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"User Experience" as a label is a broad umbrella, and it often doesn't accurately describe the work we do or serve a purpose in recruiting for jobs. Cory Lebson, author of The UX Careers Handbook, spoke with our members last week about how to carve out your own piece of the UX Cheesecake.

Cory wrote a blog post all about the cheesecake metaphor and just why he chose to use it as a cover image for his book. Each type of cheesecake has its own flavor, but there's still commonalities linking them together. And while each type of User Experience work requires unique skills, there's still a common basis that we all share.

UX involves three broad categories of work:

• Designing stuff (like Interaction Design, Information Architecture, and Visual Design)
• Evaluating stuff (like User Research, Accessibility, and Human Factors)
• Strategizing about stuff (like UX Strategy, Content Strategy, and Customer Experience)

Those tasks and skills are applied in lots of different ways. You might be primarily a user researcher or information architect, focused in on your own preferred slice of the cheesecake. And each role within UX work has unique degrees of designing, evaluating, and strategizing. 

"Career advancement comes not from throwing it all out there, but saying I'm an expert at this." - Cory Lebson

Nobody can be experts in all of these areas. Cory put this in very concrete terms: If you start out by billing yourself as a UX Unicorn, master of all slices of the cheesecake, then nobody knows just which slice you're truly an expert at and you might get passed you over for a specialist job. It's very possible to become that unicorn someday, but it's important to start a career by focusing in one area. Build that expertise and then someday later think about branching out.

Telling Your Story

It's important to have your resume and portfolio tell your story and show your strengths. Which of the slices are your specialty? Make sure your story matches the job description you're applying for.

But your story goes beyond just the job application itself. Cory said that employers will obviously Google applicants, and it's important to control your brand in what pops up.  He suggested Googling yourself to check if the results tell a story of the work you do. If you say you're a User Researcher or other specialist, your web presence better back it up. 

Cory emphasized controlling:

• LinkedIn (Publish on LinkedIn Pulse)
• Tweets (Have a daily presence on the #UX hashtag)
• Personal Webpages

But your brand alone won't get you that dream job. 

Steps to help manage your search process:

• Tell your network you're looking
• Post your job search on social media
• Go to UX events and network
• Check out online job boards
• Create a custom job board feed to stay current on listings

During discussion at the end, an attendee asked about the usefulness and quality of an education via a UX bootcamp. Cory replied that "Doing a bootcamp is a good thing," but emphasized that it's also important to supplement a bootcamp with outside work. You should also do your research on the bootcamp in question, and see what slices of the cheesecake they're strongest in. Do they align with your interests and career goals?

How do you think Cory's insights will impact your next job search? Does his advice and experience fit with your own?

Thanks to Cory for spending some time with us, and to everyone who attended. We hope to see you next time!

(Event photo by Andrew Wirtanen)

 

 

With UX being recognized more frequently as important by everyone in the organization, we find ourselves spending more time justifying our designs, and how we approach explaining our work can make or break our success in doing so.

Some of us know this first hand because we've created really great work only for clients to not like them (and sometimes *really* not like them). We blame ourselves for not conveying all the details, or not spending enough time advocating for the user, or not facilitating the right conversation with the right client. Knowing how to lead these conversations is a skill of any good designer.

Tom Greever, author of Articulating Design Decisions (O'Reilly), visited us last week for tacos and a talk on how best to prepare, listen, and respond when it comes to explaining our design solutions for stakeholder buy-in.

Preparation

As with any meeting, preparing for it can help with its overall success. Tom recommended rehearsing and anticipating reactions so we are better equipped to discuss our work thoughtfully and not in a reactive rush. Our own mental preparation is important, too. We need to be prepared that we're not always going to be right and others could be. Your stakeholders may have information about the business you don't have, so check our ego at the door.

Listening

When it comes to listening, it's really about leveraging basic communication skills. We should be allowing others to talk, pausing before we speak, and diagnosing the real issue at hand. Often, a client might suggest something that isn't the right solution. As designers, it's our responsibility to get to the heart of the issue – what problem are they trying to solve and how can we provide a solution serves the needs of the user as well as the business. Listen to the words behind the words. One way to do this is to convert “likes” into “works” to understand the reasoning behind their suggestion. For example, it’s more impactful to hear “this dropdown works because…” instead of “I like this dropdown.".

