🦆 Interaction Nerds by UXA | F23.13
The Dead Week Issue: Career Prep Day Takeaways and fun UX games! Finish your semester strong 💪
👋 Announcements — Good luck on finals week!
Hi UXA Family! Thank you to everyone that came out to our events this past week! 🎉 We have more up our sleeves so stay tuned for more fun and educational events in the future! 🧐
We hope everyone is well rested and pumped to finish the semester! Remember to keep warm and take care of yourself! 🍂 We have a super chill issue for y’all today, so sit back, relax, and stay strong through the last classes of the semester! 🌼
⏰ UXA x UXGO — Career Prep Day Recap
Written & edited by: 🐳 Alana Wu
Missed our Career Prep Day over the weekend with UXGO? 😥 Forgot to take notes because you were too busy being in awe of the awesome guests? 🤩 Check out these key takeaways!
🤓 Design Education vs. Industry
Students like us getting a design education (ie. CMU) can distinguish ourselves from the thousands of bootcamp designers by diving deep and developing expertise in specific skills. 🧗
Leverage your own background to stand out. After you have the foundational design skills, leverage your unique set of experiences and perspectives. 🤔
🚗 Three key skills for finding a design job (early career):
Storytelling
Design process
Self-branding
🏃♂️ Applying to jobs
Finding a job is a job of its own. You have to invest the time. ⏰
Timeline is key when applying. Not having your application materials ready at the right time is akin to failing. 😔
Even if your portfolio is half unfinished, put it out there and get feedback. That’ll always be more effective than waiting until it’s “perfect”. 🏋️
📍 You need to deeply understand why UX is for you.
to answer during interviews
to guide your learning & application process
🪢 Different companies have different design philosophies.
Do research on what philosophy they have and apply that in how you answer interview questions and frame case studies
📄 Resume Writing
This is the most important step - critical to getting to any of the other phases.
There’s a lot of outdated misinformation on what’s best for resume-writing. Be careful who you listen to.
It’s okay to put things you have lower proficiency in on your resume. The purpose of the resume is to get to the next phase, so keywords are critical. 🔍
🧑💻 Interviews - General
Even if you don’t have the “perfect UX case study”, that’s okay. How you tell the story matters far more than what kind of project it is. 👁️
Make your answers clear & concise - frame in terms of a single takeaway. ⭐️
You don’t always have to give an example for every question. If the interviewer is interested, they’ll follow up & ask for an example. 🙋
🧑💻 Interviews - Common Interview Questions
🎨 What is the difference between UX & UI?
Use an example of a project you did to explain where you practiced UX design, and where you practiced UI design
🧐 How would you describe your design process?
Using an example of your own project, give a quick overview of the process, then focus on the most important aspects, like refinement or research.
⚖️ How would you balance customer needs with business needs?
Again preferably using an example, find where needs are integrative vs distributive (do they compete, conflict, or create value?)
If you don’t have work experiencee, this is a great opportunity to talk about working on design projects in clubs or school projects.
🖼️ Case Studies
✍️ Build your case study along the way during projects.
During the project, think about how you can uniquely contribute and focus on that aspect 👯
Make sure your solution clearly matches your problem statement 🧭
🙈 Fun - Skill-building UX Games!
Written and edited by: 🦝 Caleb Sun
Assignments got you down? Need a break from studying for your final? Check out these games that build design skills while you play
🔗 Color
How is your color picking going for your latest project? 🎨 This game challenges you to match colors based on core principles of color theory, and is super relaxing for when you’re taking a break from those assignments! 😪
🔗 Designercize
Checked out for break but still want to keep your skills sharp? ✨ Check out this generator, that gives random whiteboard challenges to keep you on the top of your game! 💪
🔗 The Bézier Game
Hate the pen tool? 🖊️ Want to make crisper, cooler graphics? 🤯 This game is a great way to build digital drawing skills! ✍️
🔗 User Inyerface
Can’t get enough suffering from finals week? 😭 Check out this game. Enough said.
🤔 Who’s behind the scenes?
The editors behind this week’s issue are 🥸 Kaitlyn Ng, 😈 Sophie McGrady, 🧸 Ahana Banerjee, 🕺 Arin Pantja, 🍳 Evelyn Lui, 🚐 Sherry Chen, 🐳 Alana Wu, and 🦝 Caleb Sun.
🥰 Follow Us
We look forward to co-curating future content with you! Let us know what you think about the content and send us some good vibes through these channels below.
Instagram | Facebook | Linkedin | UXA Website
🌱 Join the Community
Join the Slack channel to get updates on upcoming events, learn about cool resources and opportunities, ask questions about anything HCI, and much more.
Yay for career prep day it was so fun!