The audience was not designers
How2B is an Armenian business and technology outlet — news, finance podcasts, salary and tax calculators, career explainers. Its readers are making decisions about work and money, not looking for craft tips. Armenian Code Academy, where I lead the design practice, made this episode with them in December 2024 for one specific person: someone who has heard that UI/UX is a good career, does not know what the job involves, and is trying to decide whether to commit to it.
How2B published the full question list, and it is a fair one. What UI/UX is. What problems a designer solves. Examples of bad design and good design. Why projects matter. The stereotypes. The purpose of design. Which skills are required. How long it takes to learn. How to choose a course. Three recommendations for people starting out. And, last, how to work out whether you are actually suited to this.
A school asking its own instructor how to choose a course is an obvious conflict of interest, so the answer has to be one that does not serve the school. Judge a course by whether it makes you build things that get criticised by people who are not grading you. A curriculum list and a roster of tools tell you very little.
The answers that hold up outside the video
Problem before tool. The route into this work is not learning software; it is learning to see a problem — who is trying to do something, what is making it hard, and what would make the outcome clearer, faster, safer or less humiliating. Tools matter because they let you communicate an answer. Tools also turn over every few years, and the habit of finding the real problem does not.
Which is why “projects matter” is the least interesting-sounding item on that list and the most important one. You do not learn design by completing lessons. You learn it by picking a problem small enough to observe directly, making something, and finding out where it fails.
And a portfolio is evidence, not a gallery. A row of polished screens tells a reviewer you can operate Figma. What a product team wants to see is how you think when the brief is incomplete: the context, the constraints, the decisions, and the thing you deliberately left out and why. Three honest projects with the reasoning attached beat ten decorative ones.
How to tell whether it is for you
The last question in the set is the one people rarely ask out loud, and it deserves a straight answer rather than encouragement.
This work suits people who are curious about other people. Not people who like beautiful interfaces — people genuinely interested in why someone got confused, gave up, or did the thing the wrong way round. The second requirement is tolerance for critique. Design is the discipline where your work gets taken apart in front of others on a regular basis, and where “I like it” is never a sufficient defence. People who need their work admired burn out; people who want it tested get better quickly.
The third is patience for the unglamorous half: the research, the edge cases, the fourth revision, the meeting where you explain the same decision again. That is most of the job. Anyone deciding whether to start should know it before they pay for a course, not after.