Cathy Wang (@cathycracks) is a designer that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting virtually (hard to pin her down — she’s from Vancouver, lives in Milan, travels a whole lot). She works in the field of Service Design in the real world. As UX Designers, we should pay attention, because this is something that can greatly expand your influence. Read on.

Have you tried explaining to people what you do as a User Experience Designer?

Now try to imagine what you would have to say if you were a Service Designer. People have often asked me what I mean when I say “I design services.”

If you are in an agency or consultancy environment, you might categorise service design as part of user experience and/or experience strategy. If you come from a product environment, service design might vibrate more to what you consider as product management and business design.

In a nut shell, service design is delivering a designed experience onto different levels of actors with a more holistic approach in mind. Let me elaborate on that.

Design for touchpoints, not just people.

Service design is about designing for the intangible and connected touchpoints between all the involving actors and factors. Each one of these actors and factors is considered a service touchpoint.

Who are the actors?

Services are made by people, delivered by people, served to people.

An actor can range from who enables the service, to the person whom the service is delivered to. When designing a service, you need to consider more than just the end-users:

• How are the people enabling the service involved?
• Who will be carrying out the service?
• Does the organisational structure need to be revised to support the new service?
• Who will be receiving the service?

The customer service person in a store or on the other end of the phone line is an actor in the service ecosystem. It is part of customer experience;  when designing a service, we should be looking at how this person provides the service. Designing a good service should give the same emotional delight for the receiver as well as the person giving the service.

Hey, giving should feel as good as receiving right?

What are the factors?

When designing an interface or software, requirements and specifications come from the technical restriction and feature sets. When designing a service, the requirements often follow the use case flows with forks formed by different actors and overall organisational structure.

The factors build up the components of the service. Designing a service means everything in the service cycle is taken into account. We are designing more than the normal technology interfaces that we encounter.  There are business processes, organizational process, physical interaction and sometimes even marketing strategies to be taken into account.

When you call your telecom provider to get support. Many components of the service come together to successfully enable the service provided to you. The backend system, the auto authentication system, the call assignment system etc.  It’s important to design overlooking all the involving systems as a whole even when you are just designing one of the systems.

Is it really different from User Experience Design?

Yes and No.

As a UX designer,  you are probably asking yourself: Why am I not doing that?

As a product manager, you might be asking yourself: I thought I do all this all day already.

The real question to ask might be: How can I integrate this into my work more?

We are creating more businesses opportunities

Being a UX designer, your passionate designer heart might say: “I want to make the world a better place one web page at a time.” But really, the ultimate goal in our business-oriented world, is to create more business (in most situations). Added values like enhanced user experience and easier processes basically contribute to more business, either in the short run or the long run. (If you are the lucky few that gets to design only for wellness, kudos.)

Designers, it’s ok to be business oriented. It pays the bills at the end of the day.

How to create more opportunities?

Don’t look at a business as just one rigid structure with a one-dimensional lens. The revenue of the business and the core business offerings might be more than what meets the eye. Ask these questions:

• How Can I connect this service with other services / third-party services to create a better service eco-system? Product eco-system?
• What are some new components that can be added to the service for it to serve end-users better?
• How can the service be carried out in a more efficient way?

Study the full service journey, from the organisational structure to user journeys. Know all the points where the service reach. Be open to alternatives, it doesn’t have to be a solution that relies only on design. (or even design services that your agency don’t normally do.)

Zoom out, and look around.

We are always on the same team. Product managers are not your enemies. Don’t put the invisible “evil client” hat on your client. You are designing a design solution that’s fitted to your client.  We, as designers, design for people. Clients are people too.

Approaching the client knowing that you are on the same team. You are a consultant that is dropped into someone else’s product/service cycle to help them achieve something. Do your job. Help them achieve what they can’t achieve in-house. (This of course applies to consultancy designers.)  Don’t just design the window frame, open a new door for them.

Why should you care?

There are many gaps that companies need help on but don’t know where to look. (In agency talk: there is a pile of money left on the floor that no one is picking up.)

When I was asked “What kind of agency do you want to work in?” I answered: “I want to work at a place that aims to take away a big chunk of Accenture’s business in the next 5 years.” I am not saying that UX designers should become consultant alligators. (big mouth, big teeth, short arms). The convergence of strategy and design is the way the industry is heading. Design thinking is applied in all spectra of industries and job functions. UX designers need to step up to fill the gap.

But really, the true reason behind doing so is to better help solve the problems. As designers, we solve problems. Now we just need to step up and look at a bigger realm.

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Very, very funny.

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From GetResponse

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Now’s the time many designers are graduating from college. That’s great — we need more designers in the field — but it’s really, really hard to break into.

I’ve written about this a lot (read my Career Guide, I have about 40,000 words there about this and probably should publish a book), but I still get the occasional email asking me questions about how the process works, where to download a resume template, and if we actually get to do the complete UX process (The answer: “No, we don’t, especially in startups.”).

So, before you email me and I make fun of you over the phone or Skype, here’s a few questions you should ask before you hit the send button.

Did you intern last year or did you do any side projects?

Yes, awesome. You have something to show on your first interviews!

If you haven’t, you’re already a year behind of most your classmates. Some have been working on startup ideas or coming up with neat little websites that do things.

Many students spend time during their Bachelors and Masters programs working as interns to learn the craft of interaction design. They might have been working on something during school (the best idea is to turn a school project into a potential startup).

Remember, the job search isn’t fair. If you don’t put the effort in moving ahead of your classmates, your path deserves to be much, much harder. You have to make your own luck, and that’s through hard work.

Do you have a portfolio?

That’s where you put all those projects you did at your internship. When you see how thin the portfolio is, you’ll be motivated to do more work.

The portfolio shouldn’t be cute or show too much of your personality (they aren’t hiring you for your like of cute flowers). What it should show is your line of thinking, soup to nuts in a project so they know how you think.

Behance is good enough for most people (Every time I talk about this, I bring up LaiYee Lori’s portfolio, because it’s amazing), and most of us just want the design to be clean.

