I'm happy whenever people ping me about starting a career in UX. In the past week, a stranger asked me this question out of the blue. I thought I could just write and send this article, and share my answers with everyone I know too. The knowledge on how to start in UX should be free for everyone, so here I am writing at least 70 things I can think of so people interested enough in my opinions have something to act on.

I've attended some university talks from User Experience Society too, and the questions from the Q&As were basically all the same—"How do I start?"

Well my friend, if you're still asking that question, then you have come to the right place.

Here's a huge disclaimer though: you don’t have to do all of the things listed here. Not all of these points will work for you. I just also want to preface everything by saying that I am extremely privileged, and don't have much of the barriers most people face when it comes to starting off a career in design. Either way, I'd love to help you out by actually sharing what worked for me. This is the advice I give my students as a mentor, coach, and industry professional.

Be critical—mix and match. See what helps you inch toward your goals.

Ready? Let's start with the most important one...

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1. Set realistic expectations, then commit

UX and product design has certainly caught strong demand in the job market in recent years. With the entire world transitioning to remote work, the playing field has become even more competitive. You're not just competing with people from your place anymore. And the reality is, there will always be more privileged, lucky, and talented people who will also have more resources than you. But don't fret, a strong commitment to your field, hard work, and focus don't go unnoticed. If you truly commit to learning UX and product design, do the necessary legwork even if faced with a lot of barriers—luck will eventually find you. And there are swarms of good-hearted, generous mentors who are more than willing to mentor you for free if they sense your ambition and commitment.

2. Start googling what UX is

Start devouring some UX-related content on Google, and you will start to understand what this field means. Surprisingly, even if this is the obvious thing to do, not all aspiring designers do it. Simple research goes a long way in sculpting your mind-space, and readying it for more advanced user experience and product design content. The more knowledge you have, the more easy it is to connect the dots and make sense of new things you will come across. Acquire knowledge, so that when luck finds you, you're more than prepared.

3. Hang around NNG’s website

Nielsen Norman Group's blog is certainly one of the most legit resources out there when it comes to user experience. You won't go wrong with hanging out here and making sense of all the articles about user experience. As a professional, I regularly come back and relearn all of the concepts I've come across.

4. Understand frameworks like design thinking

Design thinking is one of the staples of user experience. Popularized by the guys at IDEO, one of the pre-eminent global design consultancies of the world, you won't go wrong with learning this framework. A simple caveat: a framework is just that—a framework. It doesn't apply to all situations. However, the understanding the first principles of empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping and testing is extremely powerful—it's just a matter of tactics and specific methods once you understand the reason behind certain phases.

5. Read the seminal book on usability

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug is the ultimate book about making things easy to use. Don't skip it. The fundamental knowledge and principles can be applied no matter how far you are in your UX journey.

6. Take a look at UX job openings and work your way backwards

Start with the end in mind. You won't land a job if you do random stuff hoping it will work. Direction matters. One way you can establish direction is by reading job descriptions and performance profiles from companies you want to work at. Look at the UX Designer, Product Designer, UI Designer, UX Researcher job openings. Check the qualifications and skills required. Figure out where you're weak and strong at, then act accordingly. Another caveat: not all companies have the same maturity level when it comes to design. So when you're looking at job descriptions, it can possibly be overblown. Nevertheless, it is still immensely helpful.

7. Connect with UX professionals on social media

Find designers that seem to know what they're doing. For myself, I like following people with interesting perspectives, who post educational content, have regular reflections on design that expand my thinking, and devote their time building the community. Connecting just means being friends with people! Don't take yourself too seriously.

8. Find a mentor

Mentors help you accelerate your career through informal knowledge transfer and counseling. Find designers you admire, and be ready with a question. Or better yet, start a discussion with them! Don't ask people to be your mentor, because that's a huge ask. You need to build the relationship organically first. However, there are resources where you can just directly interface with mentors like ADPList and UX Coffee Hours.

9. Start a side project

Side projects related to user experience typically revolve around designing around certain problems or interest-areas you care about. Apply the UX skills you've learned to something that resonates with you, and you won't have a problem with generating design-related work. Side projects can also revolve around helping your community learn design, which I will talk about further in this article.

