Beginning, failure, and success as a self-taught UI /UX Designer

Published in

XD Studio Monterrey

5 min readOct 28, 2021

Three (but necessary) stages to go through and learn on your career path if you want to get into UI /UX Design with no background knowledge.

You have probably seen plenty of headlines like “Tips to Become a UI /UX Designer” or “Becoming a UI /UX Designer from scratch”, with lots of useful lists of topics to learn, design software to download, and design practices to follow.

Here is what happens in the real world to self-taught UI/UX designers like me, and how failure is part of their professional success.

Beginning

Making the switch

These days, many people are taking a leap into the unknown in the field of UI/UX Design, and I call it this way because they have the courage to switch their careers and start from scratch, in many cases without the right background, knowledge or discipline required for the role.

From beginners to seniors in other career fields, they have the curiosity to become UI/UX designers, so they left everything behind to have that goal in mind.

I made this switch in my career with 7 years of experience in Branding and Marketing behind me to take that leap and start all over again. This decision started my journey and I had to work very hard to figure out how to get started.

Self-taught journey

UI/UX Design was not part of my educational program. I have a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design, and hearing about UI/UX was something so vague and even rare back then that I did not know any UI/UX designer to lean on.

The great advantage in this modern world is that with the internet we have all the information at our fingertips, so anyone can teach themselves anything.

I started spending several hours a day learning from myself; Medium articles, YouTube videos, design tutorials and more. My mind was taking a lot of information without following a specific path, so it was a little difficult and confusing, but eventually all made sense. I mastered some design programs, like Sketch, and started practicing in my spare time.

With this technical knowledge, I was able to build my portfolio with some UI designs, with the goal of finding an UI/UX job. And here came the failure.

“You always pass failure on your way to success.”
- Mickey Rooney

Failure

Try again

We are all humans. Humans make mistakes. In our careers, failure is part of the equation, just as it is in UI/UX. Remember “Recognize, Diagnose, & Recover from Errors” (Usability Heuristics)? It is quite clear that we learn from our mistakes to achieve a goal and try again.

Being a self-taught UI /UX designer feels like going to war without weapons. I have applied for a lot of jobs… a lot, without success. At one point I thought the cause of my failure was my zero background, but that was not 100% true.

What is expected of UI / UX designers is their potential and skills, more than a timeline on a resume. And I had some weaknesses that I could not see for myself. Thanks to the positive and negative feedback from others, I can understand my flaws and that I was not so far from my goal neither. This motivation pushed me to keep going.

Embrace feedback

There were some mistakes I made or some missing things that I could not figure out at the time. My key was to get feedback and learn from it.

“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”
– Bill Gates

Thanks to feedback from professionals and the overall experience, I learned these things:

UI/UX is about solving problems: I was not clear on what User Experience was about. As a graphic designer, it was all about aesthetics for me, but I was completely wrong about that. As a UI /UX designer, you should be a problem solver, understand users and challenges, and be able to think creatively.
Mastering design programs does not make you a UI/UX designer: we need to learn and understand the fundamentals of User Interface and/or User Experience to design great products; Sketch, InVision, Figma, are just tools.
Define your weaknesses and work on them: if you have received negative feedback on some things, do not be sad or angry about it, but make every effort to improve. Learn these topics, and better yet, get certified.

Success

The knowledge gained from this feedback was the beginning of the path I had to take to continue the journey. All the knowledge gained, certifications and a strong portfolio helped me land my first job in UI /UX. Time passed and I moved on to a better job.

Impostor Syndrome

My professional career grew from the ground up, but in the meantime, I experienced something that might be common for self-taught people: Impostor syndrome.

Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes (1978) identified “Impostor Syndrome” as the idea that you’ve only succeeded due to luck, and not because of your talent or qualifications.

If I fail? Is it okay to get the job? Did I lie about my skills? These thoughts sometimes went through my mind as a self-taught UI/UX designer because my education was not conventional. The best way to get rid of Impostor Syndrome is simple:

Keep going, do your best, and if you are on the right track, you’ll end up feeling like you are in the right place.

The journey doesn’t end

And the success doesn’t stop there. Successful UI/UX designers are constantly educating themselves to stay up to date with what’s happening in the world every day, and to be ready for new challenges.

Now I am a senior UI Designer at Accenture and I joined the team on my second try, 2 years apart (no joke). The feedback on the first try got me to where I am today, and my current goal is to grow my career. Another source of knowledge for me is the opportunity to work with very talented UI/UX designers, the teamwork we have and the ideas we share are priceless.

Today, I continue my self-taught learning by reading, taking courses, and getting certified. Now I know that self-taught learning is not a weakness, but the key to our professional development.