Reddit reviews Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

My advice is to follow 3 tracks.

• Build relationships. Find local meetings where people building products/companies or other designers go. Such as: 1 Million Cups, Open coffee club, Creative Mornings, CoFounders Lab, StartUp Grind, local UX meetups. Pick 1 weekly and go every week. Pick 1-2 others, go when you can. Talk to the people who run the group. See if they need any help checking people. Volunteer to do that. If you get to, be friendly and chat with people on the way in. This is your tribe. Don't feel like you don't belong b/c you are young or are checking them in (or whatever other excuse your mind might come up with). This is your opportunity to find out about what people are working on. Some people will be working on something that interests you, that you have the skills to help with (eventually if not now), and have a personality you could enjoy working with. Give 100% of these people your card. Tell them you do UI/UX on contract. Ask for their card. Talk to them more at the end of the meeting if you can. Not in a sales way. But in a get to know more about them way. Then follow up with an email shortly afterward, a few days to a week. And in 6 months again if you haven't connected since. Do this every week for 2-3 years and you will have your client base and reputation in town. If you need practice to feel confident doing the networking part, then practice. Your career counseling dept at college could probably help you practice. Friends can be good practice too. Comfort with networking is critical to running your own business. Your goal should be to eventually lead a recurring meeting.
  
  
• Build your skills. First college is great for learning some things. I believe it is terrible for learning UI/UX. Studying behavioral economics would probably be the most applicable, some psychology or data science as well. UI/UX moves too fast. But here are my recommendations for becoming good at UI/UX quickly:
  
  

1. Start using Sketch app by Bohemian coding. It is the current industry standard.
   
   
2. Sign up for Subform app wait list. It will probably be the next industry standard. But is not available yet.
   
   
3. Study design systems Practice using these elements to create screens. Download the Sketch file. Then grab the elements you need and create screens to build an app (preferably to solve a simple problem you care about). Start small. Practice designing quickly. Then go back and make details precise. Eventually you should be able to build your own design system like this.
   
   
4. Study material design and iOS design.
   
   
5. For inspiration in practice, look at examples on Dribbble, Behance, and at the apps you use everyday.
   
   
6. Get feedback from friends and family on the things you have designed.
   
   
7. Read books like Inspired, Seductive Interaction Design, Sprint, Product Leadership. There are many more.
   
   
8. Understand you need to know more than design to do contract work for small businesses. Your clients may often ask for one thing but really need something different. Study business in general. Read books and magazines about business models, industry shifts, etc. Good UX designers are always balancing user needs and business model needs. There is no formula for this. It takes practice. Lots of practice. Youth and inexperience here will be a challenge. Talk to as many people in their 30s/40+s about business lessons they have learned as you can. This knowledge will help your design.
   
   
9. Don't wait for the perfect idea to practice. Practice everyday.
   
   

• Build your savings. So you can go full-time at a co-working space. This is less direct advice. But you will need to have a few months of living expenses saved so one day you can dive in. A co-working space costs a few hundred per month but this is where your client base likely lives or goes to meetings occasionally. Being part of one shows you have a professional presence. And the serendipity at these places can be off the charts. And I highly recommend not working form home only for many reasons, sanity being an important one. Also, contract work can be feast or famine. I have had a handful of weeks in the past 4 years where I have needed to complete 60 billable hours work. This is more stressful than the weeks where I only have 20 billable hours b/c I save knowing work will be up and down.
  
  ----
  
  These are things that led me to where I am today. Others may have completely different or contradictory advice. But these are my go to methods. And most of my clients in the past 2 years have come to me. I didn't call them, or post an ad. Generally they found me through a recommendation from a friend, LinkedIn, Twitter, slack group, Dribbble, or at a meeting.

