He wins a George Foreman Grill. Your grill is on its way!

Who’s going to be number 4,500?

I’m going on vacation. Watch this video while I’m gone.

Most hiring managers don’t understand the skills needed for great websites and web applications because the field is still relatively new. They understand that skilled designers can lead to amazing successes (read: they want to be like Apple), but they don’t grasp what the process is, for or which skillset they should be hiring. It’s not entirely their fault.

User Experience still isn’t well defined (think of our industry as television when color first came out) so it’s especially hard to come up with a job description that’s still being written. Even most college programs are still in flux, meaning that some degrees in the field aren’t worth the paper on which they’re written.

As a User Experience designer, you can help employers shape the jobs they advertise. Educate them, and you pay it forward for the designers of the future.

What’s the Lay of the Land?

During the interview process, ask a lot of questions:

• How many developers do you have?
• Do you have a visual designer?
• Is there a front-end coder?
• How big is the team?
• Is there a product manager?
• Have you had a UX designer before?
• What’s your development process?
• Is your team talking to the customers?
• Who’s writing the requirements?
• Are there requirements?

These questions give you clues about whether or not the organization has the right makeup for success, and whether you have the tools available to effect change. For example, if this is the first UX position among ten developers and the team lacks even a project manager, it probably won’t work.

Double down if a previous hire went sour. If they’ve had firsthand experience with one who’s spent two to three months there and couldn’t even deliver a wireframe, hiring managers become especially suspicious of people in the field.

Reach out to other people at the company through social media channels to get their assessment. This is a very effective way to find out if User Experience will work there, because you can make judgments on more than just the hiring manager’s viewpoint.

Does Your Skillset Fit?

Most hiring managers want people that fit into different-sized boxes. Do you fit?

I personally have a skillset typical of many User Experience Designers that work well in startups. I’m deep in User Experience, but can also do prototyping, some visual design and a bit of programming. That makes my skillset very valuable with smaller teams, but it may not match the needs of places that want specialists, because I might not be deep in an area they need, like taxonomy.

No one would confuse me with Jared Spool, who has a completely different skillset. With his extensive and very specialized experience in user research, his background works very well for large corporations that are trying to solve huge problems. We both claim User Experience as our passion, but neither of us would fit in the same box.

Assess what you can do realistically, and ask yourself if you’re a fit for the job. What you bring to the table — for example, whether you specialize or are you a generalist — can be more or less valuable depending on the company’s needs.

Are You Flexible in What You Can Contribute?

I did a presentation recently with Dylan Campbell about getting a great UX Job. One of the key comments was: “While you feel you don’t have to know how to code, JavaScript developers are here at the event leaning about User Experience. That makes them more valuable than you.”

Employers want flexible people. Specialists are great for specific tasks, but the resource and skill set needs of any business change with each software development life cycle.

You should change with them.

That might mean learning a new skill, or reacquainting yourself with skills you haven’t used in a while. You have to sell yourself as a great resource that can grow, learn and expand your knowledge with the company – that alone will allow you to shape your new UX Job, and, by extension, your career.

Do You Have the Skills to Teach Them?

The reality of User Experience is that even though how you apply your process changes with each organization, the tools of User Experience don’t change. And it’s up to you to decide if you have enough experience to effectively guide them.

But it’s just not about the hard skills, such as knowing how to do personas or the basics of ethnographic research. The soft skills, such as how to negotiate the politics of a organization learning about the User Experience process, are equally as important.

Three soft-skills questions you should ask yourself:

• Can you handle the political nature of the company?
• Do you have an aptitude to educate coworkers?
• Do you have patience?
• The best way to build an organization dedicated to design is by building credibility. This takes a lot of time and the ability to build support with the right people in a culture.

Are They Flexible in What They Can Learn?

This is hard, because it requires “Spidey sense”. Ask yourself these questions:

• Can they learn what user experience is about, and how user experience can translate to success in their organization?
• Can they make the hard decisions that will enable you to instill a process that will produce great products?
• Are the developers going to allow change?
• Has User Experience failed them in the past?

