Title: Create Your Own Professional ExperienceSlug: create-your-own-professional-experienceMeta (EN): Learn how early-career UX/UI Designers can boost their employability by applying UX thinking to small businesses and building real portfolio cases.Meta (PT): Descubra como UX/UI Designers iniciantes podem aumentar sua empregabilidade aplicando UX em pequenas empresas e criando cases reais para o portfólio.

The Reality of Small Businesses

Taking a clear-eyed look at the world of small business owners, one pattern stands out: a lack of solid planning. According to legal and accounting specialists, the vast majority of micro-entrepreneurs are people who ended up as business owners — entrepreneurship is a condition, not a calling. Despite limited administrative preparation, they have the technical knowledge and the will (or need) to make things happen. People start businesses for all kinds of reasons:

  • I'm really good at X and I want to sell it
  • I'm done having a boss — I can do this on my own
  • I need to prove myself to my family and friends
  • I was laid off and I want to bounce back
  • I inherited a business and have to keep it going

On the other side, there's a minority: people who are genuinely built to be entrepreneurs — with real administrative preparation and strategic instinct, even if they lack deep technical knowledge of their product. Their profile looks very different:

  • They have a natural drive to build, and set ambitious goals because of it
  • They come in with strategic vision and prior planning
  • They understand their market, competition, pricing, and sales processes deeply
  • They know their numbers, taxes, and legal constraints
  • They have a clear vision of their product and its potential
  • They're prepared to lead and manage teams

According to those same specialists, because most small business owners lack both the entrepreneurial calling and the administrative foundation, many businesses never gain real traction — they don't consolidate, and their financial reality is precarious. Year after year, they barely cover costs with no real profit generation. Worse: this reality often goes unnoticed, or if it is noticed, it gets ignored. Keeping even a small business financially healthy is no easy task.

But across both scenarios, there's one thing in common: from the least to the most prepared, all of them saw a business opportunity and decided to pursue it with whatever resources they had. And that's exactly where there's space for you to apply your newly acquired skills — because focusing on users in the creation or improvement of products can have a significant impact on business results. Far beyond design itself, the real value lies in seeing UX as a transformative and multiplicative force.

UX for Smaller Businesses

So where does a UX/UI Designer fit into all of this? If you think about it, the UX knowledge you already have can make a real difference. Your role isn't to save businesses — you're not an auditor, an administrative consultant, or a financial specialist. But your understanding of product can be enormously helpful, especially because these businesses were never built around the user. They were built around a simple premise: make a product and offer it to whoever wants to buy it. When you start paying attention to how these products are offered, and how customers find, buy, and use them, you'll notice gaps for improvement everywhere.

An important point: UX isn't exclusively for digital products. Digital is the big trend, the hottest market, and an enormously fertile space for designers to work — but it's not the only destination for this mindset. There's no right or wrong type of company for a UX Designer to operate in. Wherever there's a relationship between a product and a user, there's space for UX.

In short, smaller businesses are underserved by good UX thinking. Right now, many of them are losing money without knowing why: investing too much in product functionality while design could be preventing problems upstream; running lots of advertising without understanding why conversions are low; pricing wrong because they don't know their audience; missing the moment customers abandon a purchase; not seeing where competitors are winning. Since this is entirely new territory for them, your work of convincing, validating, and proving value will be substantial — but when results start coming in, it will be highly rewarding. And the results are absolutely possible.

How to Identify Your Opportunity

The most important factor here is your initiative. Businesses have problems they often don't see — or don't treat with the attention they deserve. If you, as a user, identify something that could be improved in any experience, that's your opportunity. You're probably thinking: "There must be thousands of those." There are. Keep your main objective in mind:

Prove your capability, mindset, and process by building a real case — which is exactly what companies and recruiters need to qualify you as a promising UX Designer.

Here's a sequence of actions you can start experimenting with right now, simply by opening your eyes to what's around you:

1. Pay Attention to Your Own Routine

Every day, you use dozens of products. Which ones give you a bad experience? A few examples: Does your pillow give you back pain? Is your toothpaste cap hard to open? Does your coffee mug burn your fingers? Why do you still have to queue for a number ticket just to buy meat at a butcher? Why are express checkout lanes in wholesale stores? In large shopping mall bathrooms, why do you wash your hands on one side and dry them on the other — crossing the whole room with wet hands dripping on a slippery floor? At a pet store, why isn't there staff trained to assist blind customers with guide dogs?

2. Choose a Problem and Observe Its Root

Pick one of these scenarios — ideally the one that frustrates you most, the one where you feel the pain most acutely. Define the problem clearly: where exactly is the pain point, what feeling does it generate, and what did you have to do to work around it?

