Powerful Truth: You CAN Create a UI / UX Design Career With No Background in Design

Absolutely! Anyone who likes solving creative challenges and wants to make things work better can certainly have a career in UI/UX.

At its core, UI and UX are looking to improve 2 things: how something looks and how something works. There likely are countless time when you used a website or application and grew frustrated with how it worked. Saying things like “this doesn’t make any sense” or “why would somebody do it this way?”.

These are the beginning questions that can spark a UI/UX career.

This isn’t to say that just a desire to improve visuals and interactions will guarantee a career, there is a lot of experience to gain to become truly valuable.

From the UI perspective, you’ll need to train yourself on creating ascetically pleasing designs. You will need to craft beautiful works for interfaces and websites that users will want to use, and that you clients will be happy to pay for. You may be dissuaded by this if you don’t consider yourself a “creative” or “artist”, however look at the following image:

Which one looks better? Chances are you chose the right one, and accordingly you’ve qualified to be able to design. There are many, many things to learn: colour theory, fonts and typographies, spacing and alignment, etc. But these are just skills to practice that will give you tools to express your in built ability to determine what looks more visually pleasing.

On the UX side of things, it goes back to those experiences I mentioned: “This doesn’t make any sense”. In its most simple form, UX is making this more and more intuitive so that everyone involved can accomplish their goal. This includes the user, but also the business in directing interactions that help support it’s bottom line.

An excellent book that has remained relevant throughout the years is Steven Krug’s “Don’t make me think”, that takes a very pragmatic approach to improving the UX of anything you build.

Much like UI, there is an incredible amount of skills and processes to learn: user stories, goals, flows, patterns, etc., but just like UI those are all very learnable that will grow the core truth that you want to improve the experience.

Yes, you CAN learn UI/UX design without any background in design!

I’ll repeat it again, at it’s core it’s about making things look visually pleasing and simple to use. That’s a goal that anyone can aspire to and have a sincere desire to enact. Though there is a lot to learn around it, that’s just a matter of time, patience, and experience.

If you'd like some powerful and unorthodox tricks for boosting your design career, consider checking out my book, An Ugly Design Career.

Cheers to your UI / UX career!