- How do you know when you've reached UX experts status,
and how do you get there?
During our New York virtual UX conference,
we held a Q&A session,
where Jakob Nielsen offered several tips
for UX practitioners looking to grow their careers.
Let's say our first question is from
Vinny, from Rio de Janeiro.
And he asked, if he doesn't have a job yet,
how do you practice some of the content
that you're learning during this conference,
especially the ones that are,
the research-based questions, how can you do that?
- The first advice is a little bit silly,
which is to get a job,
because I do think that the best experience,
it comes from working on real projects
in a real company with real colleagues.
But of course, the way to get a job is to have something
that you can prove yourself and show to the hiring managers,
and so doing some projects before you get a job
is definitely a great thing as well.
And I think they're really two main types
of projects you can do,
and so they are either what you do in some sense,
kind of like your own project
that you just decide to do something for your own benefit,
or there's also where you do a pro bono
as is sometimes called,
a project where you team up with somebody
who's not paying for it,
because again, you're not yet at the stage
where they're gonna, like, write you a big check,
but you just worked for free.
So that could either be in a nonprofit,
or it could also be a company where in essence,
you are just working as, like, an unpaid intern,
which is an option as well.
So I think that's a different little bit
between design and research,
for which of the two are the most recommended or the best.
Because if you're designer,
you could definitely take on your own project and say,
"Let me grab some website and just redesign it
"how I think it should be better."
That's a nice thing to do,
and it can be nice in a portfolio to have, like,
a real website, according to your kind of approach,
rather than these kind of design school projects
that are completely made up and irrelevant to be honest,
most likely when I see portfolios of students,
they're irrelevant designs they do.
But do something, design something real,
or redesign something real.
The downside of that is that,
of course in real design, they're all these trade-offs
that relate to the business model
of what can be done, what engineers say,
or what the boss says, and what 50 other people say.
And therefore these redesigns that people make on their own
often tend to be a little bit unrealistic
and maybe not compelling enough.
And so that is actually a benefit
of going into an organization
and doing a real design project,
even if you don't get paid for it.
That can be something that's better to show off
because, like, also remember that,
to get hired, people don't wanna just only see
where they designed something nice,
but how did they design it, what was the process,
how did they overcome
these various setbacks and trade-off scenarios?
So that's for design, I think,
doing a real design, even if you don't get paid for it.
is one of the ways to crank up your credentials
to then later on get hired and get paid.
For research, it's almost kind of the opposite,
because I think if you go and do research pro bono,
then often it's not gonna be valued very much.
If people don't pay for it,
they will often tend to ignore the research findings.
And also when you go and show them to others,
and you say, well, we did this research project for,
like an opera company or something like that.
And somebody has done an opera company,
if they look at that say, well yeah,
you found out how to sell tickets for Mozart,
but that has nothing to do with what we are doing,
even though it's actually e-commerce, right?
Even if it's e-commerce for the arts,
but it's still e-commerce, we sell tickets,
but people will often tend to ignore that.
On the other hand, as a researcher,
you can do some very interesting self-defined projects,
which you can do studies of some design elements,
something that a lot of websites do.
It can be something very specific,
like a certain type of the filtering,
or it can be something more general.
Like one of the products that we have done, for example,
is on investor relations areas of corporate websites.
That's sort of a special area and you can go
and study that across, say, 10 different websites.
And then you can come up
with some very interesting conclusions
that are generalized across that.
And that is a great way of showing, kind of like,
really, hopefully anyway, very deep insights
that most people have not seen before.
And so I think for researchers,
you can define your own project
and do some research of something
that you think is interesting,
but it's a realistic thing that people actually,
companies actually do,
and you can research across websites
or across mobile apps or across,
variety of different scenarios.
And that's something that the individual people
who work in the company usually don't have time for.
And therefore when they see that
it can be quite compelling often.
On the other hand, if you're a designer,
I would say, try to go in and do a real design product.
And also for writers, are really in many ways
they're like designers, but they design with words.
So in some sense, the same advice would apply.
But I think actually one more thing writers could do,
which is you can also take some sample content
and rewrite, but then not just one rewrite,
go back and read the articles
we've written on a tone of voice.