What’s your skill set?

Do you know how to do front end coding, can design simple graphics in Photoshop, or know your way around Visio? Those are the kind of questions that you’ll be asked at any interview or first job interview.

We honestly don’t care about the super cool science project you did; we want to know how you built it so if there’s something than you can do we can’t.

Most of older designers will be looking for interns that know how to code up a page because a) we hate doing it, and b) some of us don’t have that in our skillset. Frankly, there’s a serious shortage of front end developers right now, so if you can pick up that skillset before you graduate, you’ll have an advantage over every single designer you are up against. You have a whole summer to learn it!

I will gladly give that work to them because they can build interactive prototypes that are perfect for doing usability testing.

And, if you’re smart enough, you’ll get to do the testing too.

I did mention both of these are perfect to put in your portfolio, right?

Are you applying through applicant tracking systems?

If you’re applying directly through them, it gives you about .41 percent chance of getting the job. That’s right around a 1 in 260 chance.

You’re better off buying lottery tickets or responding to one of those Nigerian scams.

All that work you do to pretty up your resume may not work — some applicant tracking systems present only a text only version of the resume on the first display (they have to download it to see the real deal). This is the first impression the recruiter gets. It may work for smaller startups because they usually accept resumes through email.

The better thing? Stalk people on Twitter or at events and become a personal referral.

I encourage you to find companies on LinkedIn that you want to work at, find out who works there, and find them on Twitter. Or even better, go to a something like Jobvite’s job board, where you can see the connections you may have at the company. Invite them out for a coffee.

Being a personal referral works: Those people that apply for jobs through personal connections or recruiters have a 10 percent chance (or better) of getting hired.

Are you an idealist looking for the perfect job?

You probably aren’t going to be hired into an organization and get to develop Facebook Home. you’ll be a wireframe monkey or doing research that may (or may not be) used. Don’t expect to get something at Twitter. You can apply, but don’t bet on it.

The employers have the upper hand, and once you realize that life becomes much easier. The competition for those jobs is intense, and best if you actually know somewhere there.

Even better, look at companies that are boring, and see if they are interested in internships. Reach out to companies without a program. They might create one for you. Go to any meetups for these companies (and ironically, not the UX ones) to talk to recruiters and hiring managers.

If you’re lucky, the work might be interesting, but the reason you intern is that you gain valuable connections in your profession and learn who the process is different than the ideal they teach in school.

Are you discouraged?

Don’t be. Don’t give up. You have an amazing path ahead of you: read Christina Wodtke’s post for more education of how you should craft your career.

User Experience is a meritocracy — we want to see what you can do. Find the right place, and you’ll do amazing things.

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Every once in a while, I read an article that is completely spot on about software development. Oscar Godson’s What I Learned At Yammer is one of those articles. Remember that he’s a developer when you’re reading this, not a user experience professional. Great developers understand the user experience process and how it works with software development. They know what it means to test, build fewer features, and concentrate on an end goal of a product sold holistically, and not by bullet point.

Every one in software development should read this. Cheers.

Today marks my last day at Yammer. It’s been a hell of a ride. It’s bittersweet. I’m leaving Yammer to be back in PDX to be near family and long time friends. I’ll be starting at Simple as a front-end dev where I’ll be changing banking for the better.

While at Yammer I learned a lot. Not just about programming, but about running an engineering team and project management as well. Yammer not only made me a more skilled programmer, but a smart programmer. I decided to write up some of the things I learned outside of just programming that I’ll probably bring with me to every company I work with in the future.

Test all the things

I can’t stress this enough. If there’s one thing I learned at Yammer it’s that you need to test everything, and by everything I mean, everything. It’s not just about getting your users to come back or to engage with your software more. That’s a large piece of it, but it’s also about saving countless engineering time. A lot of people I talk to who don’t do any testing say that they feel their intuition is doing fine because they can see that the overall new and returning users are increasing. What they’re missing is that, how do you know what feature is driving those gains? Which features are hardly even being used? Could you increase your new users by 2x, 4x, 100x, what it’s increasing at now?

I spent some time trying to think of a good analogy of this problem and this is the best I could come up with:

Not testing your software is like playing darts in a pitch black room. When you throw the dart you will be able to hear if it hit the target or hit the wall and fell to the ground. What you can’t really do is adjust your throw. You don’t know where you hit the target when you did, just that you did. Testing is like turning on the lights. Now you can see the target. You might still miss here and there, but if you miss you can readjust.

Testing also allows you to figure out what features to kill before you spend too much time on them. You might have this idea that some feature is going to be super awesome and everyone and their dog will want to use it. So, you spend all this time building it out and you put it into the wild. Overall it gets good reviews from a vocal minority (probably power users). What you might not know is that most people don’t really use it or don’t understand it. Now you’re spending 90% of your time making features for <10% of your users, or not, but you really have no idea. This feature could be expensive time wise to keep up. Maybe it has a lot of support tickets or is unreliable for some reason.

Testing allows you to move faster, make better products for consumers and keeps engineers from wasting time with features nobody uses.

Unit test all the things

I didn’t get how important unit tests were until I had to refactor a large chunk of code for a project. I had absolutely no clue what I could and couldn’t remove or change and even if I thought I could remove or change it I wasn’t sure if I had broken anything somewhere else in the product. Around the same time there was a huge push at Yammer on the front-end side to put tests on everything. It became a rule that you can’t ship it unless you have tests. Looking back I wish that was the rule from the start.

A lot of people think tests slow you down and it’s over hyped. It’s not. Sure, making a small bug fix that’s a 1 line change and having to write 12-15 lines of test code seems overkill and a waste, but you get all that time back tenfold when someone goes “Huh, wonder if we need this line here?” deletes it, and the “preventLaunch() is called to prevent accidental nuclear weapon launches” test fails. Not only does the next guy know it’s important and why, if the code needs to be refactored they know what they’re missing and can make sure the app runs as it did before.

