Community: Professional Development

In Part 1 of my series on UX strategy, I defined a mature design approach for the modern world. There are three levels of UX maturity:

• operational—Designers are just implementers. They work on assigned tasks and create design deliverables.
• tactical—Designers are an integral part of a product team. They deeply integrate design into other product development tasks and processes.
• strategic—Designers are visionaries or product strategists—perhaps even product managers. They influence and make strategic decisions on how to evolve a product.

Each level of UX maturity has its own challenges, goals, and limitations. These change as an organization matures. We need strong UX leaders with the clear vision and passion that are necessary to drive change and realize their goals, ensuring that their company’s design culture can grow rather than falling into decline because of real-world limitations. However, UX maturity is impossible without great product designers and a strong UX design team—a great leader alone is not enough. In this article, I’ll describe the role of product designers and how they pursue UX strategy. Read More

There are countless articles on the Web whose purpose is to help UX designers write stellar resumes or craft compelling portfolios. But through my decades-long career as a UX professional and leader, I’ve discovered other ways of helping candidates stand out. Although some of them get less fanfare, they are no less important. The observations that I’ll share in this column come from experience—not only from my own failures, successes, and learnings as a job applicant, but also as a manager who has reviewed hundreds of resumes and portfolios and interviewed dozens of candidates for UX design jobs.

Therefore, in this column, I’ll go beyond the usual advice about creating your resume and portfolio. Instead, I’ll touch upon some other ways in which UX design candidates can stand out from other job applicants. Think of the following tips as additional arrows in your quiver that, if you use them right, can better arm you for success. These tips include the following:

• Being selective
• Embracing the cover letter
• Showcasing your initiative Read More

An internship is a great way to get into the field of user experience, but internships are often failures—for both the intern and the hiring company. Why? The hiring companies often don’t have a plan for how to use their interns, and interns often don’t know how they can contribute or where they fit in.

Whose fault is this? Both the intern and the hiring company are responsible for ensuring that an internship is meaningful and rewarding. Yet many companies hire interns without any plan for how to use them. They may think, We have a lot to do around here. We could use an intern. They then hire an intern without planning how to use that person and realize that it’s difficult to find things for the intern to do. So the intern either sits around underused or does a lot of busywork. Thus, the internship becomes a bad experience for both parties, and the company may think twice about ever hiring an intern again. Read More