And that we have a model, the model for
different parameters, different dimensions of tone of voice
and try to crank those dimensions up and down
and define, let's say four different
tone of voice variations, and then write the same content
in those four ways.
I think that can be a very compelling way
of showing off that you are a good UX writer,
if you can do that well.
- Thank you, Jakob.
I guess kind of on that same note,
Juliet Dan here in the US asked,
what is the one advice that you would give someone
to be successful,
I guess once they're already into the UX field.
- Yeah, to be successful in UX,
I think one of the big things is really experience,
and experience from actually doing UX,
not talking about it,
not sitting around in meetings and honestly,
in companies, people waste so much time in meetings
and this is one of the reasons I find it
slightly irrelevant to say,
how many years experience does somebody have?
I mean, yeah you can have five years experience,
but it's five-year spending meetings
and you have not learned very much,
but you can have two years experience
and in two years spent like cranking it out,
or maybe two years, like, in the lab,
we'll use this every day.
And you've seen thousands of users one on one,
you can actually see thousands of users in two years,
if you do it every day easily, actually.
And so that's vastly more experience
than spending five years sitting in meetings.
So that would be my, if that's like one thing to do,
to build up your kind of value
is actually to work (laughs).
Work really hard, and it is work to be in meetings
and it's not wasted, 'cause you learn something
about how to make friends and influence others
and things, which is an important part of our job.
But honestly, I think the main thing is
try to minimize overhead,
try to maximize productivity and actually,
particularly in research, being with users.
And even if you're a designer,
I would still say, be with users as much as you can also,
even if that's not the primary thing.
But if you just in a design
and it's only for your own pleasure
and you don't get any feedback on how it actually works
with real people, you're also not cranking up
your skill and insight into user experience design.
So even if you're not a researcher,
you can still sit and observe the studies,
and see how people use your design,
and that's a such a great learning experience
and just crank all of design variations as well.
Not just like the first best idea,
but detect the 10 best ideas.
- Kind of our last one around, kind of,
career advice and like things around how to be successful.
We got one question from Charles about,
is there a certain number,
like how many definitions would one need to know
to be a qualified usability expert?
- So how many definitions do you need to know?
And the answer is definitely 1000.
I wouldn't say believe, definitely, of course,
I was a little bit joking,
but there's probably like about a thousand things
you need to know.
There's so many different things in this field,
but the better answer is really,
it's not so much definitions as it is things or concepts.
And there the answer is a much higher number,
tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably even.
Some of them very minute and small,
but it's really building up your crystallized intelligence
in having just seen things.
A lot of different variations of things,
a lot of different design variations,
a lot of different platforms, computer platforms,
big screens, small screens, mobile screens,
stationary screens, wall sized screens, voice only things,
text only user interfaces.
How do people operate things
while they're driving their car?
I mean, all these different contexts of use,
different types of applications,
different types of users, old users, children,
teenagers, middle-aged users,
people with different disabilities.
It goes on and on.
And so there's so many different variations of all of this.
And if you go back to the theory of intelligence,
we have a lot of different types of intelligence,
but the two main ones I like,
the fluid intelligence that peaks at age 20,
and then it goes down, and that's just like raw brain power.
And so why is it that 20-year old people
are not the best people?
And they may actually be the best people at creative poetry,
but at other types of tasks,
you get to get better later in life.
Even though fluid goes down,
crystallized goes up.
And so that can actually keep going up until
you get dementia actually.
So it can keep going for a long time.
It could just learn more and more and more things.
And then when you come across a certain situation,
you can use both whatever fluid intelligence
you still have left to just kind of do
some raw brain power thinking,
but also use all the many things you've already seen like,
oh yeah, this reminds me of that thing I saw
30 years ago in a mainframe.
And this thing I saw yesterday
when I was doing another thing
and reminds me of 50 other things and that can come together
and you can get a very interesting insight.
So I do think that the more things,
I mean, things is a very broad term here,
but it's users, it's different designs,
it's different technologies, different everything.
The more different things you have seen,
the better you are at getting sort of that kind of, ping!
It reminds me of something.
And that gives you another insight.