Autonomy and trust are a must

If you’re the owner, manager, etc, let your employees do their job. Hire engineers you respect and leave them alone. If you can’t trust them to do their best work and work that’s acceptable for your product you shouldn’t have hired them. Simple as that.

Instead spend your time helping them break down obstacles and blockers. Make them happy. As long as they get their work done, don’t question when they come and go or if they watch cat videos and browse Reddit /r/wtf all day. Some of the best engineers I know work only a few hours a day, but get more done than others working 8hrs. Being creative is hard and giving them more rules kills creative thinking.

No limit on vacation isn’t as great as you would think

Originally Yammer had no policy on vacation. They called it the “take what you need” policy. We all rejoiced. I thought it was amazing and it’s a great selling point when trying to recruit people. The problem is nobody takes vacation when they can’t lose it and there’s no pressure to use it. When you do use it there’s no limit so you have to decide what’s acceptable. Obviously, not every employee thinks this way, but when we introduced a three week vacation policy people were actually happy including me.

My suggestion to startups thinking about unlimited vacation? Instead, give 3-4 weeks of vacation, but if an employee wants more just give it to them.

Actively try to prevent burnout

Burnout is real and it’s deadly to your company. Yammer was great about this. We were regularly asked how busy we were and how we felt about our workload. We were asked if we felt others were feeling overworked too. If you were feeling overworked it got fixed.

Your employees shouldn’t have to work long hours on a daily basis. If your employee is working long hours to complete a projects regularly you’re mismanaging the projects. The choice is pretty easy actually: would you rather have an employee for 1 year who worked 12-14hr days but burned out, was unhappy and quit, or an employee for 5 years plus who worked half as many hours, but was happy and working optimally? The hours don’t matter it’s what they produce.

And lastly, use Yammer

I had never used Yammer until I started at Yammer. In fact, to be honest, I was skeptical about working at Yammer at first because I wasn’t sure how interesting it would even be. “It’s just some crappy Facebook clone”, I thought. My friends there insisted it wasn’t, so I decided to give it a shot.

The first day it became pretty obvious just how useful it was. All our docs were on there. On-boarding processes, tips for new employees, everything. It was all where I could find it. I could message HR about general HR questions, in the public feed, get responses and months later someone else would drop by and say thanks or expand on it. People don’t realize just how useful it is and once you start using it you forget how useful it is until you don’t have it anymore and you’re jumping between a dozen different products with fragmented conversations between email, chat, and other products. Yammer pulls it all together.

It’s also extremely useful for project management. At Yammer we’d make a group for each team (engineering, front-end, rails, etc), as well as groups for each project (inbox, online now, etc). This made it so we could put specs, comps and the conversations around those in a central location where we could easily find it. This also killed the need for doing stand ups, weekly team meetings or SCRUM. We could see what everyone was working on at any time in any project. It’s also extremely useful to be able to share a Yammer thread to show past decisions about the product and why those choices were made.

Another added bonus is there’s a great API. You can have things auto post things like deploys. “Oscar is deploying release XXX to production”, for example. Or, if your spec fails, “Oscar broke the build!”. Super handy because now you can have an archivable conversation about these things. Maybe that production deploy was failed and brought the site down. 6 months later someone could link to that thread.

That’s all folks!

There’s so much more I learned, but I’m thinking about expanding on these individual topics, or things I didn’t cover in separate posts. Yammer was the first job where I came out feeling like I had more to offer my next team aside from just better programming skills. If you have any questions about any of these things feel free to contact me.

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This originally published over at UXMas, where they were kind enough to let me guest blog (how festive!). They also did a wonderful job of editing the content.

Here’s the post:

User experience designers are storytellers.

The stories that you tell in client meetings and job interviews are about the applications you design. The best stories are thoughtful, compelling and successful. Each story that you tell builds upon your library of experience—it shows the arc of your career and why you should be hired.

However, how you tell your story is as important as the story itself.

How do you tell your story? If you’re uncertain, here are a few ideas that may help.

Tell One or Two Big Stories

There should be at least one or two projects that you can tell a user experience story about, from inception to release. This means showing off some actual project deliverables—for instance:

• The user research you performed
• The actors and personas you developed
• The user stories you wrote

It also means talking about the project. For example:

• The process you followed to come up with user goals
• The assumptions you made, and how you validated them
• Your design considerations

Explaining the full lifecycle illustrates how you think, and gives your audience a more complete picture. Lynn Teo, CXO at McCann Erickson, covers this process extremely well in her presentation, Portfolios Matter: Building the Portfolio to Win the Job.

Once you’ve set the scene, it’s time to play your trump card: demonstrate the only deliverable that truly matters—the final product.

When talking about my portfolio, I frequently talk about Jobvite because we were able to achieve the full lifecycle on that project. However I also talk about a small business called Bob The Chiropractor, because it’s big story about a small business. It’s a project that demonstrates how, even with limited resources, you can achieve great things.

No project is too small to illustrate the big idea.

Tell A Bunch Of Small Stories

Not every UX Designer gets to experience the complete user experience lifecycle on every project, so it may be necessary to show how you took an existing product, made some changes, and improved the product as a result.

Small stories are very important because they show how you can think on your feet and draw on your past experience to make informed design decisions. They also demonstrate to organizations that you’re able to fit into a larger team.

When telling a small story, it’s even more important to include the final product. Your stories should always be results-driven. Whether they’re stories about big or small projects, you need to show the positive effect that your work had for your story to make an impact.

Tell Stories That Fit Your Audience

Every time you tell a story, there are embellishments and changes that you naturally make fit your audience. For example, you don’t use the same language with your mother that you do with your friends.

The same goes with your user experience stories.

Tell your story differently, depending on whom you’re talking to—whether it’s another designer, a product manager, or even the CEO. Each of these individuals needs to hear how your story fits within their context, so you should change the message accordingly.

Telling your story also depends on the organizational context: the stories you talk about for an e-commerce project will be different than for a content-driven intranet, so you may have to research your audience to ensure you’re telling the right stories.

