Business: UX Skills

With artificial intelligence (AI) transforming the professions that User Experience comprises, UX designers are facing both significant opportunities and perplexing challenges. The future of UX design—and most UX designers’ careers—makes AI skills and tool mastery imperatives that can amplify our potential and impact.

The need to adopt new toolkits is not new. Throughout the years, UX designers have always had to learn new tools to help them capture, create, and communicate their ideas. But this AI shift is distinct because our tools have now become creators that generate images, mockups, audits, and prototypes in just moments through the activation of just a simple prompt. This new reality is phenomenal to witness.

But, if you are like me and use AI regularly, you may have moments when the sheer power and speed of creation raises questions about authenticity—who is the creator?—and UX designer’s core skills. Are we, as UX designers, strengthening our core talents or letting them wither? In this column, I’ll discuss how to keep your UX design muscles sharp when the machine is doing the heavy lifting. Read More

As usability and user experience continue to become priorities for companies developing products and experiences, the demand for UX professionals is growing. However, those who lack a traditional design, usability, or human-computer interaction background face significant obstacles in making a successful transition into the field of User Experience, as Jon Walter noted in his recent article on UXmatters, “Breaking into the Field of User Experience.”

But it can be done! Amy originally planned to become a university professor. Ruben wanted to be a doctor. A LinkedIn connection put us in touch. Although our backgrounds are quite different, we both have a deep passion for User Experience and had some surprisingly similar experiences on our path into the field. Even though we’ve never met in person, the timing of our connecting with one another created a serendipitous opportunity for this virtual collaboration in sharing our UX stories. Read More

In this first installment of my series “Rows and Columns,” I’ll describe how to use some very powerful tools of spreadsheets that can make analyzing your UX research data much easier. For those who have been reluctant to use spreadsheets during analysis, this series is for you, and you’ll hopefully find this information useful. For those of you who have expertise in using spreadsheets, some of this information might be review.

The central part of any UX research project is the analysis of data. This task can be both satisfying and cumbersome at the same time. As you go through your data, you might become excited as you recognize emerging patterns or see great variations across participants. However, getting to the point at which you can easily see such trends can be quite difficult. Your data must be in a format that affords easy filtering, so you can decipher the various rows and columns across participants.

Part 1 of this series covers the following features of spreadsheets, which can facilitate your understanding of the data you’ve gathered:

• filters
• form elements such as checkboxes and drop-down lists Read More