We've proven for years that you can ship a product without a designer. Many companies have done that, and while it doesn't make for a great result, it does ship. However, it's much harder to ship a software product without a coder, if not near impossible.
That's why, right now, there are dozens of startups looking to pay big bucks to find the coding super designer. The demand is high and those designers who have proven, practiced coding skills can demand a higher salary than those who don't.
But how much of an extra salary?
What about the non-startup portion of the hiring world? Right now, the established organizations find it easier to have larger teams with separate developers and designers.
Yet, that doesn't make the designer that can code any less valuable to them. A team with two coding designers is more flexible and capable than a team with one non-coding designer and a non-designing developer. The flexible team can produce well-designed results better and faster.
I had a conversation with a recruiter about this regarding a position they were hiring for. It was a fairly large organization that was looking for someone who could do user experience, design layouts, illustrate icons, and code.
The mythical unicorn.
The pay was good, but not even close to what that person could make freelance, nor much more what most of the people with two to three of those skills are making. I told the recruiter that.
There’s nothing that’s come across my desk that would pay enough to force me use both skills. I can do visual design. I can do HTML. But I enough User Experience the most. The technical and visual skills help me understand the constraints, but I don’t go much further than that.
If a recruiter calls me about that mythical unicorn position, and isn’t paying at least a 25 percent premium over market rate, they don’t understand what they need.
What hiring managers really need is a diversity of skills:
Coding and designing are collections of skills. What we've learned is teams with a better distribution of skills, not segmented by roles, produce better results. Having a team filled with individuals who can both code and design will be more effective in the long run than a team where the skills are divided up.
Maybe we should be asking developers if they get user experience and visual design.
In today’s environment, you can get by with good but not great developers early on. You can’t get by on poor design, and that’s why user experience skills are more valuable now.
That LinkedIn Honeymoon: it might be your professional network, but how long will that last?
Several start-ups are banking that the future of career networking is actually on Facebook Inc.
LinkedIn has established itself as a source for candidate information, recruiters say. The company made its debut on the NYSE on May 19.
These start-ups point to Facebook’s much broader user base: With 500 million users, Facebook is five times larger than LinkedIn.
But changing users’ mindsets might be a challenge. Some Facebook users are loathe to mix their personal and professional networks, fearing some private information might damage their work reputation.
Younger people are more apt to use Facebook than LinkedIn. And does everyone need a LinkedIn profile?
It’s easy to criticize the user experience of an application or website, because we’re all end users.
But sometimes we use it once, while many have to use it day after day as a part of their job. We talk about how we like using some sites, but there’s always the “I wish it was this way.”
We are our own worst enemies.
We constantly pick at sites and snipe on Twitter how certain missing features are UX 101, but we don’t offer constructive feedback. We don’t understand that some decisions are based on conscious business decisions. Worst of all, we don’t get that company culture, most of all, plays a part in the final product.
Not every company is Apple where design is king. Trade offs are made all the time, sometimes without any input from the user experience stakeholders. All good user experience designers make decisions regarding what they can live with and what they can’t.
What do you forget when you comment?
All user experience designers aren’t created equal.
For most of my career, I’ve been involved in large projects. One site redesign over 300,000 pieces of content. The current application I work on has hundreds of screens, many with complex interactions.
Because of my past experience, I could tell you a lot about content management, Internet Postage and consumer level escrow transactions.
But please, please don’t ask me to design a microsite.
I tried once. After two weeks, my client and I mutually agreed it wasn’t a fit.
There’s a reason why job descriptions read: “Must have 3 years of mobile experience.” There’s all these nuances and details that come only when you work on projects. If you go from one type of site or application to another, you’re going to make mistakes. And in the end, users suffer.
I’ve made conscious decisions now to tell recruiters up front that I’m not a fit but will refer someone that’s a better candidate. Not everyone does that. Many User Experience and Visual Designers are “out of position,” because they are working at companies or on projects that aren’t in their sweet spot. Other User Experience Designers have to come in behind them to clean up the mess.