If you are going for a internet business or any product-oriented business here a are the best books



BEST ONES

"The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses" (Eric Reis) - 2011

https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/

"Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works" (Ash Maurya) - 2010

https://www.amazon.com/Running-Lean-Iterate-Plan-Works/dp/1449305172

"Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days" (Jake Knapp - Google Ventures) - 2016

https://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/150112174X/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1550802301&s=gateway&sr=8-1

​

ALSO GO FOR (these are the ones that started organizing the Startup world)

"The Four Steps to the Epiphany" (Steve Blank) - 2005

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0989200507/

"Business Model Generation" (Alexander Osterwalder) - 2008

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/

I've talked with more than 100 companies (startups, dev/design shops, and enterprise cos) about how they do user research/testing (even started working on a startup related to it). There are 2 types of companies:

• Those with someone mostly dedicated to doing testing and user research (usually a startup founder)
  
• Those who think its too much of a hassle, which is the vast majority of those I spoke to
  The companies who do it best right now have week long sprints where the last couple of days (or early days the following week) are dedicated to testing with users. Jake Knapp at Google Ventures wrote an awesome how-to (http://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/150112174X).
  Basically the summary of my research is this: either dedicate a day or two exclusively to talking to users, or its not going to be a part of the process.

There is a fascinating book called "Sprint" that was written by two of the heads of Google Ventures that talks about this little robot and how they worked with this startup to come up with the cute "yaye" noise. It's a really cool read.

Here are a few:

Elements of User Experience, Jesse James Garret: What a typical experience design process is made up of.

Designing Interactions, Bill Moggridge: Seminal thoughts on Interaction Design, holds up to this day

Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug: One of the first books to gave the issues of IA and UX design a human, customer point of view.

About Face, Alan Cooper: Another take on the whole process, dives a bit deeper into every stage than Garret's book.

Designing For The Digital Age, Kim Goodwin: Human-centered digital products

Sprint, Jake Knapp: A condensed prototyping methodology

100 Things To Know About People, Susan Weinschenk: How people think

There are a few more Product Design related books I recommended in another thread.

IDEO's design thinking methodologies are also a great resource:

Design Kit, A book and toolkit about human centered design

Circular Design, A guide for holistic design, organization friendly.

Cheers

I'm not a UX designer, but I have a psych background and have dabbled in UX as a business owner/developer.

As others have mentioned, it can definitely be a good fit. A psych education will help you more intuitively understand the cognitive and emotional processes that users go through when interacting with a product, and it also gives you a leg up on the research side.

A UX designer that I worked with recommended reading up on Google's design methodology. Specifically, he recommended the book Sprint which outlines their framework in detail.

You are providing no specifics. None. Just what you aspire to your toy to do. I can't give you feedback on your aspirations, half the toys on the market spout aspirations about teaching children valuable things.

​

\>Since most adults are clueless on what profession, career, calling to pursue. Your children will have a taste of it when they are young so they'll be able to figure out which one is for them.

This is utter BS. Playing with a toy focused around a career teaches you nothing about what that career is like.

Build a prototype, go test it with potential customers. Check out Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days.

Check out;

• Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days" by Jake Knapp
  
  
  This book really is great and helped me to create a startup in 24 hours. Below is my startup;
  
  
  
• Desert Storm
  
  
  It really gets you to think of speed and tests your idea without investing too much into something that might not work.
  
  
  Ideally, management will be learnt on the way and shouldn't be too much of the focus when starting up a business. You need to focus on getting your product out to the market asap and prove your business model works. From this point, everything else will follow.
  
  
  I hope this book helps you out and wish you all the best of luck! Let me know if you need any other advise.

I'd second all these and add

• https://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/150112174X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499489674&sr=8-1&keywords=sprint
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/ref=pd_sim_14_8?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0307887898&pd_rd_r=T1PBJEZ7FD6W6AT5Z98H&pd_rd_w=Y6d2i&pd_rd_wg=bgZJB&psc=1&refRID=T1PBJEZ7FD6W6AT5Z98H
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/DevOps-Handbook-World-Class-Reliability-Organizations/dp/1942788002/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1499489786&sr=1-1&keywords=devops
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Skills-Software-Developers-Manual/dp/B0158SJ3EM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1499490040&sr=1-1&keywords=john+sonmez

The robot is very similar to the one mentioned in Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas which was backed by Google Ventures

I'd recommend reading the book Sprint by Jake Knapp. He developed a super cost and time efficient method for startups to see if there is in fact a demand for their product before dumping tons of money into it. Check it out -> Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days https://www.amazon.com/dp/150112174X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_urQAxbAD06ZS6