What’s the best way to recruit great UI/UX designers to an enterprise software startup?
Enterprise is quite simply where great Interaction Design happens. Most junior level ux professionals, with the help of a couple decent pattern libraries, can crank out your average web 2.0 application in short order, look good, and never burn more than a few brain cells – it just isn’t that hard, and most are me-too applications anyway.
Enterprise is different. Enterprise apps, especially large scale, important, collaborative and conversational apps require a unique and deep understanding of user-centered design, design research, business domain expertise, contextual inquiry expertise, political prowess, business strategy expertise – all on top of basic design skills like problem space definition, exploration, abductive reasoning, prototyping and usability testing.
Some might say that consumer application ux design is where *it’s at* because the median iq/domain expertise for your average (is there such a thing?) user is considerably lower and therefore requires a stricter discipline to make things elegant, understandable, engaging, and persuasive (in the BJ Fogg sense of the word). I would say the assumption is false, and further it’s just as important in enterprise application design.
I don’t know if I accept your premise that enterprise is where designers tend to shy away – if this is true – it might simply be because it’s harder. Most of the problems involve really complex business rules, large amounts of corporate value resting on the success (as opposed to venture vending that cares a lot less, since they are simply looking for a 10x – 100x from 1 of the 15 companies they invested in within the exact same problem space.)
Am I biased? Not really – I spent years inside 2 large enterprises doing knowledge management (groupware) design and risk modeling software design. I also spent plenty of time designing consumer applications and experiences. Both worlds carry their own challenges and opportunities – but because most enterprise software is accomplishing complex business objectives instead of the “It’s twitter for ER Nurses” or “It’s Tungle.me for gangstas,” – and because many consumer apps are frankly easier – they will always attract the low-hanging ux designers looking for an easy job and the promise of fame, glory, drug addiction and hookers.
Okay – so back to the initial question. “How do you recruit great ux/ixd into an enterprise”
1. Focus on the design challenges and the opportunities to engage in a number of different ux related activities, methods, and processes to hone their skills.
2. Differentiate Start-up life from Enterprise life: sometimes, start-ups are so lean, they have little to no budget to do the following:
- User research
- Mental Models
- Mood Maps
- Stakeholder Interviews
- Design Studios
- Sketching and Critique
- Iterative Prototyping
- Usability testing – both formal lab testing as well as remote.
- Analytics (also because, if they are launching a completely new thing, there are no analytics from which to glean insights to feed back into the design process).
Theoretically, enterprises should have the cash flow from operations to support all the various elements of human centered design as well as other important aspects like:
3. High probability that your check will clear;
4. Formal review process; well-designed career path with goal setting and “visioning your future” as well as moneys for education and training including attendance to relevant conferences. (This may have been curtailed during the recent economic downturn, but it actually provides an opportunity to treat career paths and learning as a unique problem requiring innovative solutions – so for instance internal book clubs across team functions. I recently joined one where people from a couple of different teams are coming together to collaboratively read and discuss behavioral economics, persuasive technology, and influence.
5. Start-ups are often stressful – they can be fun, energizing, amazing experiences, but they are also fraught with stress, anxiety, and long, long hours. Having worked on a number of start-ups, this is more the rule than exception. Clearly articulate the work-life balance to them to potential designers interested in an opportunity in your enterprise.
6. Opportunity to learn from top-notch talent that has been around the block a few times. Many start-ups barely have moneys for more than a single UX designer, and they are looking for that unicorn that can do solid ux, visual design, and front end coding because their budgets are tight. Enterprise organizations are more likely to have at least a few, if not an entire team of ux talent across some of the many sub-disciplines like user research, content strategy, seo, ia, ixd, and usability testing – these people will be on the team providing many learning opportunities to expand skill sets.
If your enterprise doesn’t have those things – you can always simply pay more. It’s a relatively free marketplace in the US meaning – sell all those great aspects of your company, and if you don’t have those things, pay 30% more than the going market rate for similarly skilled ux professional. Start-ups are cash lean, and intentionally offer lower than market salaries combined with options granted that are, for the most part, paper – and should be treated as such. The probability that your 100,000 shares at a $0.001/per or 0.05% of the company shares will ever be worth more than it’s equivalent weight in toilet paper is less than 1%.
Just my opinion. YMMV
What should IxDA become, do, change, evaluate, or otherwise consider?
