Discover a Career: UI/UX Designer

Are you planning to become a UI/UX designer? UI/UX designing is undoubtedly one of the most in-demand and popular professions that can help you earn a decent income. Only if you plan to become an expert in what you do, there’s no ending to your income growth. However, before you start daydreaming about being a professional and successful UI/UX designer, you must be aware of what it entails. Our short guide on UI/UX designing will help you discover this profession just right!

What Is UI UX design?

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) usually go together because where one’s job ends is where the other begins. UI usually consists of the layout of an application, including buttons, text, fonts, colors and every micro-interaction between a user and an application/software. We can summarize it as the aesthetic role in design. While UX is determined by how the users interact with the software. They set out to optimize how easy or how difficult it is for the user using the interface the UI designer created. Thereby creating an exciting experience for customers/users while navigating the application. UI designers are tasked with how the interface looks while the UX designer is tasked with how the interface operates.

There is actually a psychological aspect to a UX designer as their goal is a more customer/user-oriented approach, which includes design based on user research, information architecture, interaction design, usability testing, and content strategy. However, UI/UX Design is not to be confused with website designing as a web designer does the work the UI designer does on apps for a website but does not go as in depth into UX because a website is a bit more static compared to a software/app that constantly needs to evolve.

Required Skills and Education Level:

The first and foremost effective way to gain recognition and a handful expertise in a field is by learning the skills that coordinate with the profession/job. Here, in terms of being a UI/UX designer, there are numerous skills that you can learn, practice, and improve to enhance your portfolio in preparation for a successful career as a designer. Along with these skills, it’s always crucial to study the right courses and get the necessary degrees to open the door to any organization. Now, if you’re to this, let’s go ahead and explore both these concepts below.

Skills:

Applied Skills:

To enter the UI/UX designer field with some knowledge of its competency, it’s always better to gain familiarity with some of the tools and concepts used in the field so that applying them professionally is not foreign. For this, some of the tools and concepts include:

• Research for performing jobs according to the audience
• Web development languages such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript
• Information architecture
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Improvement in visual communication and language

Soft Skills:

While you master the technical requirements of becoming a UI/UX designer, it’s always great to practice some soft skills that may help you perform better and more efficiently in the field. These include:

• Growing curiosity
• Practicing empathy for positive customer experience
• Improved communication with elements of storytelling
• Understanding collaboration tactics

Education Level:

Since UI/UX designing is a technical job that involves plenty of technical services on software/applications, it requires advanced level education. For many institutions and companies that hire professionals in this field, an employee having a higher level of education is more reliable than one who has only gained knowledge through practice.

Considering this, it’s best to enhance your professional growth and benefits to the fullest by advancing your educational level in the UI/UX designer field. The higher education levels required in this field include:

• Bachelors
• Masters
• MBA (optional)
• PHD (optional)

Salary Comparison:

Although UI/UX designing is an ever-growing job prospect and thanks to its huge demand today, it is one of the top five in-demand skills according to the reports presented on LinkedIn. Now, let’s talk about the estimated salary of a UI/UX designer. This can be a bit difficult to analyze since this profession is relatively new, and different countries have their criteria that involve the need and presence of a UI/UX designer in their industries. However, the earning and salaries of a skilled UI/UX professional and a fresh graduate can differ.

If we analyze a global estimation, a source confirms that a UX designer’s highest paying annual salary is around $53,000. At the same time, Switzerland is recorded to pay the highest average UI/UX designer salary of up to $101,000. Additionally, to analyze where you should kick start your UI/UX designing career, it’s also beneficial to explore what salary different countries are paying to an expert/newbie on an average basis. Here’s a chart showing average salaries from 3 major countries.

We would notice the salary in Nigeria is low when scaled with other countries and that is because Nigerian market is not fully developed for this profession. But we have been seeing improvements over the last 2 years with banking companies hiring UI/UX designers and it is only a matter of time before the rest of the county catches on.

Future Market:

According to the U.S Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall growth of the UX designing profession will be around 3%, being a year-on-year growth through 2028. According to the specific sources, even CNN Money predicts that the need for UX designing and its professional growth will grow 18% in the coming ten years (starting from 2015). Considering this, if you opt for becoming a UX designer, there’s a great chance that the coming age will help you become a more skilled UX professional, allowing you to explore more opportunities to grow in your professional career and gain a higher salary above the average.

Famous People:

Now that we’ve discussed everything regarding the process, skills, and demand of a UX designer in today’s tech world, it’s time you evaluate whether you’re ready to be a part of this competitive professional field or not.

But wait! Before you do that, are you looking for inspirations or role models whose success can help you evaluate how good you can do in this field? Well then, let’s talk about some popular professional UX designers today – according to the LinkedIn and internet reports today.

• Luke Wroblewski:

Product Director at Google and Author of” Mobile First “

If you know Google, you may know that many highly professional and skilled experts are working behind it every day to make it the go-to internet solution for everyone globally. One such name who has built tons of successful software that billions of people worldwide utilize is Luke Wroblewski. Not just that, but he is an internationally recognized digital product leader.

Knowing a person with so much expertise and talent surely makes him an influential person to follow on LinkedIn.

• Farai Madzima:

UX Lead at Shopify, Organizer of Pixel Up! Conference

Another well-known and popular name on the UX professionals list is the current UX lad of Shopify, Farai Madzima. While he has spoken at various UX and design conferences for a long time, his biggest achievement was building banking products that were successfully utilized all over Africa.

To get in touch with him, you can follow him on LinkedIn here. 

• William Ntim:

Senior UX Designer at PayPal

William has had over 6 years of experience as a UX designer where he worked for renowned companies like HostGator, Plegr, Home Depot and Cornell University before he joined PayPal early this year. William has also applied his expertise in many other aspects such as speaking in UX webinars, and he is the published author of “1010 Random UX Tips”.

Follow William on LinkedIn.

• Oti Eboigbe

UX Designer at IBM

Oti is Skilled in the use of UX industry standard software (Sketch, Axure, Adobe XD), wireframing, prototyping, user research, mobile app design, information architecture, data analysis programming languages (VBA, Python, and SQL), and presenting technical information to senior management. She joined IBM as a UX Designer early 2021.

Get in touch with Oti on her LinkedIn account.

Conclusion:

So that’s it! Now that you know who to follow and how to fulfill your dreams of becoming a professionally successful UX designer, it’s time to make those dreams come true. It is never too early to set precedence. Start by taking courses like Programing I and Graphics & Animation offered by 1010 coding to develop your analytical skills. Good Luck!