UX Careers: An Interview with Cory Lebson

Getting into User Experience

Janet: You recommend that UX professionals take charge of their career and pick their superpowers, as opposed to trying to be a UX unicorn. How do UX professionals go about choosing their own set of superpowers?

Cory: Just as for a superhero, the superpowers choose you. As a UX professional, you will find that you are naturally better at some aspects of User Experience than others. However, even within your areas of natural talent, you may not enjoy doing work relating to all of them. When you pick your superpowers, you are really identifying the universe of superpowers that have chosen you, then within that universe, selecting those activities that you most enjoy doing. Chapter 11 of my book reviews a wide range of UX-oriented activities that I’ve grouped under a number of UX professions. Beyond reading my book or other references, UX professionals need to try out different things to realize where their strengths lie. At the start of Chapter 11, there’s a great narrative by Tracey Lovejoy who talks about exactly how you can identify your strengths and interests.

Janet: Is it ever too early or too late to move into a UX career?

Cory: Last year, a local high school asked me if I’d take on an intern for a few weeks as part of their senior-year internship program. I agreed and since, at that point, I had started to write The UX Careers Handbook, the activities I gave her to do related to researching some topics for the book, as well as actually helping me with some UX research I was doing for a client. She knew that she was generally interested in technology, social science, business, and creative activities, but was not yet sure how those puzzle pieces fit together. However, her exposure to User Experience over the course of this internship gave her some insights into one potential avenue for her own career. The last I heard, she was considering a college offering a course of study that would lead her into a UX profession. So, no, it’s never too early to move toward a UX career.

Is it ever too late? Not as long as someone is willing to continue to learn and grow their knowledge and skills. In fact, continual learning is so important for UX professionals that the book dedicates two whole chapters to this topic: Chapter 2 is about formal-education pathways, which don’t actually always have to be UX related. Chapter 3 about taking advantage of more informal educational opportunities. By learning, by practicing, and by doing, it’s always possible to move into a UX career—pretty much from anywhere!

Interacting with Other UX Professionals

Janet: How can leadership in a professional organization or volunteerism affect a UX career?

Cory: Before 2008, I was a happy usability consultant and enjoyed my work. I did go to some conferences and events—sometimes to listen to speakers and sometimes to speak or network with my peers, but that was the extent of my involvement in the UX community.

Then in 2008, Lisa Battle, at that time, President of the DC chapter of UPA, suggested that I should consider running for the UPA DC board. It sounded like fun, so I accepted the offer to run and joined the board. In 2009, Lisa stepped down, and I found myself the new President of the chapter. It was in that year that I started to realize how powerful UX leadership could be. People in the DC community who I’d never met before would come up to me and know all about me, even though I was just meeting them for the first time. I noticed the same thing happening with other board members, too.

My social-media numbers and in-person UX connections started growing to numbers that I had never really imagined before. When I got pulled into UXPA International, I observed the same thing happening on a more global scale. I was already on a freelancer path back in 2008, but with the power of all these new connections, I got all the freelance user research and UX training work I could handle via a network that my UXPA leadership activities made much stronger. Even if I had chosen to be an employee of a company, I imagine that the massive network I gained from my UX leadership activities would have been quite helpful in many ways.

So, for me personally, one of the biggest career benefits of UX leadership turned out to be the development of a huge network of other UX professionals. But UX leadership is also very exciting in and of itself and can help balance out the frustrations that most people experience from time to time in their day job. It also feels really good to get to help others in their own career. In fact, it was because of my UXPA leadership activities that I realized how much I wanted to help guide other UX professionals in their careers, which is what inspired me initially to write my book!

Janet: As an independent consultant, how do you interact with other consultants without jeopardizing your future projects?

Cory: User Experience is not a zero-sum game—that is, if I am chosen to work on a project, the result is not that my UX colleagues will no longer have work. In fact, once companies realize the value of UX professionals, they’ll often start to build out their UX resources, both with employees and consultants. Also, particularly in major metropolitan areas, there is often more work, both for employees and freelancers, than there are qualified people to do that work. Even beyond the fact that there is generally enough work to go around, User Experience itself tends to be a social set of professions. It just feels natural for us to want to interact with and get to know our colleagues and not feel like competitors.

User Experience as an Adventure

Janet: You have said that the key lesson of The UX Careers Handbook is to keep your eyes and mind open and always be prepared for the next adventure. Can you tell us about a particular adventure that launched your career to a new level?

Cory: First off, I think of a UX career as the whole of your UX involvement, paid or unpaid, day job or other activities, networking, learning, and so on. So, with respect to what I call a UX adventure—which, if someone Googles that term, I’m proud to say I get the top hits!—having your career reach new heights doesn’t necessarily mean a great, new VP position. It could mean doing an exciting job relating to UX stuff, then getting to do more exciting UX stuff.

If I had to pick adventure, I’d say my involvement with UXPA DC and UXPA International over the course of nine years, which was certainly an adventure that launched my career to a new level by building my UX network tremendously. However, adventures don’t always need to be so big. It’s actually all the exciting little adventures that have led to more exciting little adventures that thrill me the most: Whether writing the book or articles—like those I’ve written for UXmatters!—or blog posts; speaking at a conference or a meetup: doing a training video; or just participating in UX events all over the world, these UX adventures not only drive me to want more UX adventures, but the impact of one UX adventure seems to lead right to the next UX adventure.

Janet: Have you ever had a serendipitous connection unexpectedly lead you to an exciting project?

Cory: All the time! But at this point, nothing seems truly unexpected. I’ve grown to understand that the best thing you can do for your career is to keep setting things in motion—one after another, never stopping. Eventually, there will be so many things you’ve set in motion that you can forget they’re even there. Then, surprise—a new serendipitous thing that’s not really serendipitous pops on your radar. It’s true for UX adventures and for life in general, as long as you open yourself up to the possibilities.

Cory’s Book

You can find out more about Cory’s book The UX Careers Handbook, shown in Figure 2, on the book’s companion Web site.