Dan Saffer‘s answer is really generous towards the IxDA; like the asker, it assumes IxDA can be fixed. I’d like to take a step back and take the antagonistic point of view and say the best thing the IxDA can do is dissolve itself. Not that it “should” dissolve, but that the problems it has are terminal and irreparable, so all it can do is dissolve.
I’ll draw a line in the sand. In order of importance:
- The IxDA can’t stand for me as a designer because it doesn’t stand for anything.
- The IxDA has no value proposition.
- The IxDA has a marketing problem.
The IxDA can’t stand for me as a designer because it doesn’t stand for anything.
What does it mean to be an interaction designer? What do you have to know? What do you have to be able to do? A national organization that is supposed to represent me, can’t, if it can’t answer that question. It doesn’t actually matter what checkboxes you’re supposed to check, it only matters that there are checkboxes to check at all. Right now, there aren’t any.
IxDA needs to draw a line in the sand and say, these are the skill sets you need to have in order to be an interaction designer.
It doesn’t matter what falls on either side of the line; that can be up for discussion after they’ve set an arbitrary standard for the next, oh, I don’t know, 24 months? No grandfathering. Either you’re an interaction designer by the 2011-2012 standard, or you’re not.
But, it can’t, and it won’t, because it’s entirely volunteer-run and donation-supported, so it can’t afford to alienate anyone. That’s a shame, because that’s the only way it can truly claim to represent anyone.
The IxDA has no value proposition.
What do you get out of being a “member” of the IxDA? What do you get out of “leading” it? Or speaking at Interaction? Solomon Bisker spoke at Interaction within three years of discovering IxDA. Is he amazingly skilled? Or was he merely motivated and that’s enough when the organization is volunteer-run?
I put “member” and “leader” in scare-quotes because it’s meaningless to be a member of an organization with no barrier to entry. Anyone can be an IxDA member, designer or not. You’re only a name on a mailing list with a bad web interface, and I don’t see a value in that. I am not subscribed.
What does it mean to be a “leader” of an organization with no ability to set policy and a terminal fear of losing the donations it does get by alienating people? How many “leaders” sign up with the intention to “change things” and realize they’re mostly impotent?
The role of any organization is to do what individuals cannot.
The role of any organization is to help individuals do what they cannot do alone. A year ago, after Jesse James Garrett’s IA Summit talk, I went digging into all of the mailing list archives and reading up on as many local groups as I could find to see if there were any initiatives to provide “workshops” and “exercises” for interaction design, something like a Toastmasters, and there were two posts on a mailing list from a year before that, and nothing else. National IxDA membership doesn’t help me. It provides neither direction, nor standards, nor recommendations, nor best practices, nor introductions, nor funding.
What about local IxDA membership? Without national support (direction, funding, marketing, introductions, sponsorships, etc.), local IxDA is a meetup. Saying I’m with the local IxDA chapter doesn’t mean anything to potential clients, future employers, bosses, coworkers, and sometimes even other designers.
I do help run my local IxDA chapter. But, because there’s no intrinsic value in doing so, it’s mostly to help the other people running it. I’m helping the people, not the organization. If the group name changed to “Designers Only – New Group System,” nothing else would be different, and that’s the problem. The lack of value is why I’ve started two different local design organizations, one a hands-on design workshop http://vi.to/workshop/ and the other a local chapter of Xianhang Zhang‘s Product Design Guild, in an effort to create something more meaningful and relevant.
The IxDA has a marketing problem.
Meeting designers who have never heard of the IxDA is not uncommon. I have lunch once a month with a dozen designers and every time, there’s 3-6 new subscribers to the local IxDA list, because they have only just discovered that there’s a whole group of people like them out there.
I haven’t been a designer for fifteen years (five? six?), but I only heard of the IxDA 18-24 months ago. Hiring managers don’t look for IxDA membership. They’re not a standards and practices body, so all of the new Masters in Interaction Design programs aren’t “IxDA approved.” All of the art students at the local university know about AIGA but not IxDA, and I’d bet the IA students haven’t heard of it, either.
tl;dr:
Paying for membership is only the start. The goals of the organization have to center around providing national- and local-level value for the interaction designers, from standards and practices to awareness and marketing. It can’t do that with its current structure and “membership,” and rather than alienate 20,000 people on a mailing list, the most effective “we’re serious about this” move would be to shut down and start over. Consider IxDA your “one to throw away.”
