Are you struggling to find your first job as a UX designer?
Ever wondered why you do not get a call back when you apply for a job?
You think you have enough projects in your portfolio to impress your prospective employer?
“Did you know that the numbers of UX projects in your portfolio is an important factor to attract your prospective employer.”
Who is this post for?
Assumption is that you taken some formal UX training through any of the following ways:
- By taking a Free UX Courses
- By taking a UX Course for beginners
- By attending a UX Bootcamps
- By taking a UX Research Course
- or Self learnt UX Design
This post is for:
- Aspiring designers who are freshers or Students who have graduated from some design school or have taken a UX course/UX training
- Aspiring designers who have some knowledge about UX and experience working with designers and are looking for a career transition into UX
- Seasoned UX designers who cannot share the projects on their portfolio due to company policy or who do not work on interesting projects
- Students who have attended a bootcamp but are struggling to find a job because of lack of experience and un impressive portfolio
- Self taught working professionals who are looking for a career transition into UX
Interesting UX Projects hypothesis
Here are some of the interesting UX Project hypothesis that you as an aspiring designer work on and impress your prospective employer.
UX Project Hypothesis 1 : Allow new conversation/discussion threads
Product/Application : Whats App
- You do not chat or discuss on a single topic with your contact
- It is really very painful to find or locate an old discussion and to be able to refer to it and start the same conversation again
- I felt the same problem while chatting in a group.
- We discuss on different topics in a group and We should be able to refer different topics when there is a need
UX Project Hypothesis 2 : Making the conversation contextual and smart
Product/Application : Whats App
- Autosuggest Messages
Autosuggest messages like linked-in or gmail make life so much easier - Reminders
Can the app allow me to set reminders when I messages someone to respond back in 10 minutes? - Not everyone is good at writing and chatting. Can the app suggest some romantic vocabularies or words or sentences when I am chatting with my wife or girl friend?
- Can the app remind me of Birthday’s of my contacts?
UX Project Hypothesis 3 : Status messages
Product/Application : Whats App
I am a power user when it comes to sharing and updating statuses. I simply love to motivate, entertain and engage people. Here are some of the pain points and desires I have.
- Posting a longer videos
Right now I have to use 2–3 different apps to share a longer video and I observed lots of people are doing it. Isn’t it painful? Why can’t I do this right in app?
Wouldn’t it be really cool if I can share a video by simple pasting the URL of a Youtube or facebook video. Why do I have to always have the video on my mobile phone? - Summary Card
Users share a url on the status because they want to you visit this page. Wouldn’t it be cool if whats app can generate a summary card that makes it so much useful for the contacts to know what is this link about. - Sharing a longer text message
Why do I have to do this manually? Wouldn’t it be cool if whats app can do this automatically? - Saving my Status history/archive
Wouldn’t it be cool if you can always repost a status from the history of your own - Allow Reactions
Wouldn’t it be cool if people can actually like/dislike and comment on your statuses and everyone else in your contact can see the reactions? - Steal/Copy Statuses
Lots of contacts like to copy your status and post it on their status and they ask you to send it.Wouldn’t it be cool if your contact can do this easily with a single tap?It will be really nice to show Status timeline for eg. from where it originated and how many copied it. - Templates
People post Wishes, Greetings, Invitation and Achievements on their status
Wouldn’t it be really cool to be able to use some template for such posts? - Status Gallery
People post Motivational, Inspirational, Funny and Emotional quotes. Wouldn’t it be really cool to be able to be able to pull from a gallery and post it?
UX Project Hypothesis 4: Masking a group member in group chat
Product/Application : Whats App
Some of the groups that I am a part of are my family members, family friends, school friends, ex office friends, childhood friends, college friends and so on.
These contacts have different mentality/religion/education/background and we cannot always discussion/share everything with everyone.
Some times there is a need to share/discuss something with only a few members or may be exclude one/few members.
Eg. Let’s say if we have to plan a surprise birthday party of a contact — you cannot plan it in the same group
Another example is if let’s say you want to help a friend and do some monetary contribution, can you plan this in the same group?
Project output
Here is a list of deliverables that you can prepare and include in your UX portfolio.Desk research data (e.g. users opinion ),
- Data from various types of user research (meeting in person, remote interviews),
- personas
- user flows
- hand-drawn sketches
- wireframes
- clickable prototypes,
- User testing / result
- Iterations and taking it back to the users
- Success metrics/user feedback/value
Why this post?
The reason why I felt the need for this post is based on my observation during a research that I am conducting to identity the challenges faced by aspiring designers to find their first UX job.
Lots of the applicant do not hear back from their employer.
When I reviewed some of their portfolios I realised they have only 1 projects in their portfolio which was executed with the support of the mentor.
They do not realise that just 1 project is not enough to impress your employer.
They all know that the employers need more experience but they do not attempt to add more projects to their portfolio.
Perhaps they don’t know which project to work on.
With this post I am only trying to motivate aspiring designers like you to give it a shot and prove your worth.
Another benefit of this post is that I have most of the examples of whats app that’s because I am power user of whats app and I am sure you all have contacts in your family/neighbour hood who use whats app. You can easily meet them and validate these hypothesis and perhaps come up with more desires.
Closing note
Yes its true. It is not easy to find your first UX job in this competitive field.
You really need to work hard, go that extra mile and keep practicing in order to impress you prospective employer.
I really hope that alike me you guys have also found this project hypothesis true and interesting and you will come out of your comfort zone and leverage the opportunity to apply all the UX knowledge you have.
I will be curious to see how many of you leverage the opportunity to execute any of these project improve your UX portfolio to impress your employer. Leave a note in the comments section.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other UX project hypothesis that can be included in this list.
Need help on how to execute these projects?
Leave a comment so that I can make another effort with my another post on “How to implement a UX Design process and execute a project on your own”
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