Often, this cleanup lasts longer than the initial development because of migrating legacy user experience issues and redesigning the technical implementation with users in mind.
There’s a lot of truth in Joel Spolsky’s statement: “All applications suck until version 3.” It takes a lot of time to learn the users, build the features and fix all the crap that you broke in the first place.
All of the startups where I have worked functioned on the “just good enough” philosophy of development. Some places where I worked, tasks that should have been automated were done by hand, because the system didn’t support it.
I worked at one startup where we were up against the wall. One month before launch, and nowhere near complete. They had to launch. On time. No questions asked.
The development team was in a meeting room late at night trying to figure out all the features that absolutely had to be done. There was a bunch of arguing, a bunch of negotiating, and then someone brought up something completely unthinkable.
“Well, when we launch. We don’t have to bill the customers for at least a month. That would buy us some time,” a developer said.
So they launched the product without billing. Absolutely amazing. Later on, we had to pay the technical debt because the billing system they did write was written by developers that had been working 14 hour days for months. But that was a business decision that at the time seemed worth it.
Why? We shipped on time.
Many startups begin without a user experience designer, and that affects every decision that is made. That forces the incoming user experience expert to be a janitor — something that’s not really seen until the redesign is complete.
There’s a famous tale of a web designer that called out American Airlines for how bad their site was. He redesigned their home page, doing a great job creating a very clean design. Easy to do, right?
He got a response from a user experience designer that worked there, a very talented one at that (and one that eventually got fired). The designer listed all the divisions that were stakeholders on the site and explained the interactions that lie outside of user experience but made it in the final product. He mentioned that one group might have control of the pages, user experience designers get overriden by executives and, in the end, the visual designers might have final say, affecting the shipped product.
The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the siteand a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality.
I’ve been in many places where user experience is back of the bus to the direct opposite of what they sell. Some places, creative runs the shop. It really just depends.
A culture has to value user experience and product management to let it lead. The best organizations I have seen have been collaborative, but in the end, product and user experience had the final call. If that isn’t the case, then it’s a culture issue.
I was at a meetup a few months ago, and a few people I met worked at a company that recently IPO’ed. We were talking about the size of teams. In their company, they had 60 visual and interaction designers. Most of the places where I have worked, I was on a team of one. Sometimes, I’ve been lucky enough to have a visual designer.
That’s a pretty big gap.
When you’re working with smaller teams, you make a lot of decisions that you would never make if you had unlimited resources. You know that drag and drop WSYISYG editor you’d like to drop in? Can’t do it, but we can create something on a smaller scale. The site-wide redesign? Don’t have the resources, but we could do it on a rolling basis. Rewrite every email that gets sent out? Sure, but we’ll have to do it over two months.
All of the situations above I’ve gone through. Multiple times.
Not everyone works at really large companies with unlimited resources.
Nor do we work at startups trying to solve very specific business cases. One project I worked on, there wasn’t a product manager for a single screen. The majority of us work at companies were there’s job security for three years, because you’ll be redesigning the application one section at a time.
Because of this, we all make decisions on which battles to fight. Often, it’s the difference between shipping and not shipping a product. Not shipping leaves one year gaps in your resume. You ask yourself the following: Is digging in worth that one year gap? Do you want to own the decision that could negatively affect the profitability of the company?
Do you want to put your job on the line because you want something cooler?
If I was working at some software services, the last thing I would do is improve the user experience too much.
There are a lot of services companies that sell great software. But what they really sell is services to install, maintain and extend the software. It’s going to be easy enough so sales engineers, most of them making much, much more than user experience designers, can show how customizable it is, but hard enough so anyone without experience can customize it.
Because at the end of the day, the business value of user experience hits the bottom line.
Great user experiences for consumer products not only sell the product, they prevent customer support and save money. The reason Mint.com had to be so easy to use is because customer support representatives cost money, and that’s something you can’t charge for with their business model. What you can charge for is solution architects, because there’s a perceived need.
I worked for a consulting company, and we did a lot of customizations. We played this game all the time, and none of it was about User Experience. It was about the bottom line. We billed by the hour, and the easier the package was, the less we could bill.