10. Practice UI design and refine your design taste

You can work with the Daily UI challenge which gives you daily prompts to help you refine your visual design. To get better at UI and visual design, you need to be conscious of your choices with typography, color, spacing, layout, and more. If you can't level up your UI to a decent level, hiring managers with a keen eye for polished work—and more importantly—users, will not be able to trust you, your design work, or the brand you're working on. Sites like Awwwards and Dribbble are good places to start when looking for inspiration for polished designs. Another caveat: the sites featured here are typically created for marketing purposes, so they should be evaluated within that respect. Nevertheless, most work here are of very high quality.

11. Practice real-world UX skills

To get better at UX, you need to practice UX skills. Here's a great step-by-step guide by UX Tools you can follow to learn basic UX methods expected of any design professional.

12. Listen to narrative-based podcasts interviewing UX professionals

We all need a bit of inspiration, and seeing people who have reached success can push us to drop the bullshit and just go for it. I swear by the podcast Design Details, and I get energized hearing from talented product designers' stories. I've started a similar podcast for Filipino designers, and you might want to check it out! Stories can be powerful fuel that kindles a burning desire to improve in any field.

13. Start a UX peer group

Create a chat group of people who also want to learn UX with you, and drive the discussion by sharing what you've learned with them. Share resources you find, and help each other succeed. Having peers can be an incredible motivator in helping you get further in UX.

14. Learn Figma

Figma is the UI design tool of choice for most people, because it has an incredible user experience, supports multiplayer (collaborative design), and maintains wonderful communities all over the world. You will not go wrong with this tool.

15. Join your local design community

In the Philippines, you can join communities like Friends of Figma, UXPH, and other niche design communities like No-Code PH. One international design community I love is Designers Guild. They do an incredible job of moderating, creating engagement, and building up a supportive community.

16. Sign up for a UX conference

Pre-pandemic, joining conferences has always been an amazing opportunity to meet other designers, build relationships with speakers, understand the current landscape of design in the industry, and fill gaps in your UX arsenal of skills. Though back then, you had to spend a lot of money to go abroad or attend a local conference. Nowadays, you can attend any design conference in the world, because they're most likely remote anyway. I'm not cognizant of all the conferences these days, but a simple Google search would help you out. Christian San Jose and I have organized the UX+ Conference twice, and we'd love to host new designers for UX+ 2021 soon!

17. If in school, start or join a UX club

Greetings to all the students reading this blog! When I was in university, no club for UX existed. So I just started one, and looked for like-minded peers to join. This can be a powerful accelerator to get your shit together and learn design, because you are accountable to members of an actual organization. To lead a UX club, you have to be reasonably ahead and make sure you know what you're talking about. Otherwise, if an existing club exists, join and enjoy the feeling of community!

18. Learn common design patterns

How can you design effective UI if you don't know common design patterns?

19. Read The Design of Everyday Things

Another UX book staple is the one by Don Norman, the father of UX. Learn about signals, affordances, and why you shouldn't blame people for errors caused by terrible design decisions.

20. Find a design career coach

While a mentor helps you through direct transfer of knowledge, coaches work with you through the trenches by helping you arrive at the answers yourself. There aren't a lot of design coaches. And most of the time, design coaches are self-educated. However, they can help you discover things about yourself through powerful questions, problem reframing, and counsel informed by a high amount of context + experience. Coaches take a long-term view, and create programs extremely specific to your situation, which is what most design programs and courses lack. I do one-time free design coaching, so if you want to get a feel for it, feel free to schedule a session with me.

21. Learn how to facilitate design workshops

Facilitation is a highly sought after skill for mature UX designers. You're expected to rally the team together and create spaces for ideation and collaboration. I recommend starting with activities like collaborative design sketching or doing affinity diagramming sessions.

22. Learn how to conduct design reviews

Design reviews are formal design meetings where designers present their work and get helpful design feedback from their peers, partners, or direct managers. There is an art to doing this. You have to make sure you provide enough context about the problem you're solving and specify what kind of feedback you're looking for. You also need to provide guidelines for how people give that feedback, because critique is different from criticism.

23. Start a freelance project

Freelance projects allow you to earn money while working real world projects. There are a ton of problems out there waiting to be solved by a contract UX or Product Designer. This is precisely why we've started a platform like Swarm. How do you find freelance projects? Start with your friends and find opportunities that can utilize your unique skillset as a designer. Expand your network to include non-designers—meaning business owners, front-end developers, and marketing people, so you can be the go-to designer whenever they need help.