Responding

Tom has an IDEAL way to respond, which includes:

Once you've identified the problem and have found common ground, it's imperative to lock in the agreement, because without it, we can't move forward. Tom offered a few examples we can use for responses based on his previous experiences. His book also has plenty of great examples that illustrate how to use the IDEAL method in realistic scenarios.

If you joined us for this event, we'd love to know how you've used some of Tom's methods when it comes to discussing your design work. If you weren't able to join us, we hope you can make another one of our events soon!

Author: Michelle Chin

All Things Open is an annual conference that "explores open source, open tech, and the open web in the enterprise." It's been held each year in downtown Raleigh at the Raleigh Convention Center.

The speaker lineup features a few UX speakers, including Rachel Nabors, Bermon Painter, and Sarah Kahn.

Triangle UXPA members can save 15% off registration by using the code TUXPA15.

http://allthingsopen.org/

The first ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) (pronounced “cheer”) which will take place at UNC Chapel Hill on March 13-17, 2016.

The keynote speakers are Mark Ackerman from the University of Michigan, and Pia Borlund from the University of Copenhagen.

Description from the CHIIR site:

CHIIR provides a forum for the dissemination and discussion of research on the user-centered aspects of information interaction and information retrieval. CHIIR focuses on elements such as human involvement in search activities, and information seeking and use in context. The conference represents a merger of two successful past events: the Information Interaction in Context conference (IIiX) and the Human Computer Information Retrieval symposium (HCIR), which have run since 2006 and 2007 respectively.

http://www.sigir.org/chiir2016/

Too often, corporations develop products or services based on what they think customers want, rather than taking the time to fully understand existing needs and unmet needs. There are a range of proven techniques to discover important and unmet needs, but far too often practitioners don’t think they need to investigate needs or rely too heavily on easily obtainable secondary marketing research. These approaches lead to shallow insights and “me too” solutions that don’t interest or excite customers. 

If you are designing, building or managing products, or considering creating a new product, service or business model, you want to know that what you launch will be valuable to potential customers, differentiated in the marketplace and meet important needs. Innovate Carolina is for you.

Learn more and register at http://www.innovatecarolina.org/2015-conference/

GIANT Conf 2015 (Charleston, SC) has announced their schedule. The workshops are on Sunday, June 14 and the 3-day conference starts up on Monday. 

The Early Bird Registration rate of $700 expires on March 31. Only 100 tickets are available at this rate. Visit http://conf.giantux.com/ for more.

Everett McKay is offering Triangle UXPA members a 50% discount off his UX Design Essentials 3-day workshop (Monday 3/16 -Wednesday 3/18). The workshop is normally $1800. Go here to register: http://uxde-durham-nc.eventbrite.com. He is also giving away a couple of free tickets to any of our members that are between jobs. Email events@triuxpa.org if this applies to you and you would like to win a free ticket. 

Also, we have reached capacity on Everett's talk on Monday 3/16. You can join the waitlist here: http://www.meetup.com/intent-design/events/220901466/

GIANT Conference 2015 have announced their six keynotes and 63 other speakers. The conference will once again be held in Charleston, South Carolina.

The six keynotes are:

• Aaron Draplin (Draplin Design Company)
• Dan Willis (Cranky Productions)
• Denise Jacobs (The Creative Dose)
• Leslie Jensen-Inman (Center-Centre)
  
• Scott Berkun (The Year Without Pants)
• Sonya Looney (Professional mountain biker)

Head to http://2015.giantconf.com/speakers/ for the complete speaker list. Early bird registration is open till February 28, 2015. Stay tuned for potential Triangle UXPA discounts.

The folks behind the GIANT Conference have announced a new one-day conference series. The first one will be in Charlotte on Friday, January 23, 2015. Registration is open now and only $99 to the first 50 people.

The keynote speakers are Lou Rosenfeld and Jared Spool.

Visit http://tinycharlotte.giantconf.com/ for more info.

Congratulations to Triangle UXPA member Bill Albing, who will be presenting at the WritersUA Conference in Charleston on October 28, 2014. Bill's talk is titled Using Customer Analysis in UA Design (UA: User Assistance).

Registration is still open for the conference at http://east.writersua.com/