I wrote this originally for Onward Search, a blog I’m going to be writing for occasionally. It seemed fairly popular, so I’m reposting it here.

Most hiring managers don’t understand the skills needed for great websites and web applications because the field is still relatively new. They understand that skilled designers can lead to amazing successes (read: they want to be like Apple), but they don’t grasp what the process is, for or which skillset they should be hiring. It’s not entirely their fault.

User Experience still isn’t well defined (think of our industry as television when color first came out) so it’s especially hard to come up with a job description that’s still being written. Even most college programs are still in flux, meaning that some degrees in the field aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.

As a User Experience designer, you can help employers shape the jobs they advertise. Educate them, and you pay it forward for the designers of the future.

What’s the Lay of the Land?

During the interview process, ask a lot of questions:

• How many developers do you have?
• Do you have a visual designer?
• Is there a front-end coder?
• How big is the team?
• Is there a product manager?
• Have you had a UX designer before?
• What’s your development process?
• Is your team talking to the customers?
• Who’s writing the requirements?
• Are there requirements?

These questions give you clues about whether or not the organization has the right makeup for success, and whether you have the tools available to effect change. For example, if this is the first UX position among ten developers and the team lacks even a project manager, it probably won’t work.

Double down if a previous hire went sour. If they’ve had firsthand experience with one who’s spent two to three months there and couldn’t even deliver a wireframe, hiring managers become especially suspicious of people in the field.

Reach out to other people at the company through social media channels to get their assessment. This is a very effective way to find out if User Experience will work there, because you can make judgments on more than just the hiring manager’s viewpoint.

Read On…

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Commencement speeches are wasted on the young — everyone should watch them.

I love his bit about his life goals as a “mountain,” and his mission to do only work that would bring him closer to the mountain. Of course, we should all be so lucky to work only when jobs are adventurous and stop when they become work, but there are some wonderful nuggets of artistic wisdom throughout Gaiman’s speech.

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The process of getting a great user experience job that you love isn’t as hard as you would think — you just have to tell your story.

The Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp on June 19, 2012 in Burlingame, California covers all aspects of getting that UX job you love:

• Using social media to connect with great companies
• Presenting a great resume
• Crafting a portfolio that tells your story
• What to expect during an in person interview

Also covered are questions to ask and what to look for, so you can find the right culture for your skills and career.

As a bonus, we’ll be having a networking happy hour with recruiters from Jobvite customers who are hiring great user experience talent!

Read On…

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A/B Tests are great if you’re focused on the right issues. However, many teams focus on the wrong problem. Even worse, they’ll focus on the wrong concept altogether, opting for incremental improvements instead of dramatic changes for the better.

More often than not, A/B tests are used to are a dog and pony show for the executives than to solve real problems.

Jared Spool has written a great article about this over at UIE:

In our study, we watched more than a dozen of the presenters’ company’s own customers attempt to buy products. While many were successful, a surprising number weren’t, even though this company is the biggest in its industry (and hailed by many as the most successful). Their site looks slick, but when folks sat down to use it for its primary goal, it’s design put up a ton of frustrating obstacles.

In many cases, the users thought they ordered the product they wanted, only to discover upon receipt that it wasn’t at all what they wanted. As we watched those shoppers make their orders, we could see that they would not get what they wanted.

…

The A/B tests they presented showed they were applying a ton of effort to optimize things that weren’t close to the things we saw preventing sales on their site. If the message was that A/B testing helps, I didn’t get that because I saw them futzing around with tweaking insignificant button text when there were huge deficiencies in the design that they still haven’t resolved.

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From Fast Company. We knew it.

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One of the most important things about any job search is knowing the companies that you are applying to. Jessica Greco has crafted a great post about researching your way into a new UX Job. Some very good points:

Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data on DesignSalaries.org for information to sink your teeth into.

Prioritize your needs and wants. Is money most crucial, or do you have some wiggle room? Is it more important to be part of a team, or to work on more diverse projects? Do you want to work more closely with developers? Are you focused on making new connections, so you can eventually go freelance? Do you want to be part of a growing team that can provide you with a future management position?

Be honest with yourself. What’s essential, and what’s just nice to have? What do you really want out of your future? Any indecision on your part will effect lackluster results. Try to articulate what you really want before you begin your job hunt.

Read on.

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Need that resume and career advice to get the UX job you love?

I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template in Microsoft Word format. It includes comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume.

You also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job right away, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments. You just have to fill out a 30-second form.

I’ll be involved an event where we give you tips on how to write your resume, and interview for great UX Jobs. We may contact you to see if you’re interested, and for no other purpose.

I promise I won’t spam you with Luxury Watch advertisements or sell your email address to Jared Spool. Just download the UX Drinking Game to make me feel better.

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Nothing needs to be said. Click here to view all the videos.

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I’ve got quite a few responses, but I want more. Click here to answer the survey.

Here are some quotes from the survey:

Very timely survey. Organizational challenges seem to loom over everything we do. I find myself designing things that never get built, or things that get built but never implemented, or being left out of the process entirely and seeing things implemented that have never been designed.

…

Our relatively new UX team is struggling to settle into a comfortable rhythm of working. And it’s been a challenge to not only sell UX to other departments, but also to develop a process for assigning UX resources to projects. Top management is committed to UX being a key market differentiator for us, though, so I feel confident we’ll get there.

 …

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Does your company even come close to something like this?

There’s work and there’s your life’s work.

The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over all. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.

They want their work to add up to something.

Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.

Welcome to Apple.

We should all work like this.

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