There’s Always a Challenge
Perhaps, though, the best part of your role may be helping people experience the feelings they want to have when interacting with products or interfaces. However, picking your right next role can be challenging. One of the challenges is that UX can look very different from organization to organization and even from project to project within the same organization. We have built UX teams for Fortune 10 companies and we have helped organizations recruit their one and only UX hero.
Based on our experiences, we’ve compiled the following four key questions to help you when considering your next UX role.
1. Process
The first question you should ask is: What parts of the organization’s UX process will you be responsible for? Typically, there are five or six steps to a solid process, although different organizations and people call their UX process and the steps that compose it different things. We won’t go into the specifics here; however, you can find a quick overview of the UX process here.
2. Tasks
After you get a sense of the main process responsibilities for the role, the next question you should ask is: What specific tasks will I be responsible for as part of this role?
3. Deliverables
Once the specifics regarding the processand related tasks have been identified, it’s time to discuss deliverables. The question you should ask at this point is: What deliverables will I be producing in this UX role?
4. Communication
Communication is a huge part of a user experience professional’s role. At its core, UX is all about communication. The role of a user experience professional almost always has some level of education, evangelism and influencing. Understanding the communication skills needed for the role is critical. The next thing you should ask it is: Who will I be communicating with regularly and what will be the desired outcome of those communications?
Final Thoughts
Of course, when considering your next UX role, there are any number of things to think about, but these questions provide a good foundation from which to begin. We hope that this post will assist you in landing the role that is right for you.
If you are a hiring manager looking for a great new UX hire, we have flipped this post around to so you can easily think about this content from a hiring point of view. Check out our post on the Four Questions to Help with Your Next UX Hire., or, learn about Two Common Mistakes in UX.
Let us know about the things you take into consideration when embarking on the journey to your next UX role in the comments below!
Contact us if you would like to discuss your User Experience hiring and recruiting challenges.