Any software consultant can tell you the best thing about open source is the lack of real support.
To really learn what matters for the product, talk to everyone else in the company and ask where they fit in the bottom line. You’ll realize that your wireframes are a very small part of the big picture.
There are a few things I don’t like about 37signals.
I wish it had auto-numbering.
The lack of categories annoys me.
I wish the permissions system was better.
However, say want you want to say, they’re doing something cool over there. They’ve invented the perfect lifestyle company. They have a solid team. They’re making a virtual team work across multiple time zones, using their own products to manage product development. They are contributing to a very profitable SAAS product that has an enthusiastic community behind them. Their process works.
Who am I to criticize?
I’m a power user of project management tools.
I’m always going to ask for more features.
I’m not their target audience.
They have filled a very specific need that serves millions of users well, and they are making money on it. I could make suggestions all day long, but they have a good handle on their target market. They get their users. They understand the personas. They will be king of the hill until someone makes something better.
The same goes for any product. I look at products on which I’ve worked, and I always see features we can improve. But then the users (remember, “user” experience? Not “what you want” experience.) rave about the product, and it’s profitable. Or almost so.
It works for them, and the users are happy even if it’s not perfect.
Who am I to criticize?
There’s no such such thing as an ideal situation.
It’s easy for someone like 37signals to talk about how a product can be improved, and it’s another thing to actually do it when you’re not driving the bus. Not all companies have the luxuries a small startup does, with a clean codebase and clear objective.
The real world isn’t some startup where people will run through walls to launch a product, or some college product. The developer you work with wants to work realistic hours, and that means making realistic choices. We all want to see our family and friends; a satisfying work/life balance might mean shipping a feature in the next sprint.
If you have feedback, here’s a better approach: reach out to someone personally and give your feedback.
More often than not, you’ll get an honest response. Taking this approach is a very professional way that, hopefully, can be easily achieved by using LinkedIn or Twitter, and both make it easy to find that person who’s designing the product. I’ve done so several times (I have to dig up that email to Quora), and I’ve enjoy the conversation immensely. Having that conversation publicly through Twitter is something that is bound to come up with people evaluate you for other positions. Social Media is forever.
Doing so privately also doesn’t get the designer fired for talking frankly about the issues they encounter.
It takes a certain amount of maturity and mutual respect for the designer to have that conversation. We are all after the same end goal: great user experiences.
But that’s easy to forget, isn’t it?
Ah, the irony. Then again, does he really need LinkedIn? Do we all need it?
How much did it cost to print out your portfolio?
I know how much it cost for mine: $521. It took three hours to print at Kinko’s, and I generally carry it around in a suitcase on wheels.
I’ve been lucky — most of the places I have worked at treated wireframes and persona documents as deliverables. I also have a print design background, which most UX types don’t have. I also have also worked with Fortune 500 companies, so it’s going to look impressive even before opening the pages.
Even then, when I present my portfolio really, really impresses people. How do I know? I’ve been told several times that what I have is some of the best materials they have ever seen.
By interviewers. By recruiters. By co-workers.
Word gets around too. I’ve interviewed a lot of UX types, and been interviewed.
Sooner or later, the right people take notice, and they’ll remember your work. They won’t remember the average work, but they do remember really bad and really good work.
People move places, especially in the UX community. Even in San Francisco, it’s a small town. Once you break in, people know who you are.
Does your portfolio impress people? It should. You should be able to explain in detail what parts of the UX process you used on a particular project. We never go through the whole process — we adapt to what’s needed for the project.
Explain what you did to make the process more efficient.
Explain your thinking.
And most of it, do what you need to do so you don’t have to explain: make it look good.
This is a really good post about portfolios over at Better UX Portfolios:
I do still think that it is important to show well presented, detailed, annotated wireframes in a portfolio. Employers need to know that you can do these, and can think through the detail that a developer and designer will need.
But, no employer worth their salt will just want to see a bunch of wireframes. You should share aspects of your process.
