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Keeping It Real in the UX Job Search

Published on September 10, 2013

Guest Post by: Kofi Aidoo, Intern

I have to start this post with a full confession. I was a recruiter. Right before I switched to UX it was my job to get designers work. First, I worked with industrial designers and then more and more UX designers. In fact, working in placement helped me get closer to the design field in a more meaningful way, and it helped me to get some insight into the industry as a whole. But now as I start my UX career the shoe is on the other foot. It’s me who has to put together a portfolio and reach out to companies and recruiters in hopes of landing a job. And with as much knowledge and experience as I have in recruitment, applying for jobs still makes me nervous. So how do I make sure hiring managers and recruiters see value in my profile? How do I convey not only the things I am able to do, but also the things I want to learn? How do I work with recruiters who will actually care about me as a candidate? Basically – How do I Keep it Real in the UX job search?!

Here are some helpful steps that I’ve found that may also work for you.

#1 Know what you want to do
As a recruiter one of the most frustrating things was dealing with candidates who didn’t really know what they wanted. Junior candidates, especially, were unsure what they could provide or over shot, and perhaps, over expected what they could deliver. So, desperate for a job they say they can do everything. But the reality is very different. Study the field, speak to other professionals and get a good understanding of where your skills can be of most use. Being a wireframe machine isn’t always the best but it’s a door in. If a hiring manager can trust you to do that they will trust you to do other things.

#2 Know who you want to work for but stay open and flexible
Almost as important as knowing what you want to do, is knowing who you want to work for. Though, that’s not always obvious from the beginning. As a recruiter, one of the questions I would always ask candidates is: who were their dream companies? I didn’t ask this because I could always get them a job there at those companies. In fact, nine times out of ten I couldn’t. But it did give me a good sense of the kinds of things they were open to. Know if you’re looking to go in house or be a freelancer. Agency vs Corporate. A fast paced team with little projects or one working on a more long-term basis. For more UX specific roles it’s knowing whether you want to be involved in an agile process or more waterfall, more research focused or closer to UI and execution. Knowing what you want should help you get to where you want to work. These two go hand in hand.

#3 Portfolio Portfolio Portfolio
The portfolio becomes the critical piece in the puzzle. As a recruiter, I would easily look at a portfolio before reading a resume and cover letter. You want to see the skills of the candidate, understand their thinking and see if their aesthetic is a match for the the hiring managers you’re working with. The two biggest questions candidates have to answer when they are creating portfolios are:

1) What is the core message you’re trying to get across?

2) Who’s this portfolio targeted at?

The work in your portfolio should adequately answer these two questions and give a good impression of your thinking and skills. Try and point out the development of a project from start to finish and highlight the process. Wireframes are nice and some recruiters may only focus on that, but stay true to UX as a process and reflect the whole thing. Hiring managers will appreciate seeing the totality of your thinking and insight even if sometimes recruiters miss out.

#4 Screen your recruiters
When working with recruiters make sure you’re screening them too. You want to know that this person will represent you to the fullest, and that they have a good understanding of your skills and some respect for what you’re offering. I try and listen to how the recruiter I’m talking to is responding to my profile. Are they asking questions about my history? Are they noticing my skill-set when they comment on my portfolio? Do I feel like I can trust this person? Those are some of the questions I want answered at the end of our conversation.

Truth be told recruiters go through a lot of candidates and portfolios. Sometimes it’s easy to get jaded but they usually know what they’re doing and know what their hiring managers want. So be upfront with them as to your skills as well as shortcomings. Know that they aren’t miracle workers. They can only try to present you in the best light, so try and give them as much information as possible, without overwhelming them. That way, they can get a full idea of who you are. Also, if they give you some advice: listen! Take it if it makes you look better to hiring managers or aligns with your overall strategy.

#5 Stay Humble and Work hard
For this I will use an example from when I was in engineering. One of the best jobs I had was at a research hospital in Chicago. I had just moved back to the states from Belgium and was looking for a job after the first dotcom bubble burst. I applied for a job in a research lab and was told that they liked my background, but they had already filled the position. But, they did offer me a chance to be in the lab a couple of days a week to help out here and there. I jumped at the chance and accepted, pro bono. For 2 months I was there practically everyday. Helping out where I could, going to meetings, just enjoying being in the environment of learning and doing. After those 2 months a grant they had submitted on the day I arrived was approved and they decided they would give me the researcher position attached to the grant. I was rewarded for my enthusiasm and hard work.

I’m not telling you to take a job with no money, because in this environment, we also don’t want to cheapen the value of UX. However, sometimes you may need to take a risk in exchange for what you can learn and how it augments what you offer as a candidate. You never know where chances could lead.

