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NNGROUP 48105 WARM SPRINGS BLVD., FREMONT CA 945397498 USA Copyright Nielsen Norman Group; All Rights Reserved. To get your own copy, download from: nngroup/reports/user-experience-careers User Experience Careers How to Become a UX Pro, and How to Hire One Susan Farrell and Jakob Nielsen 2 INFONNGROUP About This Free Report 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, its still worth remembering the lessons from mistakes made in the past. If you dont remember history, youll be doomed to repeat it. We regularly publish new research reports that span a variety of web and UX related topics. These reports include thousands of actionable, illustrated user experience guidelines for creating and improving your web, mobile, and intranet sites. We sell our new reports to fund independent, unbiased usability research; we do not have investors, government funding or research grants that pay for this work. Visit our reports page at nngroup/reports/ to see a complete list of these reports. HOW TO SHARE Do not link directly to the PDF file (the hosted address could change). Instead, we encourage you to distribute the following link to the reports page on our website to allow people to decide whether to download it themselves: nngroup/reports/user-experience-careers REPORT AUTHORS Susan Farrell and Jakob Nielsen NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP NNGROUP 3 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 dont 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. 4 INFONNGROUP Contents 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 NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP NNGROUP 5 Appendix I: What Helped Most in Your First Year? . 172 Acknowledgements . 190 About the Authors . 191 6 INFONNGROUP Executive Summary 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 theres 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 cant 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. 1Additional 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 worlds 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, lets 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 17 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. 1Some questions had fewer responses, because survey respondents tend to drop off during longer surveys like this one and some questions were optional. We dont 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 its 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 masters degree, most respondents can provide an accurate answer even though were 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. NIELSEN NORMAN GROUP NNGROUP 7 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 arent 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 doesnt 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, theres more: respondents had worked on 78 different categories of products, from medical devices to home theaters and power grid systems. All of these products need usability and all of these fields employ at least some user experience professionals. Clearly, these percentages sum to much more than 100%. The reason is that most user experience professionals have worked on more than one platform in their career. The average respondent had worked on 5 platforms. So theres not just diversity between people, theres also diversity within each individuals projects during a career. UX is not a field where you learn one thing and keep doing that all your life. As one of our respondents said, “I grew up in the country. I had to learn how to do anything I was presented with. Because of this, learning the tools and trade of UX has been a fun and exciting journey. I have picked up most of my knowledge from sitting down and doing, making mistakes.” We asked people about their job roles. The most common were user research, interaction design, and information architecture (IA). While these roles are not exactly surprising, it was striking to note that 43% of respondents performed all three of these main UX roles, indicating a high level of diversity of work activity even on a day-to-day basis. On a more detailed level, when we asked about specific activities such as making wireframes, gathering requirements, or running usability studies, it was also striking how diverse UX professionals jobs are. Fully 75% of respondents said that they perform at least 16 different UX activities. 8 INFONNGROUP Executive Summary UX professionals work in virtually every industry. The largest sector among our respondents was IT with 23% of respondents, followed by finance (11%), healthcare (6%), education (6%), and advertising/marketing (6%). BEST BACKGROUND FOR UX WORKERS When asked what characterizes good user experience professionals, one of our respondents said, “If you are a lifelong learner, in other words, if you are paying attention, you will be able to take previous experiences and apply lessons learned from them to your new situation. That is more important to me than specific skills you might learn in school.” While most knowledge workers probably benefit from being lifelong learners, the point that this is more important than a specific education is rare and one of the defining characteristics of the user experience field. Even though continuous on-the-job learning is the most important, 90% of respondents also had a university degree. Theres no single degree to define the field: design, psychology, and communication were the most common major areas, sharply pursued by English and computer science. All of these fields make some sense as a partial educational background for UX professionals, but together those five disciplines accounted for only 45% of bachelors degrees. The majority of UX professionals hold degrees from an immense range of other disciplines, from history to chemistry, most of which dont have a direct bearing on UX work. The most common educational level was a masters degree: 52% had at least one masters degree (some had two, which seems like overkill). Only 6% of respondents were PhDs. Most of the remaining respondents with university diplomas held bachelors degrees and 1% had associates degrees. UX pros with masters degrees follow the same pattern as their colleagues with undergraduate degrees: that is, no pattern. A broad diversity of topics was just as characteristic at this level. One difference is that the most popular masters degree discipline was HCI (humancomputer interaction), which is highly specialized as preparation for a UX career. Fully 11% of respondents with masters degrees were HCI graduates. This was the only discipline with a two-digit percentage. Other directly-relevant masters degrees included 5% of degrees in information design, 4% human factors graduates, 3% in each of digital design and technical communication, and 1% for each of interaction design and information architecture. Other top disciplines at the masters level were MBA, psychology, and library and information science, which are also all related to UX work, even if theyre not directly targeted at such jobs. Its clearly eminently possible to have a UX career without a degree in the field, and its definitely not necessary to have a graduate degree. Still, if you want to get a graduate degree, it would make sense to aim for a specialization that targets user experience, because the percentage of relevant degrees is much higher at this level among your peers in the field. Digging deeper than the title on the diploma, we asked people which of the subjects that they studied had actually turned out to be useful. Continuing the diversity theme, there were lots of different things that UX pros claim to find useful. The top scores in order of usefulness were web design, writing, programming, psychology, design, and research methods. Any list where programming and psychology are next to each other is clearly indicative of an interdisciplinary field.
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