Business: UX Leadership

Over the last 15 years, I’ve had a recurring conversation with senior UX professionals: “I want to progress in UX, but I’m not sure I really want to manage teams.” It seems to many that the one way up is the management track—and in many organizations, this is the only upward path for UX professionals.

In my long and varied career working on staff within companies and for clients in agencies and consultancies, I have seen many roles in User Experience that need a senior, mature person—some with people-management responsibilities; others that continue to focus on product design. These roles include the following:

• Creative Director
• UX Principal
• Team Leader
• UX Manager
• UX Project Lead

Each of these UX professionals plays a specific role within an organization. For senior UX professionals, their quandary is to work out which role is required when and what role suits them best. Read More

Setting up a UX practice inside any organization—whether small or large—can be a challenge. As a UX leader, to ensure you keep the highest-performing individual contributors on your team, you should make sure they have a clear understanding of what they must do to expand their careers within your organization. While leaders often have a clear growth path inside a company, it is often less clear how individual contributors can nurture their professional career.

For example, in some companies, the only way to advance from an interaction designer, visual designer, UX researcher, or other individual-contributor discipline is to become a manager. But, for individual contributors whose talents are less as people managers and more as superstars in their discipline, who love what they’re doing, and who want to continue to be the best at what they do, their way forward is unclear. Read More

In Part 1 of this series on strategies for hiring IA practitioners, I revisited the Boersma T-Model for user experience design, shown in Figure 1. My earlier column, “Framing the Practice of Information Architecture,” outlined what I consider information architecture’s six primary areas of interest. I inserted those areas of interest into Boersma’s model to create a more refined view of the IA-practice vertical. While this helped to reduce information architecture’s level of abstraction within the T-Model, I argued that a viable IA candidate must have had previous success at practicing UX design. Hence, it became apparent that, to evaluate the desired skills for an IA practitioner, we need to understand the nature of the high and low tiers of the remaining UX practice verticals. Read More