User Experience Fields – what are they?

Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen defined User experience in one statement –

“User experience” encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen – “The Definition of User Experience (UX)”. Nielsen Norman Group.

The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.

True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company’s offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design.

This article is a publication of my personal notes that I took for a lecture series I attended. The sources have been mentioned in the reference section.

User Experience fields:

These fields are divided into three categories based on function- primarily, design, research, and strategy. The further classification of careers are given below:

Design :

1. Interaction Design – Focuses on how to create efficient and effective users and interfaces.
2. Information Architecture – how info is organised behind the scenes and then presented to users
3. Visual Design – creating meaning in elements and interactivity on a screen through use of fonts, color, images and space
4. Information Design – making sure that the content can be consumed as intended
5. Technical communication – making sure technical information is understood by intended audience groups
6. Service Design – assuring quality of customers entire interaction with company

Research:

1. User Research – finding out more about users and their product usage
2. Accessibility – making sure products are usable by anyone regardless of any kind of disability (universal and country standards must be met, eg: 508 compliance)
3. Human Factors – how physical products are used in light of human capabilities
4. Ergonomics – Assuring intended audience can use products both easily and safely

Strategy:

1. UX Strategy – aligning business goals with user experience of products
2. Content Strategy – aligning business goals with content found in a product or website
3. Customer Experience – CX works to improve interaction between users (customers) and business (service)

Interaction Design :

Usually defined as a core user experience design. Interaction design focuses on how to create efficient and effective users and interfaces, screen interactions either between screens or beyond the screens.

• step one, sketch out interaction elements using paper or whiteboards.
• step two, create mockups, wireframes and prototypes on screen using real-time feedback from stakeholders. interaction prototypes show real functionality before developer fully wire things up with code.
• designing for the web includes element (tests, buttons, menus, headers, footers, etc.) placements and structures.
• additional responsibilities include visualising interactions with documentation, annotate visual representations with supplemental documentation, communicator for design and advocate for users and design meetings, help stakeholders see beyond the business goals for the product’s user impact, may also require user research.
• general understanding of technological platforms will likely be useful.

Visual Design :

• Creating meaning in elements and interactivity on a screen through use of fonts, colors, images and space.
• A visual designer needs to design based on user knowledge and understanding.
• A visual designer will often start with low fidelity mockups created by an interaction designer and then build out a more graphically polished look.
• Occasionally, visual and interaction designing can be done by the same designer as requirement can draw from both these skillsets, but these are separate but overlapping roles.
• This includes responsibilities where visual design may require the design of interaction controls (user knows where they need to go to do a certain task).
• This may also require involvement in product branding and drafting design guidelines for future designers that the company might hire to ensure consistency across the interface
• This may require involvement in updating older style guides to provide better consistency.

Service Design:

• Service design assures the quality of a customer’s entire interaction with the company.
• These interactions can take place through electronic, screen-based, telephoner in-person interaction through the brand and staff.
• Responsibilities are parallel to an interaction designer with wider scope.
• In detail, responsibilities include understanding needs. identifying processes, enhancing interactions and visualising improvements through sketches, storyboards or 3-D mockups.
• Once these plans are set into motion, service design then provides insights and guidance on the execution.

Information Architecture:

• Information Architecture is concerned with information organisation behind the scenes and when presented to the users.
• Responsibilities focus on the creation of web and mobile resources, conducting user research, and designing structure of information.
• The significant benefit of a strong information architecture is that when information is structured behind the scenes and potential results are tagged appropriately, faceted search can be used effectively and efficiently.
• With product design, target users, user knowledge base, information structure, and validation of stake holder information may be required.
• User research may include user testing such as first click analysis.
• Information structure design includes creating meaningful site structure with required elements, creating a controlled vocabulary, and developing a taxonomy to allow for information tagging as it gets added over time.
• Card sort may be a research activity that will be valuable to an information architect to assess how users naturally group terms.

Content writing, Information design, and Technical Communication:

• The content and information is the single-most important aspect of any screen information.
• Content writing or web writing focuses on word creation while information design focuses on content creation beyond just words.
• Information design makes sure that content is consumed as intended to meet user needs.
• Responsibilities include gathering information from subject matter experts, designing user-friendly content that meets legal constraints required in the industry, creating meaningful content with pictures and information that add value and meaning, and creating, adhering to, or maintaining a corporate style guide.
• Technical writing or technical communication ensures the important technical information is understood by the intended audience groups.
• This includes converting information from a technical source to explanations that are user-friendly either through screen-based help or electronic/hard copy.

