So you know you want to shape the digital user experience of…something. Welcome to life after college. Now what? I often get asked by recent graduates “Where do I even start looking for experience and work?”
If you’re asking that question, then you’re already on the right track. Many UX veterans have changed careers to UX and eased their way into the field. There isn’t much of a clear path for those who are just starting out and have a formal UX related education. The challenge becomes getting a foot in the door and putting those book smarts to work with a career.
The experience you get and the amount you learn is most certainly dependent on your motivation, resourcefulness, and ability to work with others. One of the variables that can help cultivate your skills as a UX Professional is where you choose to incubate your skills.
I have found that the size and type of organization can play a role in the learning experience and growth. Let’s take a close look at how work environments can differ from each other for those looking to start careers in UX.
Start-up
All that money the big boys like Twitter and Facebook made didn’t come without blood, sweat, and caffeine. Get ready for lots of iterating, collaborating, and hat wearing. The workday may not be very structured and there may not be much in the way of a fancy UX lab or conferencing equipment. For someone new to UX, though, this can be a blessing. Startup UX is very grass roots. Gabi Moore sums it up eloquently:
For startups, you really can’t be perfect, you can’t afford all of the specialists that are needed to make a really awesome product. But something is always better than nothing. It’s just a matter of what that something can be.
You improvise user tests in loud cafes, you sketch on napkins, and you make presentations over Skype. Learning the basics and how to use the tools and resources available to you will help you appreciate and understand the fundamentals of user experience.
If you’re working at a start-up, you’ll notice that jobs have a tendency to grow or disappear very quickly, so it’s a good idea to keep in touch with your local user experience and start-up communities. They’ll serve as your mentors and provide a safety net as you grow into your user experience role.
Not only will you work very closely with people of a wide variety of skills, but you will get experience doing lots of things that aren’t strictly UX or even UX related. You’re likely to wear many hats within the company due to the pure lack of bodies to go around. Knowing how the gears of digital projects turn (outside of your own little UX corner) will make you a valuable asset to anyone lucky enough to hire you in the future.
Agency
In an agency, you’ll get good and you’ll get good fast. Agency experience is experience in dog years; although the work has a tendency to come in waves, those waves crash hard and loud. Be ready for long hours and high stress. That’s where products such as the ones found on theseedpharm.com come in. Thanks to the way you’ll be billing your hours to the clients, you’ll likely be keeping one eye on the clock and the other on the quality of what you’re churning out. And you’ll have to speak to that quality and defend it to clients who don’t know you or your skills very well. You may work on 4 projects at a time, and once they are gone and out the door, that may be the last time you see or think about them.
It’s a little tricky to find an agency with a mentor who has the time to devote to formal training. Instead, you’re more likely to find someone with experience whom you can bounce questions and ideas off of. In most cases, it would benefit you to do as much reading and studying up as you can during the down times.
Though this may sound pretty rough, there are upsides: variety, efficiency, and interpersonal skills that will never become obsolete or out of date. Within a very short period of time, you may find yourself getting very comfortable interfacing with stakeholders, presenting to scary folks in big leather chairs, defending your work, and learning how to compromise (at least with less teeth-gritting than you may otherwise endure).
And speaking of getting comfortable in otherwise difficult situations, you might just find yourself picking up expertise in strange places—get ready to tap into your inner anthropologist. Within a 6-month period I learned the ins and outs of the designer fashion consignment industry all while learning how custom wedding invitations are glued. And it was complicated.
Small company
At a small company, you’ll spend your time with only a few projects, rather than the crashing project waves of an agency. You will get to know them inside and out. The benefit of working on fewer projects for longer periods of time is that you can build on your own research during the product lifecycle. You’ll get the chance to design something, then go back to test and refine. There is no better way to learn than from your own mistakes.
Where user experience has yet to make it into the lifeblood of the company, you’ll get to evangelize the importance of user experience to any outsiders and nonbelievers. You’ll learn how UX fits into the processes of managers, developers, visual designers, and marketers. Within a year you should be pretty good at wireframing, sketching, creating user flows, writing functional specs, and running and applying findings from all types of user testing.
You’re likely to work on a team of people in the same field as you, but with different philosophies and experience to bring to the table and learn from. Collaborating and working alongside like minds is a great way to get your feet wet while keeping a safety net in place for those times you mess up.
With fewer projects comes the risk of getting bored and the feeling that you may be falling behind with trends and new buzzwords. Make sure you love what you’re working on and push yourself to learn new skills.
Medium / large company
A larger company certainly has its advantages over the little guys. Part of the job here is evangelizing good user experience practices while learning how to win small battles. Asserting yourself as an expert (or what I call “UX street cred”) can make your job a joy, and it’s a powerful skill to have in your back pocket. You may get the chance to impact methodology, improve corporate outlook and strategy for user experience, and affect huge projects. Making a difference at a large company is an incredible feeling.
There is usually room for steady growth and more responsibility (as opposed to most “flatter,” smaller companies). The trade off is you may find yourself having to navigate a maze of high school-like politics and drama. One of the common responsibilities of a UX professional at a medium or large sized company is maintaining and being the guardian of human interface guidelines, functional specifications and personas. A lot of best practices should already be in place when you get there, so this is a great place to learn the basics.
Academia / corporate research
Some UXers really enjoy being at the front lines of technological innovation and industry standards with human computer interaction. The research that UX professionals cite to colleagues and clients, the stuff that’s supporting their recommendations, has to come from somewhere… and that somewhere is you. Be ready to get very good at running and facilitating structured and rigorous user tests.
By doing funded research, you’ll probably get access to testing labs and the ability to play with cool new technology years before the neighbor’s kid gets to. Researchers were designing and refining gestural recognition and touch interfaces decades before they made it into the Kinect and iPhone.
If you get a chance to work with students, you may find you learn just as much from them as they learn from you. And the best part? You’ll probably work very close with a professor; who could ask for a better mentor?
Keep in mind, that if you plan to leave this kind of position in the future, you’ll be leaving without gaining valuable experience with client/stakeholder management, presenting, and budgeting time. With the (potentially) flexible hours, this kind of job may pair well with occasional freelance work to make you a well-rounded UX machine (but shhh, don’t tell the brass).
Go forth and make us proud
The scale of and variability between companies and organizations obviously varies, as do the types of experience and work. Naturally, there are exceptions to all of these observations and they really depend on you. No matter how you chose to step into a UX career, there is no replacement for creating your own learning opportunities. That means not stopping when your workday ends, reading anything and everything UX related, and being active in your local and/or online UX community.
Question from the Editor: What kinds of places do you think best help prepare new UXers for a bold and bright career? Let us know in the comments!