And the most important question:

• Is there someone (hopefully the hiring manager) that will champion User Experience in the organization?

Great organizations have that, and that’s the only way User Experience succeeds. Design-driven organizations need dedication at the top to make it work (read: Apple).

It’s not easy.

Even the largest agencies in the world are having issues in adopting a focus on User Experience into their company culture. Great organizations have leaders that are flexible enough to know that what they’re doing isn’t working and are willing to adapt. Businesses need a certain level of maturity to succeed at User Experience, and you have to decide whether or not they’re at that level.

If they’re hiring you to solve a problem and you feel it can be solved, make a go at it. If not, it’s okay to say, “Let’s be friends.” They may call you in as a consultant later if a previous resource didn’t work out.

The Bottom Line: You Can Shape Your Future

User Experience can be shaped more than any other position in the organization because the field is still evolving.

It’s up to you to shape it.

Commencement speeches are wasted on the young — everyone should watch them.

I love his bit about his life goals as a “mountain,” and his mission to do only work that would bring him closer to the mountain. Of course, we should all be so lucky to work only when jobs are adventurous and stop when they become work, but there are some wonderful nuggets of artistic wisdom throughout Gaiman’s speech.

The process of getting a great user experience job that you love isn’t as hard as you would think — you just have to tell your story.

The Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp on June 19, 2012 in Burlingame, California covers all aspects of getting that UX job you love:

• Using social media to connect with great companies
• Presenting a great resume
• Crafting a portfolio that tells your story
• What to expect during an in person interview

Also covered are questions to ask and what to look for, so you can find the right culture for your skills and career.

As a bonus, we’ll be having a networking happy hour with recruiters from Jobvite customers who are hiring great user experience talent!

Speakers

• Lynn Teo
  Chief Experience Officer, McCann Erickson
• Patrick Neeman
  Director of User Experience, Jobvite
• Dylan Campbell
  Partner, Highlander Solutions

More to come! If you’re interested in speaking or are a recruiter, send me an email.

Agenda

More often than not, A/B tests are used to are a dog and pony show for the executives than to solve real problems.

Jared Spool has written a great article about this over at UIE:

In our study, we watched more than a dozen of the presenters’ company’s own customers attempt to buy products. While many were successful, a surprising number weren’t, even though this company is the biggest in its industry (and hailed by many as the most successful). Their site looks slick, but when folks sat down to use it for its primary goal, it’s design put up a ton of frustrating obstacles.

In many cases, the users thought they ordered the product they wanted, only to discover upon receipt that it wasn’t at all what they wanted. As we watched those shoppers make their orders, we could see that they would not get what they wanted.

…

The A/B tests they presented showed they were applying a ton of effort to optimize things that weren’t close to the things we saw preventing sales on their site. If the message was that A/B testing helps, I didn’t get that because I saw them futzing around with tweaking insignificant button text when there were huge deficiencies in the design that they still haven’t resolved.

From Fast Company. We knew it.

Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data on DesignSalaries.org for information to sink your teeth into.

Prioritize your needs and wants. Is money most crucial, or do you have some wiggle room? Is it more important to be part of a team, or to work on more diverse projects? Do you want to work more closely with developers? Are you focused on making new connections, so you can eventually go freelance? Do you want to be part of a growing team that can provide you with a future management position?

Be honest with yourself. What’s essential, and what’s just nice to have? What do you really want out of your future? Any indecision on your part will effect lackluster results. Try to articulate what you really want before you begin your job hunt.

Read on.

The Usability Counts UX Resume and Career Guide
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Jobvite UX Resume and Portfolio Bootcamp
Burlingame, CA – June 19, 2012
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Need that resume and career advice to get the UX job you love?

I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template in Microsoft Word format. It includes comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume.

You also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job right away, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments. You just have to fill out a 30-second form.

I’ll be involved an event where we give you tips on how to write your resume, and interview for great UX Jobs. We may contact you to see if you’re interested, and for no other purpose.

I promise I won’t spam you with Luxury Watch advertisements or sell your email address to Jared Spool. Just download the UX Drinking Game to make me feel better.

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