24. Find someone newer to UX than you so you can teach what you learn

By having a mentee, you can spot gaps in your own knowledge when teaching specific concepts or giving advice. Also, by having discussions with your mentee, you're refining your mental model of these concepts and usually nudges you to go back and make sure you're teaching the correct thing. By teaching, you allow for the design concepts to be stored in your long term memory, and allow for more sense-making of these patterns over the long run. More importantly, you're helping someone else climb the career ladder. Go you!

25. Document your journey

People almost always have a problem with posting about their design journeys, but I think that's a missed opportunity. Whatever you're going through is your own journey, and no one can invalidate that. In addition to this, no one will document your journey but yourself. All your small wins are worth celebrating, so post about it, share it to the world, and let your own light inspire others around you.

26. Connect with designers on Twitter

Twitter is an extremely underutilized resource by early-stage designers. The amount of knowledge, mental models, and valuable content generated in this platform everyday is huge. Curate your follow list by following people that helps you grow, and make friends with designers from all over the world! It is your decision on whether a person should earn the right to have your follow. Also, overtime, you make get to know these designers even more, and realize that the content they post either doesn't resonate with you anymore, or just saps your energy. Bad actors can harass you or make the space quite unsafe too. In that case, don't be afraid to use the block, mute, or unfollow buttons. They're there for a reason.

27. Join a bootcamp

Let’s face it — watching 24 hours of videos and attending events won’t make you a proficient UX Designer. Consuming all the books and articles isn't always helpful either. What’s instrumental in moving the needle is direct application of your learnings, mentorship from experts, career guidance, and a community to support you. Fortunately, quality design bootcamps with an ISA model like UX+ University now exist so you can transition seamlessly if you're coming from another career, or just want to accelerate the process.

28. Go to YouTube and search for conference talks

You don't know it, but there are actually a lot of UX and Product Design content from conferences on YouTube. And they're all for free! It's just that not a lot of people know they exist.

29. Learn the fundamentals of web design

Nowadays, people just jump into UX without any prior understanding of web design. That's understandable, but it gives you much more credibility if you actually know how to do the front-end of websites properly. It also provides a sufficient base for you to advance into more nuanced sub-specializations in UI design, like creating front-end components for your design system.

30. Study HTML and CSS

You might think it's a waste of time, but a lot of the visual design work you do for web apps, landing pages and such can be designed better if you had knowledge of HTML and CSS. Try coding up your own mockups yourself, and you'll develop stronger empathy for engineers trying to implement your work.

31. Learn responsive design

Learning about how media queries work, responsive web design patterns, and using the proper CSS techniques with ample understanding of coding conventions can help accelerate your work, especially if you're gunning to be a generalist designer. It also enhances your responsive design decision-making skills while doing your mockups — which means you can decide on feasibility concerns for yourself.

32. Learn no-code tools like Webflow

Webflow has become the ultimate visual programming tool for designers. It gives you powers to code your design visually, even if you don't know how to write code. On the flip side, if you do have knowledge of HTML, CSS, and responsive design, your work on Webflow becomes accelerated.

33. Create a proper persona

There are a lot of bullshit personas out there that focus on the wrong things like demographics. Personas that are useful revolve around user goals, their actual behavior, and pain points that are relevant to the product team. Likewise, they're usually created collaboratively. I expound about this in a YouTube video I made.

34. Find design Discord and Slack communities to join

Joining communities like Design Buddies allow you to interface with a global community of designers. There are certainly more out there, and I won't be able to enumerate all of them—but know that this is an option for you in order to find a design support group.

35. Write your first case study

If you've done a freelance project, created a side project (like a redesign challenge of some sort), or have done real UX work somewhere, then it may be time to write your first case study! Case studies are sort of like a mini essay that showcases your work, the process you underwent, and the results it achieved. People read it to get to know how polished your work is as a designer, and if you possess the necessary critical thinking, visual design, UX, and interaction design skills. In addition to that, depending on how you write it, you are evaluated on your honesty, ability to collaborate with people, problem solving ability, and other soft-skills. When writing a case study, empathize with people who will read it. Write succinctly, show the work properly, tell a story, and only include sections when they make sense. Write the project as it happened. You don't need to write the whole design thinking process all the time. Also, one or two really well-written case studies trump 4-5 ones that are written poorly.

36. Create your portfolio

Having your case studies ready means you should create your portfolio too. Collect and write more case studies, and try to stand out by sharing more about yourself as a designer! By showing personality and sharing a little bit more about who you are, you can stand out from other candidates. Hiring managers read the about section of your site!

