It’s a truism, but that doesn’t make the advice to never stop learning any less meaningful. It is probably the number one bit of advice I offer to anyone in regards to career growth.
For better or worse, I see designers largely reading and passing around UX and design-focused tutorials – they’re reductive, simplistic, and repetitive. There was a post on Twitter or LinkedIn (now lost to my memory) describing this with far greater wit than I could hope to manage:
- Junior designers read Medium articles about design
- Senior designers write Medium articles about design
- Design leaders read articles about everything else
(Or something like this – bonus points if you can point me to the original post).
I’m not here to bury anyone who reads or writes a UX design article. I find value in them as much as anyone when they provide a new perspective on a problem and don’t just rehash arguments or present false expertise. It is far more critical, in my opinion, that we embrace the fact that UX roles are multi-disciplinary by nature, and expand our knowledge base outside of our core disciplines.
Learn new tools. I don’t mean learning Figma if you’re in Sketch, or Sketch if you still design in Photoshop. I mean: learn to use a tool that completely breaks the metaphors you’re used to. If you’ve never done it, try to learn a 3D modeling program like Blender (or Cinema 4D, Maya, etc) – and discover how difficult it is to throw out your habits and preconceptions and learn an entirely new toolset.
Learn about your company’s business. What is its language? How does your company make money? How does it make decisions? How does it plan to survive another year or decade (or century)?
Learn about biology, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. How do people grow? How do our bodies change as we age and does this change how we interact with the world around us? How does this change, based on a person’s place in society?
Learn about education and pedagogy. How do people learn? There’s no single answer, as you hopefully know, but there are many theories about the best way to teach different subjects to different groups. On any design task, we can only reduce complexity so much before the task cannot be completed. At this point, how do we educate users on the complexity that remains?
Learn. But don’t worry so much about learning about UX.