Tell Stories That Sell

You should practice your stories, and be able to elaborate on them when questions come up. It’s not enough to tell your story using an electronic portfolio—you should be able to walk up to a whiteboard and explain the story visually, so that your future employer or client understands fully.

Walking someone through the deliverables you produced on projects big and small is a great well to sell yourself. I love seeing photos of people working together, organizing information with a bunch of post-it notes, because it shows a thought process that is more than shiny wireframes.

Weaving together great stories is a matter of pacing and keeping the audienceengaged. Remember, you should be telling your best stories—a project that ends without any lessons learned isn’t very engaging. Always aim for quality overquantity.

Tell Stories That Have A Great Ending

The best way to illustrate your value as a user experience designer is to not talk about the great wireframes you built for a project, but how your work translated into a measurable return on investment for your company or your client.

When a project is coming to a close, make a point of capturing facts that you can use to sell yourself in the future. For example,

Our user research and changes to the application increased engagement 10-fold.
Conversion increased 400 per cent over one month through A/B testing.

Most design is very subjective, but results that were achieved due to the work you performed is not.

Tell Your Story

Creating a kick-ass UX portfolio is all about defining who you are. Why are you good at user experience? How can you communicate your experiences in a compelling fashion?

What’s your story?

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This is in response to UX amateurism and why I’m not a UX designer anymore. Being a UX Designer isn’t hard, but we forget to some of the low hanging fruit that is invaluable to our role.

Anyone can wireframe.

When my friends ask about building their own ideas, I encourage them to start sketching. My friends love doing it, because it’s taking something in their head and making it real.

Because. Anyone. Can. Wireframe.

However, that doesn’t make them a User Experience Designer.

What does make them a User Experience Designer is when they get feedback. They test the ideas with friends. They do research. They iterate.

Real User Experience Designers understand wireframes and sketches are only one part of the process. They result from research needed to design a product. Research may make it into Powerpoints to be communicated to product and engineering teams, rough notes during usability tests may be taken on paper prototypes, and screencasts might be recorded during remote usability testing. Each of these are as equally important as a wireframe.

If you’re following some kind of constant improvement process to make your product better, you are a User Experience Designer.

There is no one true process for User Experience, just a framework. That framework is the intersection people, business and technology, and our job is to understand all three so they work in harmony.

Communicate Without Using A Mouse

I’ve watched a lot of User Experience Designers break out their tools and go straight to wireframes. Then they save them as a PDF, send them to the client, and wonder, “Why can’t the clients understand the wireframes?”

One simple statement — it’s about context. Wireframes are only one communication tool that User Experience Designers have in their toolbox. More important is the ability to give context and talk through solutions with the clients and engineers.

Even better tools are paper and pencil, or whiteboards. Both of them are amazing because the designer can iterate and communicate with the users and stakeholders in a way that’s very collaborative and effective. I love whiteboards because we can sketch, erase and sketch again quickly while walking through the idea. Jonathan Korman calls it the “five step test”: can they take the five steps to the whiteboard.

Designers should own the experience, but they also should realize they are creating the experience in collaboration with the users who have to use it.

Hit The Road

Have you visited your customers? Have you performed a focus group? Have you watched them in action? Are you designing just for yourself?

Most User Experience Designers work on products that we would never want or have to buy. I will probably never write a check for Jobvite, yet I’m responsible for designing an Applicant Tracking System for many companies I won’t ever work for. That means I’m going to spend a lot of time talking to recruiters, the primary users of our system.

Seldom are you the target audience for the product you are designing. So why do most designers jump straight into wireframes?

There’s always time for user research, because wireframes should be so little of your time. You should make it a point even before sketching to schedule at least 5 calls with customers and discuss their needs. If you can, schedule two in person visits of at least two hours to watch them use the products that are related.

You have to understand the needs of your users in the context of their environment — only then can you design the product. I hate hearing the most is the words, “I think.” What it really should be is, “If I were this target user, this is how I think the process would go for using this.”

Show Early and Often

Do you print out your wireframes and throw them on the wall? Do you schedule usability tests? Do you ask people at work, “How would you use this?” Do you use any kind of prototype to get results? Have you ever used a half done prototype to test?

Testing your assumptions is the most important thing you could do as a User Experience Designer. Again, it’s back to “I think,” the two most dangerous and overused words in the English language. You aren’t paid to design something for yourself, you’re paid to design for the users of the system, and as a by product be tremendously profitable for your organization.

Usability testing ain’t rocket surgery. Ask someone you work with, “Do you have a few minutes to go over something I’m working on?” Most people love to do this, because they feel like they are part of the process. For B2B applications, the end users will volunteer without compensation their own time because it will make their life easier.

Carl Nelson, a designer I saw present, said the easiest tests were done at coffee shops in San Francisco. Leave a few donuts out, ask people to come over and ask a few questions. The feedback you’ll get we’ll be priceless.

Makin’ It A Habit

How are you going to design the product? How are you performing research? Do you have a step by step process you can put on the wall that talks about what you do? Are you using a project management tool like Basecamp or Asana to track where you are at?

User Experience Designers more so than anyone else should have a stake in how a product gets designed and developed. It’s up to them to be involved organically in establishing the process within an organization by building support with product managers, engineers and customer support. When a process is in place is when a User Experience Designer can relax.

I explain it simply as User Interviews, Personas, User Stories, Wireframes, Mockups, and the launch of an iteration. Repeat the last three to iterate. This process makes a great story where you can talk about previous successes and how you can apply it to your current situation.

When I talk with other designers about how I implement it, I just do. End of story. The process becomes just part of my day job, another tool I use to create great products. If there’s always time to wireframe, there’s always time to perform research.

Even great writers just don’t sit down and type: they have a story arc as a framework. User Experience Designers should have the same because their job is to turn the UX process into a story they can tell anyone involved in it.

Learn The Only Constant is Change

Do you just launch a product and hope it works? Do you ever have a chance to change it? Is it ever done?