All those things you list in your cv (collaborative workshops, sketching, personas, sitemaps, process flows, user journeys, prototypes). Where are they?
- Prove that you have done these stock UCD activities that you can learn from the many books that exist
- Demonstrate how you have adapted the technique to suit your style or the problems you were faced
- Show how they helped a project, or even better how the activity failed for whatever reason
Android phones must adhere to a "compatibility" standard determined by Google. In an e-mail on Aug. 6, 2010, Dan Morrill, a manager in the Android group, noted in passing that it was obvious to the phone makers that "we are using compatibility as a club to make them do things we want."
…and you would think open would mean being able to plug in other technologies. Not so:
In an e-mail dated June 2, 2010, Tim Vangoethem, a Motorola executive, wrote to Skyhook executives that Google had informed Motorola that Skyhook's location service on the planned smartphone "renders the device no longer Android Compatible."
Google can do whatever it wants — they open the OS. But they shouldn’t be standing behind the “Don’t do evil” philosophy if they’re only as open as Microsoft is. I’m sure there are a lot of companies and government agencies that are concerned about the amount of control Google is now exerting over the market.
And I think that’s rightfully so.
Great post. What they said. Read on.
Everyone develops opinions regarding how things should look, how things should behave, and what things should be called. These cognitive biases make up the filter between what actually exists, and what we perceive to be true.
The field of experience design attempts to realize a user's cognitive biases, or opinions, and rationalizes design decisions that make use of those biases.
If a UX designer or UX strategist does not go through the process of identifying and incorporating users' cognitive biases into their work, it stands to be misinterpreted, and site goals stand to be unachieved.
What many UX professionals tend to forget is that they also develop cognitive biases that influence the work they produce. If these biases aren't recognized and accounted for, the produced experience could be optimized for the designer, rather than the user. A common issue in agency life involves catering an experience to the cognitive biases present in the room (the stakeholders), rather than those identified through research and ethnography.
Great Read. Too often, we work alone. Great design is a collaboration, not a solo event.
In the design world, the idea of working in a “team” often provokes dread. Teams introduce overhead; they require communication; members often battle to see their ideas implemented. The end result of teamwork is often seen as compromise, i.e. as a “taco pizza,” i.e. a situation in which everyone (including the customer) loses.
On the other hand, there are many examples of highly functioning creative teams, and my own experience tells me that a team approach can be vastly more efficient and effective than working solo. Who doesn’t want a well-matched partner to ensure that the ideas flow, the problem is considered from all angles, and dead-ends are avoided? And lets face it – some of the most interesting and important problems are too big to solve alone.
…
Still, how do you ensure that people with similar skills and interests will work well together?
You make sure that each team member knows and understands their responsibilities, that they enjoy giving up a little personal ownership for the benefit of others’ perspectives and skills, and that they deeply trust the other team members to play their parts. Without those fundamental qualities, the team is likely to go the way of Tolstoy’s unhappy families – division, mistrust, high drama. Good material for a novel, but bad for designing compelling products and growing a business.
This is a cross-post of a blog entry over at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform. Enjoy.
Let's just say these are busy times in Silcon Valley, especially for developers and user experience types. Many of my friends in software development are getting multiple calls a day from recruiters, pitching the next startup or some great contract work.
It's nice to be wanted, but it's also a frustrating process having to say no thank you to recruiters especially when they have completely misread my resume. I've gotten a lot of calls for front-end developers, database architects, and even iPhone development – and none of those are things are on my resume.
I've worked before as a recruiter and have built a team from scratch, so I understand recruiters' needs. I also understand that, at their core, recruiters are sales people, except they have to sell two parties to close a deal.
Recruiting is like real estate, except you're brokering talent instead of houses. Both recruiters and real estate agents that are best at what they do have common traits. They both may make money on commission and depend on selling the candidate on the company and vice versa (the buyer and seller of a house). Both also have the same goal – to close the deal.
