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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Whether you work directly in the field of UX design or you just have a passing interest, it’s fair to say that, in 2013, the focus on all things user experience definitely stepped up a gear. Over the last 11 months at Bubble, the UK digital jobs board for whom I work, we’ve seen a huge increase in the demand for talented UX designers right across the UK—and not just from specialist niche agencies, but from major brands like comparethemarket.com, ITV, Sainsbury’s, and The Telegraph Media Group, too.

What’s the reason for this increased demand? It’s hard to say. Perhaps brands have now got more money to spend on their online offering, and it’s finally dawned on them that a great user experience really can make a difference to their bottom line and provide a healthy return on investment (ROI). Or perhaps it’s because brands are now more willing—and able!—to reallocate their existing budget from other digital areas like social media, where it can be difficult to quantify ROI and determine their strategy’s success. Either way, it’s great news for the user experience industry—both in the UK and the US—as more and more positions, especially senior-level positions, become available. 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