User Research:

• User research is dedicated to finding out about users and their product usage.
• Responsibilities include understanding users and business goals, evaluating interfaces by involving actual users in research studies.
• Usually starting with existing data analytics such as web analytics, market data, or research data, this information is used to determine recruitment for qualitative research studies and general attributes required from candidates to ensure actual user representation.
• Work with product team to determine required information and appropriate research techniques for information gathering to maximise value of research.
• Heuristic or expert review may be conducted using available information and UX best practices to identify problems prior to conducting research.
• Research may be Ethnographic research observe user behaviour in natural environment, or a Usability test to observe users during task performance, and providing recommendations on how the product design should be updated to deal with identified issues.

Accessibility:

• An accessibility specialist ensures that any user can use the product regardless of any kind of disability or physical or cognitive limitations.
• Websites and mobile resources must be designed to be accessible to work as intended.
• Responsibilities include accessibility education to design and development team, evaluation of accessibility, dealing with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), or Section 508 in the USA.
• A heuristic review of the accessibility can be conducted to ensure adherence to legal guidelines by code examination, assistive technology testing, and usability test with representative users.

Human Factors:

• A specialist Human factors deals with how physical products are used in light of human capabilities.
• Responsibilities include regulatory compliance and product safety, or in other words, ergonomics, which assures intended audience can use products both easily and safely.

UX Strategy:

• A UX strategist aligns business goals with the user experience of products.
• They should understand the language and goals of business including intention to create products, important business needs, and budgetary requirements of product development.
• Talking with stakeholders and business leader as well as gaining insights from the UX team can create a well-rounded understanding of business goals.
• They should also understand how the user experience fits into these business goals by moving towards a products that users will enjoying preferably more than other competing products, and how do stakeholders’ perception of users line up with the reality of actual users.
• A roadmap can help provide a framework within which other UX professionals – such as interaction designers and user researchers – can work in order to help align the overall user experience with business goals.
• Responsibilities include communicating with stakeholders and the team to gather necessary data and making sure business goals and UX to better match up in case there is a mismatch in alignment.

Content Strategy:

• Similar to UX strategist, a content strategist also focuses on aligning business needs and goals with the content found in a product or a website.
• Consistency of tone, voice and brand is important to a coherent business strategy but may prove to be difficult to implement with many content contributors, this is where a content strategist comes into place.
• Responsibilities include creating content guidelines documented in the form of a style or editorial guide with do’s and don’ts, and metadata strategy and information tagging behind the scenes for efficient management of information
• Information architecture and content strategy overlap with respect to tagging data on the back end.
• Content guidelines define who the users are and the voice of the content along with explaining how to best align content across the site and the organisation with business goals.
• Producing and distributing UX-based writing standards to content contributors is a great way for a content strategist to align tone, voice, and brand.
• Defining and documenting procedures of workflow and web governance may also be required such as division of content creation responsibilities between contributors, the process of creating and posting content, content contributor’s ability to post immediately or if there will be a second tier staff assigned to check and validate if content aligns with the brand identity and guidelines, and finally, time duration of content persistence before requiring review and revalidation.
• Producing and distributing UX-based writing standards to content contributors is a great way for a UX strategist to align tone, voice, and brand.

Customer experience:

• Customer experience (CX) deals with interaction between users and business and ensures alignment of business goals and customer experience.
• Similar to a service designer, a CX professional drills into all touchpoint of customer interaction with business, even off-screen, including call centres, company staff, and in-person interactions with the brand.
• CX professional works to understand and visualise the customer experience through research activities and synthesis of variety of data sources, whereas the service designer works to design the customer experience.
• A CX professional may focus on collecting and synthesizing the data whereas a service designer will use the data to holistically design the experience that a customer has with a company.
• This requires checking if expected users interact with the company in expected ways, and if there are pain points where there is misalignment with user expectations and company interactions.
• Responsibilities include producing a customer journey map that visualises the entirety of the customer experience with the product over time. The journey map visualizes the entirety of customer interactions over time which can help stakeholders see where the company is doing well and what opportunities there are for improvement.
• This journey might be overlaid with difficulties or frustrations that could possibly move customers away from the goals of business, which should be understood, working with business stakeholders to understand what difficulty may be the underlying cause of a problem and how it can be fixed, and may also require taking a step further to figure out how to exceed expectations, which ultimately leads to a more successful business, better appreciated brand and more loyal customers.