What are the differences between UX, Interaction, UI and graphic/visual designers? Are these distinctions helpful or damaging to our field?
User Experience (UX) or Experience Design (XD) is the general term under which all types of design (visual, interaction, sound, industrial, etc.) fall. Even fields like architecture, writing, HCI, information architecture, ergonomics, and a host of others could all be considered UX, because they are all concerned with the overall impression a user has when engaging with a product.
Interaction design is the definition of how a product behaves in response to human behavior, as well as defining the means to manipulate the product (controls). In many cases, how the interaction design is manifest visually is via a user interface.
Visual designers create visual representation (the form) of the interaction design (and the associated content, if any) to create the UI. Not all products have a UI, although most have some sort of means of input and feedback that should be design.
Sometimes the roles of visual and interaction designer are done by the same person. This is very common in web design, for instance. On complex projects, it is hard to do both very well, although not impossible.
The lines between many of the disciplines can be blurry. For instance, you might use the tools of information architecture to create a site structure, but the tools of interaction design to define the navigation to get between the different areas.
In one sense, most people in the field are UX designers, because most people are concerned with the overall experience of the product. On the other hand, UX is a fairly generic term that doesn’t describe what someone specializes in and the types of problems they want to address. Many generalists seem to taking the term “UX Designer” while specialists are still calling themselves “visual designer” or “interaction designer.” (“Web Designer” is an unusual anomaly in that most web designers are also front-end developers.)
It is confusing, especially to outsiders and even to people inside the field. But the story isn’t that hard. Other fields, medicine being a prime example, have generalists and specialists. If we as a field could simply, clearly, present these distinctions, we’d all be better off.
Design: What are the best resources for learning bleeding-edge web, UI and UX design?
I generally don’t read design books to learn how to be a better designer. I read business books, psychology, cognitive psychology, usability research reports, CHI papers, art books, cultural history / anthropology, and tech publications. [New technology requires new design conventions.]
By the time a book can be written and published about the bleeding edge, it’s definitionally no longer the bleeding edge.
Design: What are the best resources for learning bleeding-edge web, UI and UX design?
I generally don’t read design books to learn how to be a better designer. I read business books, psychology, cognitive psychology, usability research reports, CHI papers, art books, cultural history / anthropology, and tech publications. [New technology requires new design conventions.]
By the time a book can be written and published about the bleeding edge, it’s definitionally no longer the bleeding edge.
What are the best statistics for a UX Team to collect about its product?
There is a great paper on UX metrics by Kerry Rodden and Hillary Hutchinson, who are UX Researchers at Google.
Measuring the User Experience on a Large Scale:
User-Centered Metrics for Web Applications
It’s an academic paper, so it’s a little dry, but well worth the read. Here’s a quick summary:
Teams should focus on metrics that indicate:
- Happiness – Often measured through a long-running survey that includes a Net Promoter Score ®.
- Engagement – Visits per user per week. Or posts per user. In Gmail, we carefully watch a metric we call “5 of 7”. It’s the percentage of users that visit the product at least 5 out of 7 days a week. (This metric turns out to be predicative long term retention)
- Adoption – Measured as daily active users (DAUs). Or commonly at Google: 7-day-actives, which is the number of unique users who have used the product once in the last week.
- Retention – There are many ways to measure this. I like looking at the percentage of 7-day-actives who are still 7-day-actives a week later, a month later, and 3 months later.
- Task success – This can be measured by looking at abandonment rates in any task, or looking at time-to-completion of key tasks. For example: on Quora, you may measure how long it takes to answer a question, and how many people start to answer, but do not finish.
The paper goes into much more detail about “… articulating the goals of a product or feature, then identifying signals that indicate success, and finally building specific metrics to track on a dashboard.”
Which are the best design and user experience firms that can redesign the look, feel and information flow of a website?
Given the paucity of information here, for instance your audience (and industry), the site goals, your budget, the metrics of your current site, and the talent that you have in house as well as the last time you did a redesign, I am going to assume a number of things, as well as time and budget being infinite, the site being mostly content/marketing with little transactions, your team being small that can be dedicated full time to this project. For the top website UX/Visual Communication Design firms, you must expect to pay no less than $100K. You must also expect (assuming the taxonomy and content strategy of your current site is not massive), that it should cost no more than $250K. Mind you – this is for the very best – this is not Ford Focus territory, this is Astin Martin.
