Reddit mentions of Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (Strategyzer)

you don't need a business school to experience the core of this class ...

Here's a link to Steve Blank's HBR article on The Lean Startup. Also a series of free lectures that Steve Blank put up on  Udacity, called "How to Build a Startup" a course that over 500,000 people have viewed.    These lectures are supported by a book that Steve Blank wrote with Bob Dorf called The Startup Owners Manual, as well as a best selling business book by Alexander Osterwalder called  Business Model Generation. You may also want to see Alexander's other book, Value Proposition Design for more input/insight.

It seems like you're interested in UX design but not entirely sure what it entails. The role of a UX designer varies between companies and has changed over time. You can think of UX designer as someone who is skilled in interaction design, creating wireframes & protypes, user research, information architecture, etc. A bunch of skills smashed into one job title. Some skills of a UI designer includes visual design, color, layout, typography, etc.

From what I've seen, what companies are looking for these days when they say what a UX designer is that they want someone who can do both UX & UI to define, maintain, and grow a product with Product Managers. Product Managers are driven by business goals, you are driven by user goals. A Product Designer is becoming a popular term for this type of job. It's hard to find a UX job where all you do is wireframes, user research, and information architecture (as least with the big companies).

First, you need to think like a designer. Time to start reading some material. I took a class on Design Thinking at my university, and it has really helped me put into words what designers do. Link to the course materials.

You can find a bunch of lists of UX design books out there on the web. I started out by reading The Design of Everyday Things, a classic. Other books on my shelf are Design is Storytelling and Value Proposition Design. Not related to design, but during one of my internships I was given Everybody Writes and I recommend it because, well, everybody writes.

After you have a better understanding of what UX design is, start thinking about what it means for you and what you want to focus in. If you ask a bunch of designers why they do UX, you will get different answers.

From there, you need to start practicing. You can look up examples of side projects you can do as a UX designer. The most important thing here is to get critique from other people, learn from it, and iterate on it.

One common side-project is to redesign an app like Yelp. One thing I personally don't like about these projects is that they are typically "blue-sky" redesigns, or designs without constraints. This is fine to do when you're starting out, but to think like a Product Designer, you need to think about the business goals, make assumptions on why it's the way it is, and create constraints for your re-design. What's the user problem? What are the business goals? What are some ways I can solve these problems? What assumptions am I making for these designs?

Lastly, I think all UX/Product designers need to have some visual fundamentals down. Typography, layout, color, etc.--visuals are a huge part of the experience (along with copy, but thankfully I've had the chance to work with great copywriters). To get you started, Thinking with Type is a great book. I'm constantly looking at designs on Dribbble and Medium - Muzli for design inspiration. See something you like? Steal it and make it work for you.

Look at design blogs from big companies like Facebook, Google, and Airbnb. Stay up to date on what's happening like Mailchimp's redesign. Look at works from famous agencies like Collins. Watch YouTube videos from channel like The Futur.

Notice that I never mentioned any tools in this post. You won't become a UX design by learning html or js, those are for front-end devs. It may be nice for you to know, but not critical. You won't become a UX designer because you learned how to use Sketch or Adobe XD. Tools are constantly changing and are easy to learn. It's everything I mentioned above that's hard.

• The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf
  
• [Business Model Generation by A. Osterwalder] (http://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453755761&sr=8-1&keywords=business+model+generation)
  
• [Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want] (http://www.amazon.com/Value-Proposition-Design-Customers-Strategyzer/dp/1118968050/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1453755761&sr=8-2&keywords=business+model+generation)

Buy the book Value Proposition Design: http://www.amazon.com/Value-Proposition-Design-Customers-Strategyzer/dp/1118968050

Apply the book