Other career paths:

• Consulting – sense of novelty, short-term project, ability to work with multiple companies. UX consulting is likely to offer more unpredictability than working in-house. Someone who enjoys variety over project consistency may enjoy a consulting role.
• In-house – sense of ownership, long-term projects, loyalty to one company. Working in-house is most likely to allow for the greatest opportunity of co-worker stability over time.
• In-house consulting – long-term position, short-term projects, loyalty to one company.
• freelancer – greater schedule flexibility, opportunity for higher income.
• Staff augmentation may be possible where a contracted position though one that is often long-term may possibly feel like being an employee of the company even though the official title may be a contractor or a consultant.

Resumes/Portfolios required:

• Resumes and portfolios must represent a logical UX package and frame your skills to fit into one or more of the career pathways discussed previously based on which pathway best fits your abilities and interests.
• Beyond primary skillsets, it may help to have other valuable skills that may fit into the framework of UX as well as other general soft skills that may be valuable to employers and clients.
• Group skills associated with a certain UX career subgroup such as design, research and strategy.
• Portfolios showcase work samples to add to the information presented in your resume. These portfolios may be on a public site, password-protected site or as a physical portfolio, or work samples that can be emailed to employers as needed or presented through presentations and screen-share.
• Your portfolio is not just a collection of items but rather is a way that you can explain your career story inclusive of knowledge and experience.
• Document not just the work samples but the story behind these projects including what you specifically did and contributed to the project, how did UX skills help the company create a better product
• You may have to be mindful of legal restrictions such as non-disclosure agreements.
• Anonymising materials and stripping out confidential items from deliverables with replacements like a note about redacted items or generic text and illustrations, or communicate the process experienced to achieving the end result/goals along with illustrations of the process to showcase your value in the workflow to get around non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and other legal restrictions.
• Although, proceed at your own risk after proper evaluation of the options, the third and final option being the safest path among the ones provided above, but no two circumstances are exactly the same, so it depends on what rules you are working within.
• To start your portfolio, school project samples, volunteering at charitable organisations to strategise, evaluate, or redesign their resources, may provide an NDA-free way to showcase skills and build your portfolio.

Social Media:

• LinkedIn – representative keywords to explain who you are as a UX professional, prior work history explanation in a succinct (brief) and easily-skimmable manner, expand network to possibly obtain employers as a third-degree connection. Connect to other UX professionals, aspiring UX professionals and perhaps those in related professions. This cohesive approach will help demonstrate to a potential future employer that you are a part of the UX community.
• Twitter – Tweet regularly, ensure profile description brands you as a UX professional, search for #UX and related hashtags and engage in UX conversations, share thoughts by reading UX blogs and tweeting salient points with the link back to the original post, follow other UX professionals.
• Facebook – consider friending work colleagues, periodic posts to explain your work.
• Blogs – work experiences, platforms to blog may include LinkedIn posts, Medium, or a personal blog.

Regardless of whether the focus is personal or professional, any social media platform has the potential to help you professionally as long as you leverage it in the right way.

Offline Events:

• Local UX Events may help expand your work network outside of social media organised by associations such as UXPA, IXDA, IA, or searching for events on Meetup.com or in your local geographic area.
• If possible offer to talk in one of these organisations to demonstrate leadership skills.
• Attend national and international conferences if possible to network and offer to speak.
• Create strong social media presence by leveraging social media and in-person opportunities.

Working with recruiters:

• Understand if recruiters understand what role they are recruiting for. It’s critical that any recruiter you are working with understands open positions and how your skills potentially match up with those positions.
• If a position fits your skills, engage in conversation to learn more about what the recruiters are looking for.
• Recruiters can help you find out how your specific skills and backgrounds can fit into a company they’re familiar with and can provide valuable feedback on why your profile did not get chosen for a certain UX position about your resume, portfolio, or your background.
• Establish long-term relationships with these recruiters even if one particular position does not work out. Connect with them on LinkedIn. Strive to stay in touch with good recruiters for the long term – not just for your current job search but for your next one as well.

To speed up job recruitment, consider posting your resume on online job boards and general sites (Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed, etc.) or UX specific sites (UX Jobs Board, UX Jobs 24/7, UXswitch, etc.).

References:

1.  Don Norman; Jakob Nielsen. “The Definition of User Experience (UX)”. Nielsen Norman Group.
2. Cory Lebson, “Planning a Career in User experience”, LinkedIn Learning.
3. “UX Careers Handbook”, Cory Lebson.

Note :

This article is not sponsored and is purely based on the author’s opinions and personal experience on the journey of learning. None of the links provided here are affiliate links and are provided only for the purpose of learning.

The author is a student completing an Engineering Degree in Computer Science with a Specialization in Cloud Technology and Mobile Applications.

Check out this article on my Medium Blog : User Experience Fields – what are they?