Why Do People Look for WordPress Alternatives?

Website Vulnerability

The popularity of WordPress has a downside: an attractive opportunity for hackers to access the website and cause damage to it. 

Free plugins and templates contain high-level security issues that may let hackers access posts and add malicious content. For instance, PageLayer plugins that can work with almost all themes on the market appeared to have vulnerabilities and failed to include permission checks. Over 200,000 sites were already using the plugins when the vulnerability was found. 

The vulnerability of starter templates is crucial. According to the latest news, most plugins published by the Astra WordPress theme can lead to damage that may cause a site takeover by hackers, which is why utilizing ready-to-use solutions in WordPress may not always be a good idea. 

All that publishers can do to decrease vulnerability is to update plugins to the latest versions. Still, WordPress makes it your responsibility to monitor updates and install them.

SEO Requires Plugins and Knowledge

While WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly platforms and has numerous opportunities for creating all types of websites, it may not cover users’ needs in all cases. You can use plugins to improve your SEO in many ways, from changing page templates for meta tags generation to indexing management. Still, plugins cannot solve all of your problems, which is why you may need basic HTML/CSS knowledge or help from an additional service.

Let’s look at this example with a structured data markup. In general, structured data is a code that looks like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "http://schema.org",
  "@type": "Product",
}
</script>

If you add this script to your WordPress post, the search engine will understand what the page is about. In this example, we have added “product,” which tells search engines that the page is about the product and matches the content with search queries more accurately. The only issue is that you need to have basic HTML skills or invest your time to set a structured data markup. 

Another point worth considering is a chance of vulnerability if the user wants to solve problems that require different plugins. Their weight can slow down the website’s speed or make it appear incorrectly on some devices. Lastly, the more plugins you install, the more vulnerable your website becomes. 

Loading Speed of Themes and Plugins

If you try to run a WordPress site with a speed tester tool, the chances are likely that you will see “render blocking resources,” “unused CSS,” or “unused Javascript.” This is the reason the speed of the website may decrease as particular elements on the page cannot be rendered until the javascript or CSS are loaded. It happens most of the time due to the WordPress theme design that is quite difficult to correct by yourself. Additionally, plugins and the fact that WordPress is written with PHP may also affect the speed. 

User Experience 

From the UX perspective, the above-mentioned factors may affect the interaction of users with the website and their overall experience. The Core Web Vitals that Google uses to evaluate a website experience include three major components: first input delay (FID), cumulative layout (CLS), and largest contentful paint (LCP).

Most of these factors may be affected in some scenarios with WordPress. For instance, LCP defines how much time it will take for the user to see the page content. If themes or plugins are heavy, then the load time is more likely to increase. 

CLS defines how stable the webpage is. Again, you need to pay attention and be careful with the themes and plugins you install to ensure that the content blocks are not moving around as you load the page. 

Since Core Web Vitals recently became an important ranking factor, an additional SEO tool like SE Ranking will help define all your website’s technical problems.

Who Should Use WordPress?

WordPress is widely used for creating various types of websites with it. Most platforms are made to build a website or a blog, while WordPress can be used for a wide range of needs. Here is a list of website types you can create with WordPress (and it is not the full list): 

• Blogs
• Business, Q&A, ECommerce, review websites
• Portfolios
• Forums
• eLearning modules
• Chatrooms
• Business directories
• Galleries
• Wikis and knowledge bases

WordPress is perfect for beginners, thanks to its user-friendly functionality and management. Any user can start with no prior experience with SEO, design, or development and get a working solution for business. You can enhance a website as you go, adding plugins and tweaking functionality, which is great in an ever-changing environment.

WordPress is an excellent solution for businesses that can compromise security and have enough resources to invest time and professional effort to set up a working site. If a company is short of finances, they can invest some time and figure out the matter by themselves — a large community and support enable them to do that. WordPress is free and easy to manage, which is why a business can take care of their website once everything is set up and extend their online presence further. 

Who Will Not Benefit from WordPress?

When entrepreneurs create a website for business, most of them have one simple goal in mind: to create a site that converts into a purchase and attracts clients. As a UX designer, you know that all you need for such purposes is a reliable, UX-friendly website that will help you avoid issues rather than create new ones. 

Even though WordPress can satisfy such needs in many cases, its functionality will not work for all types of websites. 

WordPress is definitely not the best solution if the business is concerned with security. Even installing security plugins and paying close attention to updates does not guarantee that you will avoid a cyber attack. Furthermore, the platform does not offer hosting and tech support — it is worth considering if you or your clients plan to handle everything by yourself at first. 

Here are some examples where it is better to avoid building websites with WordPress: 

• Banking websites
• Investing and cryptocurrency websites
• Government websites

We suggest checking alternatives before settling with a CMS to make sure you understand the benefits and the flaws of every platform. Chances are, you will find a website builder that suits your needs better than WordPress.

6 Best WordPress Alternatives

1. MODX

Like WordPress, the platform combines CMS, development frameworks, and managed cloud hosting. It can serve as a great alternative if the business is looking for a secure solution. It has various features which can create all types of websites, blogs, catalogs, and other content types.