37. If you're starting out, change your LinkedIn title to “Aspiring UX Designer”

If you're starting out, you have to declare your identity in order to manifest it. Progress becomes possible if you possess the core belief that you truly are trying to become a UX Designer. So don't be afraid, and just change your bio everywhere to being an Aspiring UX Designer. The rest will take care of itself. Senior designers will see it as being honest and vulnerable. By being transparent that you're still on a learning journey, it will signal to them that you need support. This enables them to help you more.

38. Start applying for UX internships

For university students, internships are one of the highest value things you can put on your resume, aside from maybe building your own startup. To apply for an internship, make a list of companies you want to apply for, list down any deadlines for their applications, ready your portfolio and resume, then go and apply. Show you have a growth mindset and that your values align with the company you're applying for. I think more and more companies are biased towards interns with actual hard UX skills, versus a few years ago. I understand the struggle here—people should be given internship opportunities despite not having experience. But the job market is extremely competitive. The slots are limited. And you chose to work in a field that requires a strong base of skills to do well in. If you're in it for the long haul, the unfortunate news is, you really have to put the work in.

39. Determine what UX environment you want to be a part of

Yes, there are multiple career pathways in UX design, but the environment you operate in is dictated by what kind of company you applied for. When choosing your first design gig, reflect on whether it fits your work style, personality, preferences, and long term goals. You can do work for a startup, a big corporation, small product company, a scale-up, a digital product agency, or just continue being a freelance designer.

40. Connect with alumni from your school who became UX designers

One easy way to connect with designers is to check if there are UX designers who are alumni of your school. That way, you'll have something in common right away! Most alumni would love to help out a fellow schoolmate, so be confident and send that person a message!

41. Learn about product thinking

As a designer, we need to deeply understand the problems we’re solving, the strategic context of our organization, and the market we want to operate in. To think and act in terms of dispelling assumptions, creating experiments, and building MVPs characterizes a designer versed in product thinking. In my humble opinion, it’s basically gaining skills in product management, and marrying the concept with design.

42. Read about scrum and agile

Most product teams operate in an agile environment, most specifically through the scrum framework. To be honest, integrating design through sprints is very difficult, because you mostly have little time for UX research and design discovery. If you’re a new designer, you’ll have to get acquainted with working within an agile environment and adjust accordingly. Make sure that you’re collaborating well with your cross-functional peers.

43. Subscribe to more technical-oriented design podcasts

My favorite podcast in this regard is New Layer. Tanner and Jasmine are just so thoughtful with the topics they present and are helpful for any designer at any stage. I say that it's technical because they aren't interviewing someone to unearth their story, but really talking about specific design topics. Both have their place, but if you're the type to like both, in addition to having an interest in design leadership, then you should check out High Resolution.

44. Write blog posts about interesting things you’ve learned

At the start of your UX career, you will be learning a ton of shit, and you will barely remember any of them. What I recommend is to keep them in your brain by writing about it—write blog articles and share them with your UX peer group, or everyone else in your community. Don't worry about writing things that other people have written about. There will always be a need for fresh perspectives on evergreen topics.

45. Ask for design critique on your work

Even if you've been in design for a very long time, you really won't know how good you are unless you receive feedback from peers, or better yet, more senior designers. And I'm not just talking about any "senior" designer, but rather people who have the work to back up whatever they say. Making it a habit to ask or host critique sessions on your work has tremendous effects for bettering your design skills. As designers, we have our own biases, and a deep emotional attachment to our work. Having someone you can trust who can provide an objective evaluation of your work is key to never-ending personal growth.

46. Start talking to designers you admire

When you learn to let go of the hesitance and self-consciousness associated with deciding whether you should talk to designers you admire, you unlock new relationships, opportunities and, and friendships that never would have happened if you didn't do anything in the first place. YOLO it, because all designers are people — and we all crave that connection.

47. Learn about design systems

Design systems are all about shared patterns and practices to serve a digital product. It makes life easier for both the designer and engineer. Although not really a beginner topic, knowledge of it and its usage are essential if you want to grow as a UX designer and climb up the ranks. You can try looking up Google's Material Design or Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. IBM Design has amazing documentation of their patterns, philosophies and practices too.

48. Start a UX event for other people

Organizing events can attract similarly minded designers who are eager to learn with you. It helps you build your network, creates space for community, and refines your event organizing skills. The people who I've mentored who've started their own events, clubhouse rooms, Zoom meetups, or conferences have definitely impacted not just their immediate circles, but their own career in a potent way.

