
Are you having a difficult or stressful time breaking into UX? If the answer is yes, I hope you didn’t miss our Slack AMA session earlier today. If you did, you missed Doug Collins dishing out some really great advice – straight up and straight from the heart.
We talked about everything from imposter syndrome to working on open source projects for portfolio fodder. To continue the conversation, you can connect with Doug on our community forums.
If you didn’t make it because you didn’t know about it, joining our community is also the best way to get updates of upcoming sessions. To see what we discussed, or you want to revisit your own questions, here is a full transcript of the chat.
Transcript:

You can use the command /tz help to get time zone conversion assistance here on Slack


















































































Using this knowledge, he was eventually able to land jobs as a Software Engineer with Nordstrom, a contracted Interactive Designer and Team Lead working with a digital signage company, and his current UX Engineer role.
Doug specializes in streamlining existing inefficient systems to fit modern usability standards.








So. Onto the topic at hand.
Hawk already gave a very good TL;DR of my career progression, as well as a link to the medium version of events. You can read the long version of my story at my blog, http://lostmegabites.com/2016/06/15/from-homeless-to-ux-engineer/
It was a long road, but one that taught me so much about the corporate world, the technology sector, and my own abilities. I’m here to share my story, offer advice, and (most importantly) learn from the amazingly talented group of UX professionals and enthusiast here today. Let’s get rolling!




The biggest challenge I’m facing, which may be unique, is I have a lot of ux-adjacent experience. How do I avoid getting trapped into doing what I’ve already done.












In some ways I guess my problem is the same as @stevecrow and @frankenvision : How do I show I can do other things?





















































We all appreciate good UX when we see it and use it, however creating it from scratch is more difficult. We have lots of discussions (arguments) about how our app should look and flow, and as we all have different backgrounds and preferences we also have different opinions on UX. We obviously engage with our users and value their feedback, we’re also learning a lot from hands on experience as we just build things, make mistakes and improve it, however I feel we as a team need to be more confident and consistent in our UX abilities and deliverables. Reducing the time spent on iterations will speed up time to market for product improvements, so my thinking is that producing better quality UX earlier on will help us ship faster (yes I have my PM hat firmly on)


























































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