User Experience Careers How to Become a UX Pro, and How to Hire One Susan Farrell and Jakob Nielsen WWW.NNGROUP.COM 48105 WARM SPRINGS BLVD., FREMONT CA 94539–7498 USA Copyright © Nielsen Norman Group; All Rights Reserved. To get your own copy, download from: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/user-experience-careers About This Free Report This report is a gift for our loyal audience of UX enthusiasts. Thank you for your support over the years. We hope this information will aid your efforts to improve user experiences for everyone. The research for this report was done in 2013, but the majority of the advice may still be applicable today, because people and principles of good design change much more slowly than computer technology does. We sometimes make older report editions available to our audience at no cost, because they still provide interesting insights. Even though these reports discuss older designs, it’s still worth remembering the lessons from mistakes made in the past. 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Instead, we encourage you to distribute the following link to the report’s page on our website to allow people to decide whether to download it themselves: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/user-experience-careers REPORT AUTHORS Susan Farrell and Jakob Nielsen 2 [email protected] About This Free Report Copyright Notice Please do not post this document to the internet or to publicly available file-sharing services. This report is free, but it is still copyrighted information that may be updated from time to time, so please don’t distribute this file or host it elsewhere. Even when people post documents with a private URL to share only with a few colleagues or clients, search engines often index the copy anyway. Indexing means that thousands of people will find the secret copy through searches. © NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP WWW.NNGROUP.COM 3 Contents Executive Summary ....................................................................... 6 Overview ..................................................................................... 10 What is User Experience? ............................................................ 16 Overview of User Experience Disciplines ..................................... 20 What do Usability Professionals Work On? .................................. 26 Job Satisfaction ........................................................................... 29 What Kind of People Do Well in UX Positions? ............................. 31 Roles, Activities, and Skills .......................................................... 34 Formal Education ......................................................................... 41 Informal Education ...................................................................... 58 How to Get Ready to Do the Work ............................................... 66 Digital Tools for UX Activities ...................................................... 73 Where the Jobs Are and How to Get One ..................................... 78 Lessons Learned from Your First Year in UX ................................ 91 Job Titles of People Who Have UX Responsibilities ...................... 97 Learn More ................................................................................ 100 Appendix A: Job-Satisfaction Quotes ......................................... 101 Appendix B: UX Activities by Frequency .................................... 123 Appendix C: Education ............................................................... 124 Appendix D: Advice on Getting Started in UX ............................. 137 Appendix E: Design Tools .......................................................... 147 Appendix F: Analysis Tools ........................................................ 152 Appendix G: What Interviewers Look For .................................. 156 Appendix H: Questions That Interviewers Ask ........................... 163 4 [email protected] Contents Appendix I: What Helped Most in Your First Year? .................... 172 Acknowledgements ................................................................... 190 About the Authors ..................................................................... 191 © NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP WWW.NNGROUP.COM 5 Executive Summary When we teach our training courses, one of the most frequently asked questions is, “how do I get a user experience career?” Obviously, getting some training is a good start in any field. But there’s much more to it. And although some advice can be gained from the myriad of existing careers books, the UX field is sufficiently unusual that general-purpose books can’t tell you all you need to know. So how do we find out what it takes to have a strong career in the user experience field? By turning to our love of empirical data and finding out from people who actually work in the field. SURVEY DATA Some 963 user experience professionals completed our survey hosted by SurveyMonkey.1 Additional respondents helped us improve the questionnaire through several rounds of pilot testing, and we also collected responses with a paper survey from 47 of our conference participants and 5 of our beta testers. Our respondents were divided almost equally between people in the beginning of their career (6 or fewer years in a UX-related job) and more experienced staff (7+ years as a UX pro). This mix gives us a good view into the full range of careers. 70% of respondents live in the United States, the U.K., Canada, or Australia. It is true that these countries are some of the world’s most advanced in terms of UX maturity and therefore have disproportionally many UX jobs. We would always expect them to be well-represented in any project to assess UX careers. Even so, the proportion of our respondents from these four countries is too high and represents a bias caused by the fact that our survey instrument was in English. PEOPLE LIKE IT Before you read further, let’s get to the bottom line. Is it even worth considering a UX career? Yes, according to the people who have one. Respondents rated their career satisfaction as 5.4 on a 1–7 scale. Sure, all is not perfect in UX land, but this is still pretty good. Also, the satisfaction responses are heavily skewed toward the happy end, with 17% giving the perfect score of 7 and only 1% giving the terrible score of 1. 1 Some questions had fewer responses, because survey respondents tend to drop off during longer surveys like this one and some questions were optional. We don’t advocate the use of surveys very often in UX, because surveys are a poor method for evaluating the usability of a user interface design — we prefer direct observation of how people interact with each screen, one person at a time. But careers stretch across decades, so it’s impossible to perform direct observation of workers, one person at a time, as they progress through their careers. Also, for the kinds of things we were interested in for this project, the self-reported nature of survey responses is not as problematic as it is for resolving design questions. When we ask, for example, whether people have a master’s degree, most respondents can provide an accurate answer even though we’re asking them to recall something that might have happened many years before. Thus, we feel that a survey was a good way to get data about UX careers. 6 [email protected] Executive Summary Satisfaction with pay and benefits was slightly lower at 5.2. People always want more money. But even here, many more respondents were satisfied than dissatisfied. Interestingly, the main causes of dissatisfaction all indicate that the respondents do like the field of user experience in itself, but just aren’t getting enough of it: • They want to get more education and training so they can feel more confident in their skills and roles. • They like UX a lot and want to do more usability activities or steer their job responsibilities more firmly into UX. • Their current position or company doesn’t support them or UX enough, so they probably need a new job. EXTREME DIVERSITY The strongest finding from this research is that there is no single defining characteristic of user experience careers. For each of the main points we considered, our respondents provided an immense diversity of answers. One partial exception to this conclusion is the type of product people work on. 94% of respondents have worked on websites and web apps, so this one platform is something most people have in common and which you should expect to know if you want a UX job. But even platforms have extreme diversity. 67% of respondents had worked on mobile apps, 60% on enterprise applications, and 54% on traditional desktop software. So there are four different platforms that are common enough that more than half of user experience professionals work on them. But wait, there’s more: respondents had worked on 78 different categories of products, from medical devices to home theaters and power grid systems.