• How I landed a job in UX Design at Google
  • Author: Lola Jiang
  • The Nuggets translation Project
  • Permanent link to this article: github.com/xitu/gold-m…
  • Translator: Ryden Sun
  • Proofread by: Atuooo Lihanxiang

3 UX lessons that your school won’t teach you

Today, many people make a big fuss about the difficulties they face when starting out in UX design and when looking for an internship.

To be honest, you can now learn UX skills easily through online courses, as well as in design schools or training courses. Eventually, every junior designer’s resume mentions almost the same skills, so it gets harder and harder to stand out on a resume.

When I entered graduate school and studied HCI (Human-computer Interaction), I was optimistic. I knew exactly what real life meant — even with UX skills and a passion for what you do, that doesn’t mean you can easily find a job.

In fact, I love to do a lot of things — I love to share my ideas with people, get them to come to me, take notes on what people think and then think about what’s inside, present ideas to clients and show them proudly. It occurred to me that these skills might help me get an internship. But I was wrong. All the resumes and profiles I sent out were unsuccessful. I defied the odds and continued to vote, but I was still rejected.

Here, I will share my story of how my perseverance led me to learn skills that are very important and beneficial to my field, but no one teaches these courses in school.

Design patterns

In the summer of 2017, I started my internship at a local start-up. Because I thought my first job didn’t give me enough industry experience, I started looking for a second internship in the fall.

I am confident that my design skills are “adequate”. Man, I was so wrong.

I went for an interview on Zhihu, China’s Quora, and the interviewer was the head of the design department. I was stumped by a question: “Oh, you only use Android all the time?” I said yes, frankly, without much thought. His smile. I was turned down, and later I realized that he was a true Apple fan, expecting me to answer something like, “What design detail in iOS 11 impressed you the most?” Questions like that.

After that interview, I realized that with the constant innovation of The Times, designers should not only focus on the interaction design of one brand (such as Android and Apple), but instead, designers’ skills and knowledge should be broad enough to meet different design patterns.

Therefore, in order to expand my skills, I started using an iPhone and joined a study group, while reading the iOS Human-computer Interaction Guide and The Design guidelines of Google Material Design. And learn Julie Zhuo’s Article on how to do product reviews, and start app reviews.

You know what it’s like to get better and better at it? I had this feeling for two months. I never expected to feel so strong and accomplished! I became more aware of design patterns and how designers have the ability to communicate more effectively with developers and make it easier for users to learn.

The design strategy

Lately, I’ve been asking myself these questions:

  • Why do some products succeed while others with the same design pattern fail? Like article sharing.
  • Why do some products have a huge audience, even if it’s not easy to use? Such as Snapchat.
  • Why do some cool visual styles make a product lose its flavor? Wikipedia, Facebook.

I looked through my idol’s Twitter account and found some factors that could influence the product.

One idea that strikes me is the network effect, the moat of Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Amazon. Google’s famous pet adoption program is a network effect, with both a supply side (shelters) and a demand side (people who want pets). There are special strategies for enabling different functions to solve the “chicken and egg” problem and achieve network effects.

The Growth framework is another strategic framework I use in my design. I once had trouble upgrading the registration process because it wasn’t enough to just upgrade the interaction details. Wouldn’t it be nice if designers thought about what’s behind the registration process? These issues can be addressed by considering business goals; How do we acquire users? How do we engage our users? How can we deliver value? (Check out Chamath Palihapitiya’s video to learn more.)

At first, I didn’t think these frameworks would help me in my interview; After all, I was just a junior designer. But luckily, it worked. These frameworks give me a complete picture of the entire product development process and put me on the same page as the product manager. (See Julie Zhuo for what we expect from our product manager.)

Experience in industry

To be honest, I was jealous of my friends who got into UX design internships at Google with good resumes.

Later I realized that I was wrong. When I had two internships, I was really exposed to the real work environment. I began to learn these things:

Design: I learned how to break down a huge task to “build a design system” and in less than a month learned how to use Html to improve visual design and how to use a growth framework to translate business goals — “improve retention” — into actual design goals so I could work quickly.

Persuasive: I learned how to engage engineers in brainstorming sessions to develop their sense of the hero, and how to get the CEO to accept that he cares about delivering results.

Facilitation: I learned how to gather ideas with limited resources, how to get constructive feedback from customer success managers (a new concept in the Saas industry) and data analytics engineers, and how to put my brain to work on a more interesting project.

I am grateful for all the challenges I have faced and, most importantly, for the help and support I have received. My CEO even introduced my design at the 2017 Tencent Corporate Partners Conference. The feeling of being able to execute my design and get it done was exhilarating.

conclusion

At the beginning, I hoped to work in my dream company with my design skills. But along the way, I’ve learned how important these three UX lessons are:

  • Design patterns help me make more elaborate designs, which makes both engineers and users happy.
  • The design strategy gave me a whole new perspective on the design challenges I set myself.
  • Industry experience has helped me assert myself as a UX designer.

I’m grateful that I took the initiative and landed at the company of my dreams.

I am looking forward to starting my new learning journey and growing iteratively. Hello, Google!

If you like this article, please give me a thumbs up so that more people can see this article. Thank you very much! 👏

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