I am sure you wondered (or probably not) what happened in the last 5 weeks as you noticed I haven't been blogging.
A lot happened in the last month and I kinda had other priorities.
But here i am again hopefully with great stories for all of you interested in UX.
The course? DONE. Yes. my portfolio is online, my resumé is done, i am building a cover letter, elevator pitch, online marketing strategy and all these amazing things that will allow me to get that job and start doing amazing things.
So let's take a step back, what happened meanwhile?
I'll start with the most important change. I have a new mentor. My previous one moved to Australia which made it very hard to keep having ongoing feedback due to the different timezones.
My new mentor is Wojciech Hupert, you can see his portfolio here: https://www.behance.net/WojciechHupertDesign
Wojciech gave me a new boost! He really motivated me again and gave me another perspective on the course and its content. Always very supportive Wojciech took the time to review previous submissions and gave me ideas on how to improve them.
If you remember, in the last post I had created a Style guide for Taskly.
This was the last step before starting refining Taskly Design.
Something that has been evolving over the time - Design is a living thing. It really is.
Before all the refinements and the creation of the portfolio, (you can find a link in the end), the 8th module of the course was all about AB Testing.
AB testing is a very important process so we can validate hypothesis and get rid of some of our biases.
The process is very simple, let's say you believe a particular tweak in the design of whatever you are working on can improve user conversion. Well you take two designs, the one you already have, called the control and you create the variation design. Then you create an online AB Test sessions where you ask fictitious or real users if you have the chance to actually chose which design the prefer or simply to perform a task within these two solutions.
After that you will have enough data to validate or not your initial hypothesis.
In my case, I thought that having copy int he sign up page explaining that the sign up process would only take one step would actually improve conversion rate. And I was right!
Taskly AB Test session.
Another important notion was the AARRRR or Startup Metrics for Pirates.
AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue.
This si really important if you want to understand how to make the most of your business and maximise revenue.
After this module, the creation of the Portfolio started. And this is where I started understanding what I had accomplished over the last 7 months. It allowed me to take a step back and thing about the whole process again. From the first submission to the last I know had to tell a story and present everything into an interview ready portfolio.
And so I did: Check my UX Portfolio.
And that is it folks! well not really... the hard work starts now. Why would a company hire me ? Ok, I learned a couple of things, I have a good UX case but is it enough ? No.
I am currently working in my online marketing strategy. How am I going to put myself out there and convince people I deserve a place in the UX world ?
For the next couple of weeks I will be working on the following things:
- Improve my front-end dev skills (www.simonw3.com) - useful as a ux designer to have those!
- Make sure my social media pages (twitter, linkedin) are coherent.
- Create a resumé.
- Create a mission statement.
- Create an elevator pitch.
- Create a cover letter.
- Be active on social media sharing articles of interest.
- And of course... keep blogging!
So come back next week and it was nice to see you again!!
Cheers.