One of the designers I know, Jon Fox, asked a curious question the other day: “When do you consider a product done?”

In my mind, a product is never fully complete.

And not only is it about the product itself. Iteration is also about the process. It’s hard for many User Experience Designers to build in iteration because are a lot of projects are fixed, but their great clients and great companies understand the only constant is change, and change can totally be for the better.

The Japanese language has a term for it called Kaizen, the continuous improvement of processes. Recently we develop a hair systems for men’s website  newhairline, and they turn great result on orders. When you’re building a product, you are looking to improve the process of improving the product just as much as you are trying to improve the product yourself. The most important point to the Kaizen philosophy is self improvement: it is up to ourselves to improve our process.

Scrum borrows from this with retrospectives, which is a look back at what went well (and not so well) with your last release, and what we should improve going forward. User Experience Designers should do retrospectives themselves so they can improve their processes.

You should think this about every day as a User Experience Designer: how can I improve what I’m doing in my current environment to make the product and process better.

Build in time to make changes, make tweets and test your ideas. Get feedback. Put it in the next release. Research. Design. Build. Evaluate. Repeat. That’s what makes a great User Experience Designer.

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This is a post I wrote that appeared originally over at Onward Search. It’s been fairly well received, and is a good starting point for new UX Designers. Read on.

U.S. News and World Report has named User Experience as one of the hottest careers for this decade. It’s a great job that pays well, offers a lot of interesting opportunities, and is one of the most important roles in today’s digital, connected economy. When you work in an environment that values User Experience, the rewards of great product development are amazing. In essence, you create great products, and, hopefully, earn great successes.

So what’s the best answer to, “How do I break into User Experience?”

Very few people follow the same path into User Experience. Everyone has a different story, and that reflects in the variety of skills many User Experience Designers have when you read their resumes. It’s not like becoming a surgeon, where there’s an expected path laid out for them. User Experience professionals bring all their experience to the table, and that contributes to the products they design.

User Experience isn’t for everyone, and just because you get a degree doesn’t mean you’ll be good at it. Try it out before you jump in the deep end.

Get Educated

Getting that piece of paper is the quickest way to jump start your User Experience career.

Many colleges and universities are now offering Bachelor’s level and Master’s level degrees in Interaction Design and Human Computer Interface Design. HCI is the more advanced version of this (based on design for airplane cockpits during World War II). Carnegie Mellon is recognized as the top school for their design programs.

For other schools, your mileage may vary. Because the field is so new, many of the programs out there shouldn’t be getting the credit they deserve — I’ve met many a designer that talked about how great their program was, but their work didn’t reflect it. I read the bios of some of the people teaching, and they have less experience than the mid-level designers I wouldn’t hire.

However, not all of us can move to Pittsburgh at the drop of a hat.

The alternative is university extension programs.

In this scenario, working professionals take classes and learn the basics of the field over a few months. I’m a west coast guy, so the programs I recommend are UCLA’s Extension Courses, and Cal State Fullerton’s User Experience Design certificate that I advised years ago. Many of the professionals that have taught those classes are ones whom I respect, and some have offered intern programs that require your enrollment in the class as a prerequisite. If you’re a working professional, I would try this first, because spending $600 for a class is much better than spending $30,000/year.

There are also many accelerator programs that educate professionals about usability and user experience design.

Some of the best are Nielson Norman Group’s intensive programs, Cooper’s UX Bootcamps, and Adaptive Path‘s programs. They’re taught by some of the best in the business, but they’re pricey: expect to drop $2,500 in addition to room, board and flights if you don’t live in a major metropolitan area. I’d advise finding local resources before you make this investment.

The value of these programs is more than the nuts and bolts of learning the field.

The schools partner with companies like Microsoft and General Electric so graduates have entry level opportunities to learn Interaction Design from professionals that have done it for years. Some schools, like Stanford, align themselves with alumni programs like Designer Fund to promote interaction design, and the best way to get in is to know people personally.

It’s like getting a MBA: sometimes the real value isn’t the education but the people you meet.

Pivot From Your Current Position

If you look at the careers of many User Experience designers, especially the better ones, they usually come from design or communication related careers.

Dan Saffer, a famous designer, was a writer before getting involved in UX. Two friends of mine, Coburn Hawk and Jon Fox, were in film production and illustration before making the transition. Another, Paul Sherman, was a technologist. Whitney Hess has been a UX designer since graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a double major in HCI and Professional Writing, but was a columnist for several magazines  — at the age of 13.

User Experience design is the ability to translate a story (how we engage the user) into a usable experience.

The common thread uniting all these professionals was that they knew how to tell stories, and they used previously gained talents to contribute to their User Experience skill set. Dan and Whitney also went back to school (Carnegie Mellon), to enhance their chances of succeeding in User Experience.

The three easiest careers to pivot from are Print Designer, Web Designer, and Business Analyst.

These careers already involve elements of interaction design, even if that is not immediately apparent. Usage of space, design, and the managing of requirements are very important in translating those skills to Interaction Design.

However, I’ve seen people move from these careers:

• Web Producers and Engineers have a core understanding of how websites work.
• Recruiters know the position and the market, can communicate well, and can sell.
• Copywriters already have the communication skills and understand marketing.
• Journalists have great research and writing skills.

Each has skills in other fields that translate well over to Interaction Design. All they have to do is fill in some holes.

I interviewed a candidate recently, and before she was a product manager, she worked extensively in Human Resources. That’s experience that no degree will teach you, and might even give you a leg up on other candidates. Not all User Experience jobs need a Masters, and saying that disregards the great experience many professionals have.

The advantage of pivoting is that you can use your domain knowledge into User Experience, and that makes you invaluable.

When I was editor of a community newspaper years ago (another pivot), I got a great piece of advice from a writer I worked with. He said that they didn’t have writing degrees in England because the ability to communicate was expected, but you had to have knowledge in a domain to be of value. The best journalists had degrees in Finance or Business and were able to translate that knowledge into great content.