3. Find Out If There's Already a Solution in Progress

Go deeper and find out how the company is currently handling the problem. Even if they've received multiple complaints and the fix seems straightforward, the issue may have reached complex internal levels that you can't access without being an employee or contractor. For the purposes of this initiative-driven project, if you can't find evidence of an active solution, assume there isn't one.

4. Talk to the Person in Charge

Before you start, check whether your project would even be welcome. Don't begin without someone at the company knowing about it. Prepare a communication approach that feels comfortable — a phone call, email, video call, or in-person meeting — and reach out to the right person. Tell them about your initiative and your interest in working on the problem, even in an "academic" capacity. And prepare yourself for a no — or even a cold reaction like "Who is this person who knows nothing about my business and wants to tell me what to do?" Have an answer ready for that.

5. Produce, Test, Observe, Learn

Now it's time to show what you can do. Run a solid UX process: research, user sessions, ideation, validation, and more. Pay attention to the details, document everything, ask questions, interact, and then develop a viable solution proposal. Based on real user experience with your solution, iterate as many times as needed to refine it. Keep the responsible person directly involved — so they develop a clearer picture of how your solution addresses a problem that wasn't being noticed or taken seriously, and so they genuinely see the value your discoveries are generating.

6. Build and Present Your Proposal

Gather all the insights collected, prepare your presentation, and lay out your proposed solution — specifying what's needed to implement it, how long it will take, costs involved, next steps, and more. Do this in the most organized and documented way possible: you're already building your portfolio case.

7. Close and Implement

With your case in hand, it's time to negotiate — because the next step is implementation. You've already discovered and validated the viability of your solution; now it needs to be put into practice, and the company is counting on you for that. Whether you charge for this work or offer it at no cost is a judgment call. If you charge, things can move faster because you can involve more people and use more resources. If you don't, the process will tend to be slower and more demanding. Either way, the recommendation is the same: the value of your work needs to be made crystal clear. Clients who don't pay rarely truly value the work — and as a result, even if your implementation is excellent, they tend not to follow through or give it the attention it deserves.

Conclusion

Initiative is one of the most differentiating factors in a UX/UI Designer's career. The more problems you identify and projects you take on, the more experience you accumulate — and your professional value grows far faster than it would by simply waiting for the perfect job opening. Have you ever taken an initiative like this? Share it in the comments!

Title: Create Your Own Professional ExperienceSlug: create-your-own-professional-experienceMeta (EN): Learn how early-career UX/UI Designers can boost their employability by applying UX thinking to small businesses and building real portfolio cases.Meta (PT): Descubra como UX/UI Designers iniciantes podem aumentar sua empregabilidade aplicando UX em pequenas empresas e criando cases reais para o portfólio.

The Reality of Small Businesses

Taking a clear-eyed look at the world of small business owners, one pattern stands out: a lack of solid planning. According to legal and accounting specialists, the vast majority of micro-entrepreneurs are people who ended up as business owners — entrepreneurship is a condition, not a calling. Despite limited administrative preparation, they have the technical knowledge and the will (or need) to make things happen. People start businesses for all kinds of reasons:

  • I'm really good at X and I want to sell it
  • I'm done having a boss — I can do this on my own
  • I need to prove myself to my family and friends
  • I was laid off and I want to bounce back
  • I inherited a business and have to keep it going

On the other side, there's a minority: people who are genuinely built to be entrepreneurs — with real administrative preparation and strategic instinct, even if they lack deep technical knowledge of their product. Their profile looks very different:

  • They have a natural drive to build, and set ambitious goals because of it
  • They come in with strategic vision and prior planning
  • They understand their market, competition, pricing, and sales processes deeply
  • They know their numbers, taxes, and legal constraints
  • They have a clear vision of their product and its potential
  • They're prepared to lead and manage teams

According to those same specialists, because most small business owners lack both the entrepreneurial calling and the administrative foundation, many businesses never gain real traction — they don't consolidate, and their financial reality is precarious. Year after year, they barely cover costs with no real profit generation. Worse: this reality often goes unnoticed, or if it is noticed, it gets ignored. Keeping even a small business financially healthy is no easy task.

But across both scenarios, there's one thing in common: from the least to the most prepared, all of them saw a business opportunity and decided to pursue it with whatever resources they had. And that's exactly where there's space for you to apply your newly acquired skills — because focusing on users in the creation or improvement of products can have a significant impact on business results. Far beyond design itself, the real value lies in seeing UX as a transformative and multiplicative force.

