other methods.
• Prototype – This is the experimentation phase. Transform your ideas into prototypes of products. A prototype is essentially a scaled-down version of your product that incorporates the potential solutions you identified in the previous stage. You will test each solution and take note of any flaws and constraints. Throughout the prototype phase, you may accept, improve, redesign, or reject your proposed solutions.
• Test – Validate your product before going through the final development process. Test results may lead you back to the previous stages of the design process.

‍

3. Learn from Top Designers

Take inspiration from more experienced UX designers. Not everybody has a mentor to help them learn about UX design, but there is a wealth of sites to learn from. Rather than blindly copying UX designs, you should carefully study these components of a web system:

• Layout (spacing, padding, grids)
• Navigation (placement and size)
• Typography (line height, font size, serif or sans-serif)
• Icons (placement, type, purpose)

Focus on these smaller details and try to understand how they come together to form the bigger UX picture. Studying top UX designers will help you develop excellent taste. To make this task easier, we recommend checking out UX Planet’s Inspiration series. Every week, the online publication releases their top UX design picks. Another excellent option is Dribbble. 

‍

Get Started with UX Design

Becoming a UX designer is all about dedication, patience, and lots of practice. You need to work hard every day in order to improve. If you want practical experience with UX planning and collaboration, check out the feature-rich UX FlowMapp platform.