Build Your Own Idea or Something For Someone Else

I covered this at my blog, Seven Tips How To Get Started In User Experience. What most User Experience designers need before applying for a job is a portfolio, and no one’s going to give you that. The best way to get something in that portfolio is to either build an idea yourself, or walk into a non-profit and volunteering. It could be interning, or even volunteering. Instead of getting retail rate for your skills you’re getting experience and an education, which is a long-term investment.

I have met designer after designer that followed this approach. It lead to great experiences and eventually better paying work.

My favorite is Erin Moore, who I met in a random meeting last year. She interned at Twitter after going back to school to get a masters degree in the field. She has some great stories that will lead to even better gigs. Another student, Morgan Davis, is working with a friend of mine on a competitive analysis project. For his time, we’re going to work on turning it into his first User Experience deliverable he can put in his portfolio.

When you build something yourself you can try different ideas and learn on your own time without affecting anyone else.

There’s seemingly a million blogs out there that talk about interaction design, and a wealth of resources that you can learn from. This is the golden age of self serve tools, and one of the best out there is Code Academy. They give you a bunch of courses to start with. You can learn the skills you need to build websites and get a feeling if you like it or not.

Building something for someone else is great because you have something tangible that can be used in the wild.

Craigslist, Volunteer Match and even Yelp are great places to look for opportunities with non-profits, and sometimes all it takes is a personal introduction or some networking to find the right person to talk to. Even commercial companies are always looking for talent.

Network for opportunities

User Experience designers love to talk. And talk. And talk. Kind of.

Where do they talk? Twitter.

Twitter is the new channel for business engagement.

There are thousands (literally) of User Experience designers that use it to talk about what they read, what they like, and to promote their work. Designers are an odd sort: we’re typically introverted, but see social media as a great way to interact and engage with other designers so they can learn about their field.

Going to meetups and events like SkillShare can help expose you to other designers so you can break into the field. Follow people other than designers: many companies don’t know they don’t need User Experience or don’t know what it is. If you follow marketing people, engineers and other technology types, an opportunity might present itself. Start a conversation with them, and it might lead to something cool.

And always have a story to tell, because we are storytellers.

Talk about the projects you like working on, or what you’re building. If you start a conversation with, “I don’t know how to get in the field,” that’s really a bad place to start. The first skill Interaction Designers must have is research, and you aren’t doing that, then maybe this isn’t the field for you.

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I get a lot of emails from new designers asking, “Where should I start?” Getting that first job is the hardest thing in UX, because it requires you to find someone willing to take a chance on you.

But if you do find that someone, you can learn great things from your experience.

I tell new designers to go work for an agency right away because you get a lot of brands on your resume, and you learn how to do things fast. Agencies are always on deadline, and that’s a good thing for learning time management. Not everyone agrees, but it’s a good discussion point.

Christina Wodtke covers this in a blog post over at Elegant Hack. It is a great read.

Consulting makes you a fox, inhouse makes you a hedgehog.  Big companies teach you to focus on your craft, little companies teach you how to run a business.  It is incredibly useful for you, you designer, to try out as many as you can. You will learn a huge number of tools, and you will learn about yourself. And then you can make some choices about what you want to do.

…

My final piece of advice: ignore all of this if you fall in love. You see a company you adore, you frigging join it. Because you are young and you have a get-out-of-jail-free card while you don’t have a spouse and kids and a mortgage.  You cannot ruin your life unless you get thrown in jail, or alienate everyone by being a jerk (and I’m not even sure about the second, thinking of a few CEO’s I know).

There is no bad choice for you, there is only your choice.  I just recommend you give yourself a chance and find out what you love.

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Click the link to receive a Microsoft Word document with a template, plus annotations that describe how you should write your resume.

The Usability Counts Career Guide

Presentations at events

• Hunting Unicorns: What makes an effective UX Professional
• UX Portfolios: How to tell your story
• From Application To Interview: How to get a great UX job

Exploring User Experience as a career

• How to Get Started In User Experience
• A Day In The Life Of A UX Designer:
  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
• Want To Get Started As An Information Architect? These Are Last Books You Will Ever Need.

Getting a User Experience job

• From Application To Interview: How To Get A Great UX Job
• How to Get a Great Job Using Facebook
• How to Get a Great Job Using Twitter
• How to Build a Great Profile on LinkedIn
• How to Write a Great User Experience Resume
• The UX Portfolio: Telling Your Story
• A Great Way to Get Experience as an Interaction Designer? Intern.
• Six Tips Before Moving To San Francisco as a UX Professional
• Onward Search: How to Shape Your UX Job
• Five Tips For Recruiters: What To Know Before You Pitch Me

Working as a User Experience Designer

• How Much Should Designers Ask About The Business Model?
• Should User Experience Designers Know Design Or Programming?
• Six Things User Experience Designers Forget When They Criticize Websites
• The Top Six Tips on How to Be a Great Web Designer
• Just Who Owns The Work, Anyways?
• The Pros and Cons of Being a Consultant
• Eight Organizational Challenges for UX Professionals
• Hiring A User Experience Team

Working at a Startup

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to write at pat@usabilitycounts.com.

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The results are finally compiled (I finally got around to designing the infographic). This is based off of an informal survey. Please share, early and often.

You can read the original article at Eight Organizational Challenges for UX Professionals. What are your comments?

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Not such a bad idea.

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I don’t necessarily agree with this.

It does start the conversation: Do you think we’re in a bubble?

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This article was originally published at UXmatters on April 2, 2012. The article was truly a collaboration. 

A great organizational culture is a necessity if we are to create great products.

Being a UX professional—whether a UX designer, a user researcher, or a UX leader—can sometimes be challenging. We often find ourselves in the midst of organizational challenges—sometimes bringing more to light than we actually solve. Because our work is customer facing, User Experience is an important part of the product development equation. We reflect our organizational cultures because we are so integral to the product development process.

In many organizations, there is a very high turnover rate for Directors of User Experience—just because an organization’s culture is broken. We recognize early on that many product problems are a direct reflection of cultural difficulties, but sometimes there is no way to change them.