I'm in the unique position of doing user research by interviewing the same group of people that call me: recruiters. I strike up wonderful conversations with them, and it's a win-win situation. They tell me what they need (sometimes I can give it to them), and I get great feedback about their needs for applicant tracking and social recruiting.
Here are a few tips on how to get great candidates:
The phone call you make is the first time any candidate has been contacted by your company. Make it worthwhile. Like any interview, first impressions are everything. The candidate is interviewing you as much as you are interviewing them, and they'll be grading you on everything from your knowledge of the company to whether they understand what you do as a profession.
They'll be asking a list of questions, if they're any good. You're on the clock for presenting the company as a great place at which to work. Forty hours a week (or more, if you're at a startup) is a lot of time to spend anywhere. In other words, it's a decision no one should take lightly. In down economy, people will suck it up. On the way up, it's more of a sales pitch.
For some professional communities, word spreads fast. I used to live in Southern California, and we used to say, "Big city, small town." This applies to the Bay Area even more so. We trade stories about places to work and recruiters, especially in a superheated social media culture, so each impression speaks volumes.
Hiring for software developers is much easier, because managers will give you a list of acronyms to use when finding candidates. Typing in Java, Swing, and Hibernate will get you a fair number of enterprise developers, for example. User Experience types are harder. We're in a field that's fairly amorphous and that works in conjunction with a lot of fields, like sales and marketing.
If you have questions, do research. Find out what a wireframe is. Learn about user research. Present a few initial candidates to the hiring managers, and ask questions like, "Does this person have enough experience?" before calling the candidates. Even better, join Quora, and do some searching there. There are a ton of questions about each of the fields, and the best and brightest that have written well-researched and thoughtful answers.
The best recruiters I know bracket candidates to get a good idea of the sweet spot for the position. They'll present people with too little or too much experience to get to that "just right" spot. The recruiters that I've worked with that understand what I do have captured more of my respect. I don't necessarily expect them to design a website, but I do want them to understand what I do.
When I was a graphic designer, my co-workers and I had a common joke about some of the jobs that we're offered – midnight shift, must make coffee, must answer phones – that had requirements totally outside of what we could or would want to do. The same goes for hiring people today. The best recruiters will do a good job of understanding who the candidate is and whether or not he or she would be willing to do the work required.
The best way to understand the candidate is to read their resume. Look at their experience level, where they have worked, and with what the brands. Even look at on what kind of applications they have worked. For example, the last time I designed a microsite that was very interactive was in the 20th century. I probably wouldn't want to do it again.
There's nothing worse than getting a phone call, and they want to present you for a position that's at least $30 an hour under market rate, or the person has to move to Missoula, Montana when they obviously are never going to leave San Francisco.
As the economy comes back, there's going to be a lot of job shifting, and compensation is going to return to pre-recession levels. That requires a deeper understanding of what the market rate is, and how far off the client is in what they want. All companies want the best bang for the buck, but the true understanding of salary is that you are mitigating risk, not paying for experience.
Work with the client or your company to learn what their expectations are, and what they are willing to pay. Go to a few candidates and ask them ballpark figures of what they are expecting.
The best recruiters I've worked with talk to me even if I'm not a commission. We talk about the market, companies, and what's going on. They've helped me standardize recruiter terminology for Jobvite, and we've gone out for drinks. We trade stories about the best places to work, and I help them understand some the motivations of other professionals we may know.
The best recruiters turn it into a professional friendship that goes beyond the initial sale, in the same way real estate agents reach out to people that live in the neighborhood. It's the virtual apple pie on Fourth of July. My favorite recruiters ask me for referrals, which I'll give without thinking twice. I'll tell them about companies that are looking for candidates, and match them up with other great people that are a better fit for the position.
I've referred over 30 people to positions over the last two years and will keep doing so. I almost always pass (or don't care) about the fee, because I enjoy the relationship. I would rather gain the trust and respect of a recruiter; and the social capital is in invaluable. I also understand the nature of Weak Ties, which is invaluable when building your career.
When someone is ready to explore new opportunities, all it takes is one great referral to seal the deal. That means if you get a shot, you can look like a hero to your client or company.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
