Everyone's telling you to learn Figma shortcuts, learn AI this, learn AI that…and build more case studies and take another course.
I want to tell you the stuff that actually made me a better design practitioner, and they’d make you better, too:
1. Work a customer-facing job. Retail. Support. Sales. It doesn’t matter which. Spend a few months watching real people struggle with real problems. Nothing else will give you more empathy. Ever.
2. Study fields that are not UX design. Behavioural economics. Cognitive psychology. Improve class or Toastmasters. The best UX insights I've had came from books and extracurricular activities that had zero actual design in them.
3. Deliberately use bad products. Don't just rage-quit an app! Sit with the friction and diagnose it. What decision led here? What assumption broke? This trains your eye faster than any design critique.
4. Present your work to people who don't care about design. Not your design team. Your parents, your partner, your non-designer bestie, a neighbour, a skeptical software engineer. If you can't explain your decisions to them, your thinking isn't clear enough yet.
5. Do nothing. Intentionally. Walk, sit in a coffee shop, stop consuming content. I've seen myself plateau the fastest when I didn’t give my brain space actually to connect dots.
You don’t need another course on your resume to become a better designer.
Learn sideways, meaning learn from places outside your direct field rather than just going deeper into design itself.
Start there!