Business: UX Skills

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 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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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