Business: Hiring UX Professionals

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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In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts consider what it takes to stand out in the growing field of User Experience. As more and more companies realize the importance of good UX design and hire more designers, many people outside the field of User Experience are attracted to the opportunities this field offers and becoming UX designers. While some have the necessary education and talent to become good UX designers, others do not. Unfortunately, the field of UX design is becoming commoditized because some weak UX designers are willing to work for ridiculously low wages, and companies that aren’t able to discriminate between great, good, and poor designers just go with the least expensive option.

Our expert panel explores how to make yourself stand out in the current competitive environment, making specific recommendations for how and what you should communicate about not only your skills, but also about how your design work can fit within a company’s goals. Because it is important to balance business goals and design goals in our work, we need to consider how our work will affect a company—and maybe society at large—over the long term. Our panelists also encourage designers who are working for companies that do not value them to look for other opportunities. Of course, this discussion could be applied to many fields. Read More

In the first two parts of my series on becoming a data-driven design organization, I described how aligning different customer-research methods with business goals and requirements can help you to build a customer-centric framework for your organization and develop a data-driven approach to design. I also showed how metrics can demonstrate the value of making customer-experience improvements to both your organization and the business.

Now, in this third and final part, I’ll discuss how employing right-sized processes and having the right customer experience–design (CXD) professionals to support them can affect the outcomes of using customer-research methods and the resulting customer data.

Best Practice #5: Right-Sized Processes

A CXD strategy is actionable and demonstrable and identifies metrics and desired outcomes. One way to make CXD strategy concrete is to devise flexible, right-sized processes for CXD projects. Read More