1. Creating the Right Job Description
User experience (UX) is concerned with making products and services easy and enjoyable. But in a field that includes everything from information architecture to usability testing to visual design, defining your company’s specific UX needs can be a challenge. Here are some steps that can help you to create just the right job description:
- Align your goals to the success metrics of your company and determine what the position needs to accomplish
- Clearly define the user experience professional’s place in your company
- Identify expertise and skill sets required by the user experience candidate
- Define what success will look like in 30, 60, 90 days and in a year
2. Understanding What Makes a Good UX Professional
Clarity of thought is an indispensable quality for UX professionals. Since the practice of UX is based on explaining things to people, top candidates must be able to explain themselves and their designs extremely well.
Of equal value is the understanding that UX design is about the experience of other people; it’s not about an individual opinion. Top candidates will rarely speak in the first person about their designs, preferring instead to discuss research findings and other scenarios.
UX, despite its technical characteristics, is essentially a humanistic endeavor. And so should be your hiring process. Look beyond whether candidates can create a wireframe or a site map—are they natural communicators? Are they capable to selling an idea as well as collaborating and achieving consensus? Do their work samples demonstrate ease of use of complex products?
3. Top Hiring Tips
Try out your new UX staffers as contractors. If you find that you still are not 100% sure what your new UX position looks like, then hiring people temporarily as contractors is a great way to evaluate. The best way to determine how good a person is at their job is to see them doing it firsthand.
For both interviewers and interviewees, the best way to judge a candidate is to hold a “working session” in which the candidate is given a problem to solve by brainstorming potential solutions and discussing with the team. By seeing how they work, it’s easier to tell whether the candidate will fit with the team and whether they have the necessary analytical and presentation skills.
The ideal candidate will possess most or all of the following: hands on UX work, a excellent portfolio, solid references and personal connections, a bit of a technical background, industry experience, professional affiliations, and great communication skills.
4. Interview questions for user experience design roles
- Can you explain some of the strengths and weaknesses of heuristic evaluation?
- Can you give a few examples of cognitive principles that influence web design?
- What are some of the differences in designing for the web versus designing for print or a Windows or Macintosh GUI application?
- What are some visual design principles that you would try to follow when designing web pages? Can you give some examples?
- What usability methods are you most experienced with?
- How do you keep your knowledge or use experience design and usability up to date?
- Are you familiar with any information architecture methods? Which ones?
- Have you ever been involved in documenting the user requirements for a website? What methods did you use to come up with these requirements and what was your involvement in the process?
- Describe how you have marketed user experience design in your current position.
- What steps have you taken to convince a reluctant developer to listen to your advice?
- How would you explain the benefits of a user-centered design approach to a project manager who is unfamiliar with it?