Email letter to get User Interface Design Specialist job

There are lots of graphic designers out there and more people are filling the industry every month. A good designer is the key to a beautiful, easy to use website and a bad designer can cost you lot more than just salary.

As a graphic designer, how do you stand apart from the rest of the crowd? What do you do to make sure, you don’t have to stand in line for getting your dream job?

First and foremost; you must forget about everything you learnt about getting a job. Forget sending your resumes and listing with employment agencies. Second: you must develop a specialty, something that makes you work at the cutting edge of the graphic design industry.

There are many things you may be able to pick but let’s assume you pick User Interface Design Specialist. Sounds interesting, sexy and cutting edge. Most designers also do the user interface but a good UID specialist makes it easy for you to use a website. They follow the “don’t make me think” commandments. They go out of their way to make sure, site users, find what they are looking for easily and quickly.
As a User interface Specialist you can earn lot more money than a graphic designer.

Simply pick a startup, mid or large level company and do the following:

Look at their current site and redo the front-page, register, log in and product/service pages so they are max three clicks away from any link. Create a flow of; how the storyboard should play in, increasing the time spent, repeat traffic while decreasing the bounce rate. This means at times, you will have to have a single focus (when someone is actually in the buying loop, don’t push anything else and let them finish their purchase). Other times you may want to make sure, you present the next possible choice, for the user to click on something else. Amazon does a good job with this with “people who bought this, also bought this”.

The most important point of this is “whatever the page, the user should understand what it does”. This is the difference between a Designer and user Interface specialist.

Create an easy well presented user interface for a company of your choosing (startups are the best, they are all looking for a good UI RockStar) and get in touch with them via email. It is always better to be introduced but as long as you have done a good job, you can directly approach the main decision maker via email. I’m assuming you have the email of the person you are contacting. Here is the email pitch.

Headline: Don’t make me think interface for (site name)
This is just a sample headline, you can write your own

Email body:

Dear Mark, I think you have an (excellent, unique, interesting, cool, amazing) idea. As a user of your site and as a young self-acclaimed UI specialist, I have done some work on how your site metrics can be improved. The key is to make sure; the first time user can easily and quickly understand each page. Your concept is great but when I visited the site, the presentation is not clear. I have attached some UI flows. Would love to meet with you, over coffee, to show you, how we can nail the overall User Interface based on “Don’t make me think” principal. If you like what you see, you pay for the coffee, if you don’t, I’ll foot the bill. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Regards, Melinda Bliss

P.S. Even the designer of Pinterest was a young self-acclaimed User Interface Specialist. There are more of us out there.