Two notes (These are strong opinions, so take that for what it’s worth – but it’s also based on 15 years experience working for product companies, operating companies, start-ups, enterprises, as well as for a few “digital” agencies):
First, do not, under any circumstances, go to a top tier “digital” agency. Your budget will be blown on account directors, fancy offices, lush travel accounts, and the direction and design will be led by the vicissitudes of a cranky creative director who has more interest in pursuing a dream of producing the next great independent firm than designing an elegant, useful, usable, desirable website that meets your core business objectives. Large digital agencies, by and large, also don’t have a core UX capability – their dirty little secret is they outsource most of the usability, information architecture, interaction design, and user research to contractors. A simple test is to look at the senior leadership of the firm – if there is an executive creative director, but no senior UX person on the leadership team, you know what their focus is – internal power structure indicates values – and if UX has no power in the organization, it’s an after-thought, and it will be an after-thought on the design of your site.
Second, do not hire a development firm that advertises their expertise in “Rails, Python, iOS, ,insert language and/or platform here>”, because while they may be able to write elegant, standards compliant code in a rapid manner, they will not, by and large, have a focus on user research, audience definition, design testing, or visual communication design. If the firm is dedicated to Adobe Flash implementations, run – don’t walk.
The top user experience design and visual communication design firms (notice the difference), for that kind of project with 3-6 months, and over 100K in budget is hands-down Happy Cog, Messagefirst, and Behavior Design. This is my opinion, but each of these firms has a strong reputation in both the design and user experience communities, have delivered consistent results year-over-year, and have processes and methodologies to back up their work as well as in-house talent in leadership roles that are considered best of the best by their respective communities. None of them will break your bank either (you can definitely spend more).
http://happycog.com/
http://messagefirst.com/
http://behaviordesign.com
Now, if you are loaded, and want to spend either that same amount, or even significantly more for the exact same quality or slightly lower quality site, then by all means, go with one of these next three, that will still deliver relatively good results, but more of your budget will end up funding fancy offices and multiple account directors (with all they lovely padding that comes with it), but not necessarily any meaningful or measurable increase in the value of your new site:
Huge, Inc
R/GA
AKQA
Each of these firms will design something that is good, but ceteris paribus, are at least 2x more expensive than the previous 3 firms, with no significant increase in the value of the product they will deliver to you. They do have quality UX and Creative in-house (will not out-source it to contractors, and they have in-house UX and Creative talent that are well-known and respected in their communities – perhaps not to the extent of the first three – but solid), but their rate sheets may bring tears to your eyes.
Happy hunting. If you want the same breakdown for transaction-heavy sites, e-commerce sites, or massive content sites, I can provide that information as well.
One last note: I know sometimes Forrester Research publishes something related to Web Design or User Experience Design, and in the course of doing an industry overview of the fields and disciplines, sometimes goes as far as recommending a few firms that do ux and/or web design work. I would take their recommendations with many, many grains of salt. Firstly, they are not known for doing solid, quantifiable research in the UX field; also, they are not exactly considered the arbiters of great ux, design principles, etc – and finally, many times they have been known for recommending firms or agencies that just happen to be clients of theirs – so they are not the most objective source of information or recommendations – even if they were considered thought leaders in the ux space – which they are not. I once saw a “heuristic evaluation” done by them which was, in fact, done by people for the ad agency world – and let’s just say that their understanding of design principles, user-centered design, and best practices was bordering on negligent idiocy. #JustSaying
Again, just my opinion, YMMV.
What are innovative, new ways to design Master/Child relationships on a page? [on hold]
I’m currently working on a ASP.net application that has a variety of master, child relationships, portrayed on the page in a master gridview with tabs below. While this works for a somewhat small set of relationships, I was w…
What are innovative, new ways to design Master/Child relationships on a page? [on hold]
I’m currently working on a ASP.net application that has a variety of master, child relationships, portrayed on the page in a master gridview with tabs below. While this works for a somewhat small set of relationships, I was w…
What company’s UIs are at the forefront of design, and why?
I’d look at if the UI/UX is getting the users from A to B in as few steps as possible, and as simply as possible. If it feels too complicated, then your designer needs to iterate. Looking at trendy screenshots is not something I recommend. Looking at design patterns might be, if you notice a UI problem and want to know best practices for how it may have been previously solved: