The User Experience Job Market

Episode #8 Transcript

PUBLISHED ON JUNE 28, 2010

Peter Clayton: Welcome to an all new episode of the Onward Search Career Cast. This is Peter Clayton reporting. I’m here with Director of Account Services, Jonathan Restaino from Onward Search and User Experience Expert, Keith Laferriere, to discuss the latest trends and changes taking place in the user experience job market. If you’re interested in a UX gig, you’ve come to the right place.

First things first guys, when I think of user experience, I think of Jakob Nielsen, who has been writing about this stuff for about 20 years, the user experience is a term that gets a lot of buzz but when we talk about user experience as a discipline or a profession, what does this really mean and what does this person really do?

Jonathan, can you help us out here?

Jonathan: Sure. User experience is how a person feels, interacts, reacts to a product, website, service. Mostly over the past few years since the user experience has become a hot topic, it’s being used in the interactive world for the most part. It highlights perception of the user, the subjective feelings and thought of a product, like I was saying, or a service. It’s really in the interactive world a human-computer interaction. These talent… these people in the industry, they saw complex interaction challenges. They research, evaluate, create user personas as far as who is the audience around what they want, to what these limitations are. Further down the process, they create wireframes, interaction pathways for a website, then there is the visual component in the creation, so everything from color of site to button shape to site components and flow of the content is analyzed and created.

Peter Clayton: Keith, what is your perspective on this?

Keith: You know, it’s multidisciplinary. When I started UX group on LinkedIn, I was amazed by the call to action for so many people on this. The first topic of discussion was what does UX mean, and I go back to Don Norman who is Jakob Nielsen’s partner who came up with the term essentially on user experience and I think about how many different disciplines this touches. You know you’ve got the designers, you’ve got the IAAs, you’ve got UX’s interactive challenges that we handle. It reaches basically every sense of the gamut from creative to production to the digital output – every single person that has anything to do with a customer journey is part of the user experience team.

Peter Clayton: Is there any difference between the term user interface or user experience or are they basically the same thing?

Keith: No. A user interface is really – and it can be applied to an ATM just as well as it can apply to a mobile phone or a website – the user interface is the thing that you’re interacting with. It is the actual non-physical but tangible-in-their-mind thing that you’re touching on and you’re working with as opposed to the user experience which is it could start all the way at a store with the right signage that points you to a website, that points you to a mobile experience, so the user experience really does take you out of just one item and work you all the way through an experience, as opposed to user interface which is primarily for one specific device or website.

Peter Clayton: Thanks for that. What makes a good user experience on the web on mobile or even in a physical store?

Keith: Without question, it’s continuity. If you can get someone to experience the same thing as they go from one step of their journey to the next and keeping in mind a good user experience from the customer side is a little bit different than that of the business side where a customer needs to have to continuity. It needs to know that when I go somewhere no matter which part of the journey I’m on, I’m being treated the same way and I’m being brought down a certain path.

For the business side of it, it’s bringing the customer down a certain path so that they end up at the purchase decision or at the piece of information that you really need them to get to.

A good experience is multidisciplinary, it’s across all channels, it helps you understand the full journey, and it gets you somewhere from point A to point B with a real continuity involved.

Peter Clayton: Jonathan, should information architects be expected to be involved in the visual design process?

Jonathan: I think they should always be expected to ensure the integrity of the information is not compromised. IAs where they have a design background or a design skill set is certainly, whether desirable or put to use, they should at least be prepared to add value to the design process itself by being able to make sure that the content and information and flow of the site is going properly for its success.

Peter Clayton: If I’m a student, recently graduating from a UX program, what information should I be prepared in the industry, Jonathan?

Jonathan: That’s a good question; I’ve been asked that a lot lately, and you’re seeing not only recent college graduates but talent that have been in the field, been designers, been researchers going back and getting a further education in human factors or user experience essentially. I preach to them that they learn to become an expert in a particular skill yet understand all of the supporting components, so be versatile yet be coveted because you are an expert in the field. It’s a tight market so you need to have an edge.

There are multiple technologies out there that go into user experience from the design suite as well Axure, OmniGraffle, Visio – these are tools that are used to create wireframes in the information architecture in UX process, and you will be asked to use those at multiple occasions and multiple times, so be familiar with the tools of the field.

Peter Clayton: Why is there such a disparity in the field among a specific title or the field like user experience designer or UX architect or interaction designer and information architect?

Jonathan: I think it goes back to what Keith said earlier in the call that it’s very difficult to compartmentalize many skill sets into one field, into one title. I also think that the industry is very young and there’s a lot of education to be had that hasn’t happened yet and there’s much more that we can learn about the industry. Many things are still to be tested, they’re still trying to be figured out; so certain titles are bringing different skills, whether it’s more design heavy to more research heavy but overall, there are times where they will interact with each other and then there will be components of one title and one position that will flow into others.

I think over time, like I said, as we learn more about the industry, there will be a uniform title or will be a uniform hierarchy of titles that will come.

Peter Clayton: Keith, where does the UX fit in the application or software development cycle?

Keith: It fits everywhere! Here’s my approach on this. The earlier, the better. If you can get an UX designer or an information architect or just somebody who has an idea or a stake in the user experience in general, all the way at the beginning of a project no matter what the project type is, they should be involved in figuring out what the journey from step 1 to step 17 and to work with the team, both in an iterative approach; where you start with the project, you go down the cycles and let’s say you have an agile project where you’re building an application for a bank, the idea is to keep the interface design and the experience as a whole in a certain path where it’s linear tasks being taken care of and not so much a path where a user has so many options at them.

In the case of an application for a banking system, you know you might say I want to transfer funds, so you take that use case and you start to develop it with the user in mind. What happens a lot of times in the software development cycle is that there are really smart people putting together really smart applications and sometimes because they’re thinking so smartly about the application, they forget about who’s actually going to use it, and we want to make sure that everybody’s on the same page and that the UX person responsible for that care taking of the customer is, in fact, there helping the journey be established from all the way from the beginning of the project.

Peter Clayton: You bring up something interesting; the fact is when people are doing this kind of transaction, like wanting to transfer funds or whatever in a banking application, they don’t want to think about that anymore than they have to. How does a UX talent balance information and the functionality?

Keith: It’s all about the environment you’re trying to create. The experience that you’re in for a banking system and you’re doing very functional, tactical things is going to be a lot less information driven with the exception of maybe having a help option or having things that allow you to see whether or not what you’ve done has taken effect so some messaging that goes back and forth from the system but really, it depends on the environment.

If you’re in a marketing situation, even an overflow of information is going to be too much. You kind of want to peel back a little bit, get the most bang for the buck, understand that people are not going to digest seven paragraphs of information no matter what system they’re on, and start to pare it back from there. Marketing experience can withstand a little bit more text than a banking system which really doesn’t have any place having a ton of text attached to it because they’re trying to get something done and just don’t get in their way.

Peter Clayton: I’d like to get some insight from both of you guys, what do you think the future of user experience is?

Jonathan: It’s an industry that I think is going continue to grow, it’s going to be looked at more closely. Just think about all the devices and all the technology that’s out there now from the iPad and Kindle and even gaming devices like the Play Station Portable to mobile devices from your iPhone to your Android, even 3D television and 3D gaming, there’s going to be so much more to look at and to analyze that the industry is just going to keep growing and continually expand because as people, we crave information, we crave entertainment, so any other device or any other website or component that’s going to be out there that’s going to allow us to get more, is just going to have to be analyzed and create an optimal user experience.

Peter Clayton: Keith, from your perspective?

Keith: It’s pretty limitless. The idea is that we’re still in a pretty young stage in user experience as a whole from people not even adopting the term at some larger agencies to people who are just experts in user experience because they come from such a wide background. What I’d like to see in the future, I can’t tell the future or else I’d be a very, very rich man, but what I’d love to see in the future is that we keep growing this thing at a rate at which it can be digested. I want to see companies really put a stock in user experience as a whole and understand what the customer is really looking for, not just designing because the business requirements say so. It’s more about how do we grow this industry into a much more powerful unit for every type of project no matter what type of company you work for. That’s the goal is to really get it to be part of your every day thinking.

Peter Clayton: From my perspective, when you want to think about the power of what user experience is all about, you have to look no further than the iPad. Here’s a technology that has completely reinvented the industry over night and it’s the user experience, right?

Keith: Yeah, that’s correct. As a matter of fact, any of the devices that have become touch with haptic response, with any kind of interactivity where you don’t even have a physical keyboard anymore to be honest with you, you know we’ve had touch screens for years, that’s not really new, but what’s new is how they’re being developed and how integrated that touch is and the different mechanisms and the different gestures you can make within a touch interface to get from point A to point B and work with software and work with games especially. Where it’s comes now is from the days of yes, we can do a touch screen to now we can do a touch screen that actually means something that you can do something with, that it’s so easy to use that even a 6 year old can pick up a device and immediately know how to use it, it’s that intrinsic to your behavior – that’s where this is all headed. So if we can keep it going in that direction, that’s perfect.

Peter Clayton: One last question and this is really towards Jonathan, we usually end these shows with a hot job segment. What jobs in UX is Onward Search trying to fill right now?

Jonathan: Onward has a number of contacts and opportunities with agencies and organizations across the nation in particular in Boston, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles, there are a number of opportunities for information architects, for user experience designers. Those that can create that content structure as well as be able to apply visual components, so two separate positions, but there are number of opportunities. My request with the user experience talent world out there is to connect with us because we understand the market, we are able to speak to the industry and speak to our clients about your skill set and be able to be successful together.

Peter Clayton: Jonathan and Keith, thanks so much for taking time to speak with us today on the Onward Search Career Cast.

Keith: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure.

Peter Clayton: We’ve been speaking with Jonathan Restaino, Director of Account Services with Onward Search and User Experience Expert Keith Laferriere. Thanks for joining us on Onward Search Career Cast.