The good thing about UX right now is that there are a lot of jobs out there. The need for UX grows greater and greater, so it’s a good time to be coming into the field. However, there’s still a lot to navigate. Some companies view UX as only wireframing, others have an evolved process, but may move slower than you want. You also have to try and understand the environment that will help you thrive and grow to be the best UX’er you can be, and that means more than making the choice between an agency or corporate environment. So start by keeping it real with yourself about what you want and what you can do, then demand that others keep it real with you. That’s the way to maximize your job search and craft a great career.

Tell me about your job search adventures and what advice you’d give to someone looking for a job in UX.
Tweet me @K_ID_X

Learning UX in a Lean Environment Part 2: The Journey Not the Destination

Published on July 9, 2013

Guest post by: Kofi Aidoo, Intern

Author Greg Anderson said “Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.”

As I sit back in my Brooklyn abode and reflect on my last 3 months at The Starter League (TSL), an independent “school” that teaches entrepreneurs and enthusiasts the technical skills to venture forth with their own ideas or for some like me make a change in their career, it’s this quote that comes to mind.

In my last post I was adapting to Learning UX in a lean environment. Today I will wrap up my experiences and learnings in my final 6-7 weeks as I tried to maximize my learning while building my own application.

Here’s what I learned:

#1 – Always make time for others! This is the most important thing that I learned. While battling it out over the last few weeks I hit a few roadblocks both as an individual and also within the confines of the team. Help always came from one of 2 colleagues in the web development class and UX classes. One of them was basically at TSL to build his business back in his native country and had little time for deviation, the other was still working remotely and had other deadlines besides his 3x a week class. Both were technically advanced and really understood backend development as well as front end design. They would spend the time to review concepts or explain html and it was humbling. So take the time to help. You will benefit from the learning and camaraderie that develops.

#2 – User Stories are key. User stories are quick ways to put features into sentence form. Each sentence places the feature in context with the user. At TSL there were a few conversations where developers were dismissive of the need for UX in the development of an idea. Many didn’t see the need. Yet they were still dependent on a UX tool in order to develop their ideas. Developers were taught the value of user stories and the development of good user stories in order to know what to build both for a Minimal Viable Product, as well as, for the whole system. It was refreshing to hear the developers I was working with demand User stories and want to work through the research and process to refine them even more. Demonstrating the value of UX to developers in such a simple term as the User Story is a good way to bridge the gap between front end backend.

#3 – Understand all your technical limitations from the beginning. When I decided to build my application I was fortunate enough to find 2 very competent developers who wanted to be part of the process. They understood the value of UX, and, as I said in the paragraph above, were even involved in the process of defining the MVP and user stories from the beginning. Yet all was not smooth sailing. Having defined the MVP and even going through a wireframing session with them on whiteboard, my other UX/HTML teammate and I began to build the frontend from scratch using our own html and css that we had defined. Yet when it came time to integrate front end with backend (or so we thought) actually doing so was not as simple. Our ground up html didn’t mesh with their template based system and it would take too long to integrate. So in the end we had to rebuild our html to make it easier for the devs to integrate the product which,with the time left, meant we didn’t “finish” the MVP by the end of the program. Still 3 of 4 of us are committed to continuing on the project and it feels like an exciting beginning.

Finally, the biggest lesson I learned from the whole program is that UX is NOT, I repeat, NOT a lean process. It takes time. Everyone wants to move fast and iterate quickly, but we still need to reference good solid research. The best ideas address a witnessed or experienced user need. A properly researched and wisely applied strategy will uncover the breadth of your user needs. It will also reveal other exploitable areas. This requires time spent with the users and the data to produce the right insights. The UX process can be used to inject momentum into a multi-stage agile development process and when done so can be very beneficial. But an agile UX process seems to be self defeating and limits the strength and power of the output from UX work. Can the UX process be aligned with a good research strategy to support a lean and agile development? I would say yes. But, can an agile process replace a good research strategy, I would say no.

Like all journeys my time at TSL was not as straightforward as I would have liked but in the end I will say the experience was definitely more than worthwhile and I would recommend the Starter League to anyone who wants to dedicate the time to learn in a welcoming, active environment. I’ve been given the feeling that I know and understand UX much better, but I still have a lot more learning to do. Thankfully I now have the confidence to go learn anything whether it be HTML and CSS, visual design or even J-Query. And that has, more than anything, been the greatest value of this experience.

Keeping it Real: Learning UX in a Lean Environment

Published on May 13, 2013

Guest Post by: Kofi Aidoo, Intern

It’s been 6 Mondays since I landed at O’hare and came directly to the famed Merchandise Mart ready to begin a new chapter. After spending 3 years placing designers and putting my own creative needs on the back-burner, I was here to start again and begin my journey towards becoming a UX designer. So, exhausted from my last 4 days in New York, I walked into the 1871 space at the Merchandise Mart, luggage in tow and duly impressed by what I saw.

After several years of going to IxDA events and flirting with the idea of UX as a career, I decided that it was time. In making my transition I had spoken to a good number of people in the industry and received some valuable advice. I knew I wanted to dedicate myself to the practice and also that I didn’t want to pay too much money. The ship and build philosophy, the location, and the very reasonable price made Starter League, my current focus, a very attractive option.

