Bobby is running a very informal online surgery on Wednesday 3 August to answer any questions you have.
In the meantime, here’s some suggestions to get started in UX:
Get online and start meeting people: Twitter, Facebook and any Slack groups you can find. Bobby runs the UX in Scotland Facebook group so feel free to say hello.
Come to meet-ups: including UX Glasgow and UX Edinburgh.
Read books. Start with ‘Steve Krug’s ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ and Erika Hall’s ‘Just Enough Research’ as well as ‘This Is Service Design Thinking’.
Discover UX websites: the Nielsen Norman Group and the GDS website. UX Movement is also a great UI design resource.
Take a course such as the IXDA qualification. Ask User Vision or This Is Milk about UX training.
Get experience. If a friend runs a small business or charity, try helping them build their service or launch a website. If you’re already working, look for an opportunity to do a project with research and design. Rebuild that terrible company intranet based on what the staff actually need.
Create a portfolio with some case studies. Focus on how you did research with real people and what you learned. ‘What you designed’ is secondary.
Find out about the big employers who hire UX people in Scotland, including the government, banks and financial services, universities and retailers. Get to know the people who hire UX staff. They’re constantly looking to recruit new people and may take on student designers.
Get to know some UX tools: try the gov.uk Prototyping kit, Webflow, Adobe XD, Figma and Axure.
Decide what UX role you’re most interested in. The main ones in the U.K. are: content designer, interaction designer, user researcher and service designer.
Finally: come back and tell us how you’re doing. The UX community is very nice and we’ll try to help.