Member-only story
Question everyone — including me and this story.
Stop blindly trusting “UX experts”.
A while ago one of my students asked me what advice would I give them as junior designers starting out in the field. I thought about this for a while and said:
Learn from all the sources, all the time but question everyone. Use your own logic and your own bulls**t detector. And practice a lot!
And yes — that also includes you questioning that advice I just gave you. Tough luck. Maybe I’m BS’ing you here too.
So yeah. Hi! 👋
I’ve been building digital products for around 20 years now, with varied success (you can’t always win).
Recently I started thinking how I can help others, without directly pushing them in any particular direction.
So how to get good?
One of those ideas would be to become a pyramid shaped designer (some call it generalist with a specialisation, but I don’t like the term).
But the best way is simply to be consistent and work super hard.
While I can’t “teach” a work ethic and a quality driven approach, I can hint that dedication and precision are virtues in any industry.
Not everyone is at a point in life where they have the energy or drive for full, head-on dedication and that’s ok too. Plenty of stuff on Netflix. You can also explore the UI choices as you browse.
But if you want to be good prepare for both a lot of hard work and a lot of critical thinking. Don’t just eat up knowledge without reflecting upon it.
There’s a lot of sources to learn from.
When I started designing websites back in 1999, I had to teach myself to code (we used tables to align website elements) and I had to experiment with what works and what doesn’t.
