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5 Best UX Careers to Pursue in 2022

July 25, 2022

Recently, jobs sites have ranked UX design as the fifth most in-demand job in the technology domain. There are reasons to believe that the demand will continue to rise, in part because this job niche is maturing and constantly branching into more areas of specialization.

If you’ve been thinking about which aspect of User Experience you might specialize in, know that many different opportunities are available. In this article, I’ve teamed up with experts from the international jobs aggregator Jooble to explore the top five UX jobs in 2022.

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The Top Five Career Paths for UX Professionals

User Experience is a diverse and evolving field, so there are several paths you could choose to follow in seeking a successful career in this field. The UX industry benefits from the overlapping skillsets of several professions that transition well into User Experience.

If you’re a newсomer to User Experience, there are many UX career paths that you could potentially pursue. When you’re just breaking into User Experience, it’s often a good strategy to specialize and initially gain experience in a single aspect of User Experience. Over time, you can expand your horizons and learn other aspects of the profession. Now, let’s consider the top five positions in the field of User Experience.

1. UX Researcher

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced professional, you know that UX researchers play a crucial role in the UX design process. They are also in high demand in the field of User Experience. If you want to develop products that meet users’ needs and delight them as well, it is crucial that you know who your users are and what their needs are.

A UX researcher can apply many methods in researching user behaviors and needs to ensure their team delivers the best possible user experience for them. They elicit information from users using qualitative and quantitative methods, including user interviews, diary studies, and usability testing.

2. UX Writer

A UX writer plans and writes the microcopy for Web sites, applications, and other digital products. UX writing is part of the UX design process, and the industry recognizes the importance of UX writing as a career within the field. The clarity of the text in a product’s user interface helps users to navigate the product and impacts its user experience as much as any other aspects of UX design.

UX copy is something that users consume intuitively. No matter how beautiful and highly functional a UX design is, it won’t deliver satisfactory results if the UX copy lacks clarity, is misleading, or is grammatically incorrect. Good UX copy is more potent than you might ever imagine. It presents complex ideas in simple terms and helps users find what they’re looking for, without inducing any stress. Poor UX copy can ruin an otherwise good user experience.

3. UX Strategist

While UX design focuses on the creation of a design for a digital product, UX strategy takes care of the plan. A UX strategy is a detailed plan to ensure that a company’s brand identity and goals align with the desired user experience at every customer touchpoint. The UX strategist should develop this plan before design commences. Having a solid UX strategy enables the design production team to channel their energy into solving the right problems for existing and potential customers.

UX strategy combines the responsibilities of both the business and the design sides of product development. The primary focus of UX strategists is discovering the necessary points of alignment between the users’ needs and business needs and working to achieve that alignment. This enables the UX strategist to help guide design and business decisions and prioritize feature requests for the product.

4. Information Architect

Information architects, or IAs, represent another set of talents that are in high demand in the field of User Experience. Their goal is to help users find what they’re seeking in the simplest way possible. Most IAs focus on the findability of Web sites and other digital information spaces such as intranets. When working on a new Web site, an information architect considers the user’s journey across the site in determining how to logically decompose its information into pages, design its navigation system, and organize the information on each page or type of page.

Information architecture is a core part of a site’s UX design. An efficient information architecture helps users navigate through the pages and their content and easily find everything they need. IAs divide a site’s content into categories. When content strategists divide content into categories, they’re practicing information architecture. When UX designers sketch a top-level menu or a Web site’s navigation system, they’re practicing information architecture.

An information architect gives your Web site structure. Working in the profession involves the creation of sitemaps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation systems, and metadata. An information architecture is a blueprint of a site’s design structure that can evolve into wireframes and sitemaps for a project.

5. UX Designer

The user experience comprehends the user’s interactions with every aspect of a product or service. A user experience might entail navigating a mobile app, browsing a Web site, taking advantage of a service, or interacting with a physical product. The term user experience combines all aspects of these interactions. A good UX design makes products and services more efficient, delightful, and more accessible to all users.

UX designers help make an entire user journey seamless and easy. They have primary responsibility for designing every aspect of a product that a user experiences. The ultimate goal of any UX designer is to create functional, reliable, and usable products.

Conclusion

The industry of User Experience is gradually evolving into well-established disciplines. As the UX industry has matured, it has increasingly branched off into more areas of specialization. All of the positions I’ve mentioned in this article are in high demand among application-development startups and businesses whose focus is on Internet sales.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the job market, you’ll have noticed many different UX job titles, with new ones still coming up. However, the most sought-after, lucrative job opportunities in the field of User Experience are in those professions that I’ve included in this article. I hope this information will help you to make your decision about what profession you want to pursue in the UX industry. 

Independent Consultant

Kyiv, Ukraine

Alex StepanenkoAlex is a UX researcher with more than five years of experience. He has always been fascinated by the question of how people can interact with certain products or services more successfully than others. This interest prompted him choose the UX researcher path, studying users’ experiences and coming up with ideas on how companies can tailor their solutions to make users more satisfied with the business products they use. Alex started by freelancing and has become a well-known professional in this sphere. His favorite aspect of his work is meeting people to collect information about their vision of the ultimate product. Alex also enjoys conducting usability testing before he passes a completed design on to the development team. He always tries to put users at the very center of any project to ensure that they are comfortable interacting with the products or services he works on. He is currently working for Jooble, one of the leading job-search engines worldwide.  Read More

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