Business: Hiring UX Professionals

There are countless articles on the Web whose purpose is to help UX designers write stellar resumes or craft compelling portfolios. But through my decades-long career as a UX professional and leader, I’ve discovered other ways of helping candidates stand out. Although some of them get less fanfare, they are no less important. The observations that I’ll share in this column come from experience—not only from my own failures, successes, and learnings as a job applicant, but also as a manager who has reviewed hundreds of resumes and portfolios and interviewed dozens of candidates for UX design jobs.

Therefore, in this column, I’ll go beyond the usual advice about creating your resume and portfolio. Instead, I’ll touch upon some other ways in which UX design candidates can stand out from other job applicants. Think of the following tips as additional arrows in your quiver that, if you use them right, can better arm you for success. These tips include the following:

• Being selective
• Embracing the cover letter
• Showcasing your initiative Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss what skills are essential and desirable for a UX Designer.

Each month in Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers our readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your question to us at: [email protected].

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When I first began my formal UX studies, I was surprised to learn that the field of usability actually predates the widespread use of computers. Like many people, I had assumed that user experience was simply an outgrowth of society’s increasing reliance on digital technologies.

Not so. Findings from industrial and cognitive psychology in the 1950s helped lay the foundation for today’s human-centered design practices. For example, during World War II, usability pioneer John Karlin began his work on how sound influences task performance. His later research on the optimal design of telephones, at what was then Bell Labs, explored everything from cord length to the layout of the dial and, later, keypads. His work continues to influence our day-to-day interactions with common objects. Paul Fitts’s experiments in the 1950s resulted in Fitts’s Law, which gave UX designers an understanding of the relationship between movement, target object, and distance that we still cite. Read More