49. Shadow a UX designer

When you've found a mentor, try shadowing them for a little while. Take in all you can about their design philosophies, working ethic, quirks, typeface choices, aesthetics, and even favorite keyboard shortcuts. Be curious, ask them to explain their design decisions. Watch them design their mockups live. Ask to join the workshops they facilitate. Join them during their UX research interview sessions. Observational learning is a top notch way to start off your UX career. The more people you learn from, the more you can mix and match certain methods, attitudes, and styles.

50. Learn how to work with Software Engineers

Designers who work in a bubble are destined to fail. To succeed, you need to understand the world of your partners too. Involve engineers early in your design process, ask them to evaluate feasibility of your work. Collaborate with them on wireframes or sketches before you move on to high-fidelity work. Annotate your design decisions and how certain interactions are supposed to work. Provide and document different states of your UI, and create components together with the engineers for the often-used elements or patterns. Communicate early and often.

51. Start and maintain a Dribbble profile

If you can somehow find a way to get a Dribbble invite, then use it! Most hiring managers evaluate UI work posted by candidates on their Dribbble profile, and if you can post your best shots (or even have a profile) then you have a better chance at getting into strong design teams. Hanging around Dribbble helps you level up your visual, branding, and marketing design skills for sure. For product design, not so much.

52. Learn collaborative software like Miro and Whimsical

Doing design workshops, pair design work, and the like has never been easier. Just pull up Miro or Whimsical, and you won't have any problems for sure. Great for teamwork, collaboration, and working on early-stage designs.

53. Do a usability test

A usability test is best used when you want to evaluate how users actually use your designs. It's the preferred method to understand behavior, and may come in qualitative or quantitative types. Either way, this video by Steve Krug will give you an idea on how to facilitate one.

54. Refine your user interviewing skills

User research is all about uncovering inner reasoning, reactions, emotions, and guiding principles from people. In order to accomplish that, you'll have to be a decent interviewer. You need to be prepared, confident, and ready to ask open-ended questions that get to the heart of the matter. Get your users to tell stories, don't make assumptions, and ASK. When something confuses you, ask for examples and do follow-up questions.

55. Learn more quantitative and qualitative research methods

As a designer, people look to you for an arsenal of methods for learning, discovery, experimentation, and testing. It's wise to learn as many of these methods as you can and choose the ones practical to your situation. And by learning both quantitative and qualitative methods, you can gain a more holistic, data-driven perspective of your users — allowing you and your team to make the right design decisions.

56. Dig deeper into interaction design

The things the users do on your site or app cost physical and mental effort. The sum of these are referred to as interaction costs. We want to keep interaction costs low by refining information architecture, making critical UX flows as easy as possible to go through, and designing for working memory. If users are excessively reading and scrolling, always looking around for relevant info, and having a hard time comprehending that info, then you may have a problem!

57. Use products that have great UX

Just exposing yourself to great UX and product design also allows you to learn vicariously and through experience. Develop an eye for design by analyzing the product experiences that you go through, and try to understand the intent of the people/teams who designed it. That way, you can refine your product thinking as a designer. Ask yourself, "Why did they design it this way? What goals were they aiming for? What principles did they apply here?" There are so many great digital products out there, and some of my favorites are Things, Notion, Figma, Transmit, Linear, Discord, and a few of the other software I've mentioned on this post already.

58. Learn how to design good onboarding

What happens when people use your website or app for the first time? What's the experience like? Do you purposefully guide them through what they should do first? Do you ease them through using your entire app? Whether you design this first-time experience or not, there will be one — so make sure you intentionally design your onboarding experience. People stop using apps if onboarding is unclear and if first time usage of the app is too complex.

59. Take UX courses

There are a ton of UX courses available out there, and I'm pretty sure that if you've reached this part of the article, that you have checked out those courses as well. Coursera has a lot of UX courses listed, and Google launched their own UX course too. Courses are a good way into the industry, but they're not the end-all-be-all — combine it with other learning experiences and real work to get the best possible outcome.

60. Join high quality UX Communities like Designer’s Guild

Designer's Guild is the gold standard when it comes to design communities, and we have community leader Marissa Louie and the team (shoutout to Tanner, David, Stedman, and the others!) to thank for that. This community helps advance the careers of its members through thoughtful moderation, curation of quality content, and setting a high bar for memberships. What matters is you get exposed to high quality thinking, events, and discussions.