UX for Smaller Businesses

So where does a UX/UI Designer fit into all of this? If you think about it, the UX knowledge you already have can make a real difference. Your role isn't to save businesses — you're not an auditor, an administrative consultant, or a financial specialist. But your understanding of product can be enormously helpful, especially because these businesses were never built around the user. They were built around a simple premise: make a product and offer it to whoever wants to buy it. When you start paying attention to how these products are offered, and how customers find, buy, and use them, you'll notice gaps for improvement everywhere.

An important point: UX isn't exclusively for digital products. Digital is the big trend, the hottest market, and an enormously fertile space for designers to work — but it's not the only destination for this mindset. There's no right or wrong type of company for a UX Designer to operate in. Wherever there's a relationship between a product and a user, there's space for UX.

In short, smaller businesses are underserved by good UX thinking. Right now, many of them are losing money without knowing why: investing too much in product functionality while design could be preventing problems upstream; running lots of advertising without understanding why conversions are low; pricing wrong because they don't know their audience; missing the moment customers abandon a purchase; not seeing where competitors are winning. Since this is entirely new territory for them, your work of convincing, validating, and proving value will be substantial — but when results start coming in, it will be highly rewarding. And the results are absolutely possible.

How to Identify Your Opportunity

The most important factor here is your initiative. Businesses have problems they often don't see — or don't treat with the attention they deserve. If you, as a user, identify something that could be improved in any experience, that's your opportunity. You're probably thinking: "There must be thousands of those." There are. Keep your main objective in mind:

Prove your capability, mindset, and process by building a real case — which is exactly what companies and recruiters need to qualify you as a promising UX Designer.

Here's a sequence of actions you can start experimenting with right now, simply by opening your eyes to what's around you:

1. Pay Attention to Your Own Routine

Every day, you use dozens of products. Which ones give you a bad experience? A few examples: Does your pillow give you back pain? Is your toothpaste cap hard to open? Does your coffee mug burn your fingers? Why do you still have to queue for a number ticket just to buy meat at a butcher? Why are express checkout lanes in wholesale stores? In large shopping mall bathrooms, why do you wash your hands on one side and dry them on the other — crossing the whole room with wet hands dripping on a slippery floor? At a pet store, why isn't there staff trained to assist blind customers with guide dogs?

2. Choose a Problem and Observe Its Root

Pick one of these scenarios — ideally the one that frustrates you most, the one where you feel the pain most acutely. Define the problem clearly: where exactly is the pain point, what feeling does it generate, and what did you have to do to work around it?

3. Find Out If There's Already a Solution in Progress

Go deeper and find out how the company is currently handling the problem. Even if they've received multiple complaints and the fix seems straightforward, the issue may have reached complex internal levels that you can't access without being an employee or contractor. For the purposes of this initiative-driven project, if you can't find evidence of an active solution, assume there isn't one.

4. Talk to the Person in Charge

Before you start, check whether your project would even be welcome. Don't begin without someone at the company knowing about it. Prepare a communication approach that feels comfortable — a phone call, email, video call, or in-person meeting — and reach out to the right person. Tell them about your initiative and your interest in working on the problem, even in an "academic" capacity. And prepare yourself for a no — or even a cold reaction like "Who is this person who knows nothing about my business and wants to tell me what to do?" Have an answer ready for that.

5. Produce, Test, Observe, Learn

Now it's time to show what you can do. Run a solid UX process: research, user sessions, ideation, validation, and more. Pay attention to the details, document everything, ask questions, interact, and then develop a viable solution proposal. Based on real user experience with your solution, iterate as many times as needed to refine it. Keep the responsible person directly involved — so they develop a clearer picture of how your solution addresses a problem that wasn't being noticed or taken seriously, and so they genuinely see the value your discoveries are generating.

6. Build and Present Your Proposal

Gather all the insights collected, prepare your presentation, and lay out your proposed solution — specifying what's needed to implement it, how long it will take, costs involved, next steps, and more. Do this in the most organized and documented way possible: you're already building your portfolio case.

7. Close and Implement

With your case in hand, it's time to negotiate — because the next step is implementation. You've already discovered and validated the viability of your solution; now it needs to be put into practice, and the company is counting on you for that. Whether you charge for this work or offer it at no cost is a judgment call. If you charge, things can move faster because you can involve more people and use more resources. If you don't, the process will tend to be slower and more demanding. Either way, the recommendation is the same: the value of your work needs to be made crystal clear. Clients who don't pay rarely truly value the work — and as a result, even if your implementation is excellent, they tend not to follow through or give it the attention it deserves.

Conclusion

Initiative is one of the most differentiating factors in a UX/UI Designer's career. The more problems you identify and projects you take on, the more experience you accumulate — and your professional value grows far faster than it would by simply waiting for the perfect job opening.