For those who don’t know, the Starter League is a 1.5 year old “school” that teaches different aspects of web design and development. The Starter League was founded by Neal Sales-Griffin and Mike McGee, two friends who had faced the challenge of learning the skills needed to build their own digital products. Realizing that there weren’t that many opportunities and resources available that truly help the uninitiated, they began the Starter League. The root of their drive and methodology is to help people learn the skills needed to create and ship viable products fast.

They offer classes in Beginner and Advanced HTML/CSS, Web Development using Ruby on Rails, Visual Design, and User Experience, the class I’m taking. All courses last 3 months and attendees are encouraged to take more than one course to round out their education. The UX class is taught by Carolyn Chandler, co-author of “A Project Guide to UX Design” assisted by Veronika Goldberg, a visual designer turned UX designer and alumnus of The Starter League.

A typical class starts with the review of the homework, Carolyn asks us about any insights and pain points and then we delve into the lesson for the next 3 hours with a ten minute break at the half-way point. We’ve already learned about visual design, heuristics, personas, user stories, surveys and research, as well as, have begun to do some initial wireframing and site maps. All work is project based and done in groups that were formed in the second week. Groups… which leads me to one of the over riding tenets of the course. Collaboration!

Collaboration forms the spine of the learning. In the programming classes, students work in pairs during class, but for the design classes, students work in groups on one “real – life project”. They work together, as practitioners, looking to develop and launch an idea. The high point of all this collaboration is Starter Night at the end of term when teams from all the classes will join together to build an app and then present their app and their process to the rest of the League. Think of it like a 6 week Hack-a-thon without the begging for money at the end. One of the taglines displayed heavily on the Starter League homepage reads: Start Careers. Launch Products. Build Companies. But after 6 weeks here I can definitely say the emphasis, besides being on collaboration, is more heavily on the last 2 tenets.

With such an emphasis, in the UX classes especially, the process can sometimes feel a little lacking on feedback. With 3 months to cover everything there is a speed that is obvious but not overwhelming. However, our homework assignments are mere discussion points and serve ultimately as a roadmap to the construction of an app. Topics and processes are well covered, but we seem to touch on them only once or twice and don’t come back to them as we move on in the class. More than one of my colleagues and I have raised this point, and Carolyn and Veronika have responded admirably. Homework review is taking up a little more of the opening minutes in class while some information that can be consumed as reading material is placed in an extra file. The emphasis on in-class activity and familiarity with the UX process has gone up, and that is great. But enough about Starter League, the question for me remains:

As one of the many here focused on making a career change, and on making UX my livelihood: How do I KEEP IT REAL and become a UX professional while I’m here?

I was trying to keep it real even before I started the program. On deciding to come to this program I have not only left my job but have also made a not so insignificant financial investment. I wanted to make sure I would use the time wisely and be efficient. So, the first thing I did when I was accepted was to prepare myself mentally for the challenge.

Inspired by a Steve Martin quote, “So Good they Can’t Ignore You” is a book by Cal Newport, a Georgetown Computer science professor who’s been writing since high school on different tips for academic success. This latest book looks the idea of Follow your Passion dead in the eye and forces it to blink. To summarize, his claim is that a successful career isn’t about “Following your Passion”, instead your passion arises from using deliberate practice to build career capital, build valuable skills in your industry, gain more control over what you work on and then couple that with a mission statement that drives success and that elusive Passion. Skills are the foundation and that foundation takes work! This has become the backbone of my practice.

But deliberate practice isn’t just about work it’s about receiving critical feedback on that work and then working to make it right. So when my friends in the NYC IxDA community alerted me to this internship I jumped at it. I had known Lis from going to IxDA events and knew she was a well respected straight shooter who would definitely help me refine my craft. Along with this internship I was pleasantly surprised that the Starter League had also put some thought into mentoring and would provide anyone who wanted it with a professional in the city as a mentor for the duration of the course. I was lucky to have been assigned Patrick DiMichale, a colleague of Caroyln’s at Manifest Digital.

The most important thing I’ve done is immerse myself in the work. The Starter League is full of people working to put their ideas to market. Regardless of their experience they are developing projects that require good User Experience design. I’ve aligned myself with 3 of these projects (including my own), and have been using the things I learn in class to look at the projects from a user perspective as well as a business perspective. I’ve given both my mentors a lot to chew on in the past weeks and it’s been invaluable to have their input.

As I look at the next 6 weeks the end seems both far away and right around the corner. I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be ready to start a UX career by the end of my time here, but I do know I’ll be on the right path and will have built a solid foundation from which to move forward. No matter what the challenge, being mindful about the skills that are important, as well as coveted, and working on those will be the guiding principal in my practice. I urge you to read Cal Newport’s book and look at his 4 principals to a happy career. No matter what the environment Keeping it Real starts with knowing your stuff!