A great organizational culture is a necessity if we are to create great products. In this article, I’ll discuss some ways in which organizations fail because of their cultures.

Talking to Customers Isn’t a Part of an Organization’s Culture

“No matter what your process is, your organization’s goal should be to have a clear understanding of your customers.”

Instead of finding out what customers really need, a product team goes off in a room where a lot of smart people start developing use cases, wireframes, and visual designs in a conference room. Months go by, the organization releases the final product, and it bombs. No one uses it, a lot of money has gotten wasted, and the product team gets fired.

Whose fault is it? It’s the organization’s fault.

No matter what your process is, your organization’s goal should be to have a clear understanding of your customers. This means customer visits or remote user interviews using Skype video and screen sharing or simple phone calls. If you fit the profile of the target audience, you can design for yourself, but beware of doing this if you don’t belong to the audience for a product.

There is no excuse for this organizational failing; no one should design a product in a vacuum. The assertion that “we shouldn’t show customers the product because competitors might see it” is stupid. If you’re creating a new product like design a wedding gown for which the barrier of entry is so low that a customer could steal the idea, maybe you shouldn’t be in that market.

Great organizations have a clear vision for customers. Your organization should work hand in hand with customers. This is an issue of organizational culture. It should be ingrained in your culture that talking to users is not only expected, but rewarded.

Manufacturers of physical products do extensive studies of their customers to maximize their profits. Supermarket store design is a great example of this, particularly the design of customer flows. Why don’t technology firms do this?

How to avoid this failing—Go on the road. Visit or talk to at least one customer a week. Users are your best subjects, from whom you can learn the most. Partner with your customers to grow your business.

Leadership Doesn’t Have a Clear Vision

“This week we’re going to build a product with viral features.”

“This week let’s build a comment system.”

“This week we’ll do e-commerce!”

If a company’s direction is always changing, and they don’t have a clear vision of where they are going, there’s no way that they can build great products. Achieving successful product management and user experience is highly dependent on understanding the context of the user. If that context is always changing, there’s no way to build an effective user experience.

Vision is hard to define, but not as hard as you might think. There’s an anecdote about a couple of MBAs who started a business. They did extensive research and pricing studies and spent lots of money on ever-changing priorities. Eventually, they sold the company to a small business owner who had a simplified vision of how to run the company. Under the new leadership, the company sold its products for twice as much as they cost and provided great customer service. The business became wildly successful.

Creating great products isn’t as hard as you might think: becoming clear about what you’re providing to users is about listening to them. That’s it.

How to avoid this failing—Articulate a vision, and stick to it. You may need to adjust your vision based on market changes, but the clearer your vision, the better you’re able to build products that reflect that vision.

Leadership and the Design Team Don’t Share the Same Vision

I’ve worked in a few organizations where we’d be making great progress on a product and getting really close to launch. Then we’d be asked to do a big demonstration for a Vice President or C-level executive, and our meeting would turn from strategy to “could you make this button green.” Or they might ask us to add a few more features that require a complete redesign, destroying months of work.

I’ve seen email messages from CEOs who were intent on hijacking the design process or going around design leadership to ask their go-to guy to make changes to a product design. This is toxic behavior and reflects poorly on leadership because it demonstrates that they have failed to build a design team that they can work with effectively.

If leadership doesn’t believe their design team can build a product that can grow the business, they need to make changes to the design team, not ask for a button in another color. The best designers work hand in hand with management to understand their vision and translate it into a viable product. If management can’t articulate a vision that is consistent with the needs of the market, this creates great conflict.

In truly great organizations, vision bubbles up from the lowest levels, then management synthesizes and articulates a clear product vision.

How to avoid this failing—Management must let designers do their job and recognize that they aren’t the target audience. Leaders’ responsibility is setting the vision and building their team. If they’ve done this right, they shouldn’t have to hijack the design process.

The Design Team Hasn’t Laid a Sound Foundation by Establishing a Design Process

“Let’s go straight to wireframes.”

Sometimes that might not be such a bad thing. You might need to get a feel for where you need to go by creating a bunch of wireframes. But wireframes are the end-product of a lot of other UX design tasks and are just one part of the design process. They provide documentation for your design projects, allow you to articulate your design ideas visually and functionally, and let you communicate your ideas to multiple audiences, including management and engineering.

I’ve seen design teams fail because there wasn’t a good foundation for the final design vision. Good designers should have at least a rough idea of where they are going, even if their destination could change.

A good process ensures consistency across all of your products and drives you toward a consistent product vision for your users.

How to avoid this failing—Put your design process in place. Establish your product vision and create branding standards, personas, patterns, and other design guidelines.

The Designers on a Team Aren’t on the Same Page

There’s nothing more toxic than when the designers on a team are working toward different goals. Creating a collaborative culture is very important when building a design team. When designers work together they can achieve great things. When they don’t agree on a design process or share the same design goals, arguments can ensue over the silliest things—like the color of buttons or the usage of hyperlinks. Such a team cannot achieve a consistent product vision.

I’ve worked with visual designers who refused to collaborate or whose idea of design was to throw mockups over a wall. In one particular environment where I worked, the visual designers completely changed the layouts and, thus, the workflows represented in the wireframes, disregarding the deep thought that had gone into the work.

While the personalities of the designers on a team may be very different, they should be able to work together toward one common goal: the success of their company. Here’s an example of teamwork from the world of baseball: During the early 1970’s, the Oakland As were a complete mess off the field because of personality differences. But on the field, they had one goal: winning the World Series. And they did win it three years straight, in 1972, 1973, and 1974.

How to avoid this failing—Design leadership should be able build a team that is on the same page and has shared goals. Sometimes that means firing people. Design is sometimes more subjective than we would like to think. Having an inconsistent design culture can destroy companies.

An Organization Doesn’t Allocate Its Resources Properly

Look at the product teams around you. How many product managers do you work with? How many designers? How many engineers?