61. Learn how to make your designs more accessible.

As designers, we have a responsibility to create products and services that are inclusive and usable to all people with varying abilities. The more people we get on our site, the more potential customers we can have. There are really simple ways to improve accessibility, like using better color contrast, writing alt-text, and using captions for videos. Check out this a11y resources library initially created by Hannah Milan to learn more about accessibility.

62. Study information architecture

Sitemaps are commonly mistaken for information architecture. But it's more than that, it's the way we arrange parts of something to make it understandable. Some examples of it are links in website navigation, categories, labels and tasks in digital products, and so much more. UX Designers need to architect information — in fact, it's our responsibility to. We do so many things with information. We consume, deliver, retrieve, consider, learn, and even forget it. That's why we need to make it make sense. When we make the complexities of information easy to understand, we lower interaction costs and make our products usable.

63. Invest in UX books

Once you decide to commit to your UX career, you'll have to invest in more design and product books. A lot of the books from Rosenfeld Media are well-respected. Also, some of my favorite design books are Articulating Design Decisions, Experience Required, Org Design for Design Orgs, Designing Products People Love, and Mismatch. These are just the design-related ones, but a lot of soft-skills-oriented books are very important too. By far, my favorite is Ego is The Enemy — because you really do need to check your ego, you might be bringing toxic energy to people around you.

64. Refine your taste in typefaces

Stop using Montserrat or other similar free typefaces that should have retired already! There are tons of new ones on Google Fonts, and you really just have to look. Otherwise, if you do have a budget for paid typefaces, then please use them! Look through type foundries, hang around Typewolf, and refine your taste in choosing typefaces. Choosing the right type is so fundamental to the user experience, since 70% of content on a site is text. So if you don't know how to pick the right one, what does that say about your UX skills?

65. Learn UX Laws

Some designers have the natural ability to just create UI that makes good work of UX laws, but knowing about the actual theories behind them matters. UX Laws by Jon Yablonski is an amazing resource to get acquainted with these principles and to start being more intentional about applying them to your designs.

66. Write for Medium Publications

Writing builds authority and credibility. For example, writing for UX Medium publications like uxdesign.cc allowed me to gain a decent following in the UX space. One of my articles was featured in their guide for people starting in design. If you're just starting out, write about what you're learning. Reflect on your journey. Articulate and document your experiences, because chances are, other people are going through it as well. Share what you've learned to the community to pay it forward.

67. Start taking leadership positions in your UX community

If you have the time, energy, and capacity to, giving back to your community by taking up leadership positions is a good idea. It gives you agency to create impact within the circles you care about. Just make sure you choose communities whose values and practices you truly believe in. Being a volunteer with a leadership position is meaningful, because you can take a more active role in charting the direction of the organization — including what discussions happen, what events are created, which voices are amplified, what kind of culture is created, and what behavior is tolerated. If you do decide to take up a leadership position, you're accountable to the members you choose to serve, so just be aware that whatever you do is up for critique.

68. Start mentoring other people too

When do you start mentoring? As soon as you can! Once you learn new things about UX that your other interested friend doesn't, start that discussion already! You don't need to wait for a decade to actually be a "mentor." Mentorship can happen across age, level of experience, or position. The benefits of mentoring are plenty — you refine your understanding of core UX concepts, you develop your self-confidence, you build relationships with people, you uplift and evangelize the design field, and essentially—you create a ton of positive network effects. Please, find someone to mentor if you have the ability to.

69. Evangelize the field!

Because you're a UX professional, whatever small thing you do that advances the field adds up! That one time you gave advice, that one blog post you've written, that time when you defended a design decision, and more. All of these actions contribute to the growth of our industry. We are still pretty much in a nascent stage, but if we continue to prove our value by solving important problems in our organizations through design, then we can create a much greater impact on our world. More knowledgeable designers means more intentionality. More intentionality means more needs, goals, pain points are fulfilled through damn good UX design. You work and actions matter, so make it count! :)

70. Share this post!

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About the Author

Alexis is the Co-Founder and Chief Design Officer of Swarm.  On the side, he hosts the Roots podcast for Filipino designers, organizes the UX+ Conference, and coaches early-stage designers. He previously led design at Kalibrr (YC W13). He co-founded User Experience Society, the first student UX organization in the Philippines.