Community: Thought Leaders

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 this edition of Ask UXmatters, our experts discuss whether they are seeing companies’ business models change from being engineering driven to being design driven. In addition, our experts explore what it means to be a design-driven organization and how all members of a product team can impact a product’s UX design.

While some of our experts believe that we are seeing a shift to design-driven organizations, others on our expert panel think we’re actually observing a very different phenomenon. Several of our panelists encourage UX designers to acknowledge the equally important roles of Engineering, Design, and Business, or Product Management, in designing optimal product user experiences. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our expert panel considers how UX professionals can create a narrative that connects their learnings about business and user needs to a design solution, in a way that is comprehensible to all project team members, regardless of their role. Our experts also discuss what artifacts a UX team should create during a design project to best enable the team to understand the design problem, then provide an optimal solution for it.

Every 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 questions to: [email protected]. Read More