Many organizations believe that the answer to building great engineering and product teams is to hire more engineers. I’ve found the opposite to be true. I’ve worked on a lot of smaller teams that were able to build great products by following streamlined processes, maintaining proper staffing levels, and hiring resources with the right skill sets.

I’ll give you an example: the best team I ever worked on had a ratio of three developers, one visual designer, one product manager—that was me—and one quality assurance engineer. We were able to do enough requirements gathering to keep the developers busy, no one worked overtime, and we created a product that is still profitable today as a small business.

If the ratios or skill sets of resources aren’t right, a team cannot work efficiently. When there are too few designers, developers sit around waiting, with nothing to do, and the designers are grossly overworked. When there are too many designers, they produce too much documentation, so the developers don’t know where to start. Finding the right balance is like tuning the engine of a racing car: too much or too little and the engine runs inefficiently. Getting the right mix means winning the race.

How to avoid this failing—Adjust your staffing levels and their skill sets for optimal performance. This doesn’t necessarily mean hiring more people: sometimes too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the broth. Get the ratios right and your team’s performance will improve.

An Organization Encourages Feature Creep

Product management should work hand in hand with user experience. They should work together not only to decide what should be in a product, but also what shouldn’t be in a product. Most product teams don’t have the luxury of doing green-field product development with unlimited budgets. Therefore, feature creep can kill companies.

Constraints are our friends. We shouldn’t have to try to “ice skate in a phone booth,” but great teams realize the limitations and constraints of their environment and work within them. That’s the core of designing for mobile first: understand exactly what a user’s minimum needs are, then build a product to satisfy them. That’s one of the core premises of agile development: iterate to a final product within the constraints of your organization. If you force hard decisions, you’ll end up with a better product.

Poor product teams and UX teams don’t understand restraint, and they suffer because of this. Projects are rushed, wireframes undergo endless revisions, and nothing ever gets done at a level of quality that anyone is happy with. It’s in everyone’s best interest to focus on what you can do rather than some mythical and unachievable goal.

How to avoid this failing—Less is more. Iterate to a final product. Every feature that you include should provide tremendous value and be integral to the user experience. If leadership consistently asks product teams and designers to add features or make fundamental changes to a product within an unrealistic timeline, the organization’s culture needs to change.

There’s No Effort Dedicated to Fit and Finish

Would you try to sell a car with a half-finished paint job? Only three seats in the cabin? A dashboard that wasn’t cleaned?

That’s the rub: users will continually expect better and better user experiences as the Web matures. This includes the fit and finish of a product, which reflects directly on the team that built a product. Apple goes to great lengths to build products that feel complete. Most companies don’t produce products at that level, and the market reacts appropriately, declaring such products to be commodities.

Lack of attention to the details of a product reflects directly on how organizations perceive the expectations of their customers. An example: For many years, American automakers weren’t dedicated to the goal of refining the fit and finish of their products, and their customers reacted accordingly.

You must take the greatest care from the initial design of the user experience to the final implementation of its details. Customers notice when a product team doesn’t take the time to take it all the way to the finish line.

How to avoid this failing—Emphasize the expectation that your organization should be dedicated to producing products to the highest standards. Making sure a product goes out with every detail complete should always trump deadlines or any political concerns.

If you want to participate in a survey about your culture, please click here.

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From Google Analytics. Funny as hell. True too.

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Yeah, that’s about right.

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I covered a list of expectations I have for new user experience designers. Some lucky designers graduate straight from school into working at company; the rest of us have to break in the field any way they can.

The best way into the user experience field is interning.

I know that it may seem like working for free, but the experience is invaluable, and it helps build your network. You can do if after you graduate (if you haven’t done it before), and it’s a good way to build your portfolio so you have something to show on job interviews.  It also might lead to a full time job if they like you, and I would rather hire someone that had an internship because it shows they are willing to invest in their future and not in it for the cash.

Even returning students, like Erin Moore, took internships that were hugely valuable — she spend time at Twitter. She’s good enough she didn’t need to.

Great designers are not born, but grow through experience and learning from other great designers.

Here’s a few ways to find a great internship.

Search internship job sites and job boards

Companies I talk to find it hard to get interns because many  designers  don’t want to work for rates lower how they  perceived   their value even though they lack the skills to effectively do their jobs. They’re taking to the internet to find candidates whereas in years past, you would have had to know someone.  Many internships are listed on sites like Internships.com (a past client of mine) and InternMatch, and they tend to be larger companies so you get to see the internal workings of IBM and other Fortune 500 firms.

Opportunities are also listed on general job boards and through career sites. Over 8,000 internship listings are available through Jobvite’s Facebook application. Meetup.com is one of the companies looking for Design Interns.

Follow Interaction Designers on Twitter and read their blogs

Install TweetDeck, News Gator learn how to use ifttt.com to get email alerts, and find interaction designers to follow. The very first place they’ll list internships is on their Twitter feeds and their blogs.

Nadyne Richmond of VMWare has a few internships available right now, and the first place you would have read about them is on her blog.  HUGE, the interactive agency, is another one that talks about their UX Design School program (entries are closed). And searching on Twitter is your best friend; there are hundreds of results every day.

I also have several Twitter lists categorized by location of Twitter users who are User Experience designers to follow, and I’m always curating that list. I would reach out and start a conversation with the designers on the lists.

Go to local meetups

Personal networking is an another way to get started in the field. Many companies host meetups to find great talent. You can also get advice from other designers in the field on how they got started.

In San Francisco (where I live), UX Eye for Developer Guy is a meetup that pairs engineers with designers to create great products and get feedback on ideas.  Many companies sponsor the meetup, and it’s regularly hosted at organizations looking for interns. The UX Happy Hour also is a great way to meet designers that might have opportunities. The Happy Hour is growing to metropolitan areas like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.

All you have to ask, “Is your company looking for someone to break into the business?” What’s the worst they could say…no?

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Posted over at Johnny Holland.

Brandon Stephens, Axure? Really?

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Courtesy of Douglas Wray. Very funny. And true.

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