For three years, my LinkedIn headline said “UX Consultant.” It sounded professional. Legitimate. Like I knew what I was doing. It also meant absolutely nothing. “UX Consultant” is the professional equivalent of “I do stuff.” It’s a job title that could mean everything, so it means nothing. Like saying you work in “business” or specialize…

Five years ago, I hired a UX designer with exceptional soft skills. Articulate in meetings. Diplomatic with stakeholders. Created beautiful presentation decks. Responded to Slack within minutes with encouragement and emoji. Three months later, the project failed because they’d agreed to every terrible idea anyone suggested. Seventeen stakeholder requests. Fourteen contradictory features. Zero pushback. The…

Part 2 of the series on social media marketing for designers who’d rather be doing literally anything else. In Part 1, I told you that authenticity beats polish. That algorithms finally reward genuine content over growth-hacking bullshit. That your design instincts about quality were right all along. All of that is true. Here’s the part…

If you’ve been avoiding social media because it feels like a scam, the algorithms just caught up to your instincts. I’ve watched designers torture themselves trying to learn marketing for years (oh, hi, Ira!). They take courses on “growth hacking,” force themselves to post clickbait, and generally feel disgusted about the whole thing. Meanwhile, marketing…

If you need seventeen different skills just to get an entry-level job, maybe the problem isn’t your qualifications. We are hiring. A designer messaged me last week. She’d been “upskilling” for eight months. Figma courses, design systems bootcamps, user research masterclasses, prototyping workshops. She’d spent more time learning UI UX design skills than actually practicing…

Your beautiful portfolio won’t survive first contact with a real stakeholder meeting. Here’s what no UX design in education program wants to admit: most of what they teach you is performance art. You’ll spend months learning to create pixel-perfect prototypes, conducting user interviews about hypothetical problems, and crafting case studies that read like design fiction.…