Benefits for UX Designers

• The platform has the flexibility to create both simple and complex sites. 
• It pays special attention to security matters.
• Built-in features allow users to easily manage the website once it is built and solve any issues with professional support. 

Price Range 

$30-$275 per month

2. Joomla 

From the SEO perspective, both Joomla and WordPress require the knowledge and help of plugins to improve SEO. However, Joomla is less exposed to vulnerabilities, which allows us to consider it as a WordPress alternative. It is great for developers who are ready to work with servers for the most part. 

Benefits for UX Designers

• Joomla is highly customizable and flexible in terms of design. 
• The platform has brand guidelines, from copy to colors, textures, images, CTAs, and more.
• It is easy to create a clear journey for your visitor and identify an audience persona.

Price Range

Free

3. Wix

Wix mainly focuses on creating appealing websites and plans to develop in this direction. The platform offers hosting and tech support, while WordPress does not specify such features. Wix can become your alternative if you are looking for an easy-to-use, creative website with professional support and enhanced security. 

Benefits for UX Designers

• Flexible designs with numerous templates that allow you to build creative websites and adapt them for your needs.
• The platform offers CMS-like dynamic features, video backgrounds, scroll effects, and animations. 
• Wix follows the latest trends and has a well-developed UI and UX. 

Price Range

 $4.50-24.50 

4. Squarespace

Squarespace is a website design platform with “award-winning web designs.” The main benefit of Squarespace is the availability of built-in SEO and analytic tools that are hard to find on other platforms. Additionally, it offers blogging tools that let you categorize, share, and schedule posts. Similar to Wix, Squarespace also takes care of all technical aspects and support, which WordPress does not.

Benefits for UX Designers

• Get unlimited storage and bandwidth.
• Fully integrated eCommerce on most plans, which makes the platform a great fit for building online stores. 
• UX designers will find built-in templates helpful when starting a new website. You automatically get built-in mobile version templates.
• You can use Squarespace’s custom CSS option to insert code on any website page. 

Price Range

$12

5. OpenCart 

While WordPress is a multi-tasker, OpenCart is designed for e-commerce stores. From the SEO perspective, OpenCart is not a piece of cake: you need to put some effort into figuring out how to use it effectively. Yet, it becomes easy to set up, manage, and analyze once you do. 

Benefits for UX Designers

• Availability of information lets users see an overview of total orders, sales, customers, sales analytics, and other widgets.
• The multi-store feature allows you to manage all stores in one place. 
• Wide product variables let you adjust product size, color, length, and other variables. 

Price Range 

Free

6. Shopify

As Shopify is based on the SaaS model, it is built for users who do not have a technical or design background — pretty much anyone can sign up and create an appealing online shop. The main difference is that WordPress requires a more hands-on configuration, while Shopify is a tailored solution for an online shop. 

Benefits for UX Designers

• The platform has a range of customizable templates which help you meet business’ branding requirements.
• Shopify offers responsive and easy-to-edit templates with support. 

Price Range

 $9-2,000 per month

Let’s Draw to a Close

Is WordPress still bringing value? Definitely. 

Can it be your all-in-one solution? This depends on your skills, expertise, and goals. WordPress can certainly become a solution for you or your client, considering it is one of the most beneficial platforms for beginners. It is completely free and has a large community, allowing individuals who have the time to invest in it to set up various website types. 

Yet, WordPress has some flaws that can limit a website’s abilities if it requires a specific set of plugins or can only solve a problem with HTML/CSS knowledge. 

Should you start looking at alternatives?

If you feel that security is one of your primary focuses and need a more tailored solution, you should consider alternatives. For instance, platforms such as Shopify or OpenCart are built for online shops, while Wix and Squarespace focus on websites for businesses. 

When you choose the suitable CMS for your clients or yourself, the best you can do is define your goals, find bottlenecks, and go over the functionality of each platform — that way, you will get a clear understanding of whether WordPress is good for you. 

Hero source image: Freepik

The post When WordPress Is Not a Good Solution for Your Website (and Best Alternatives) appeared first on UX Mastery.

What Is a Wireframe?

Before digging deep into this subject, let me try to simplify what a wireframe is. A wireframe is a skeleton for the digital product design. You can imagine it to be the blueprint for any product. It consists of lines and shapes, and each represents some element/hierarchy/structure.

The main three elements of a wireframe are:

1. The Line

This element could represent a frame, a border, or a separator.

2. The Image

This element could represent either an image, or an icon, or any graphics.

3. The Solid

This element represents either a block or a line of text.

Using all these elements in a design can produce something like this:

Now remove these hints from the design and give them to a user asking them to use it. Can you imagine that?

Why Are Wireframes Bad?

I remember one time I was working on a mobile app product for weekly/monthly healthy food ordering subscriptions. The app allowed a user to subscribe and get healthy meals delivered daily. It allowed the user to choose the daily meals and the delivery time. And it also provided health tips and some workout exercises to keep living a healthy life. Here’s a concept that we tried testing out.

When I tested this concept as a wireframe with the first group of users, I asked each one this question “Suppose your daily meals will be delivered daily at 2 PM and you want to change this time to be at 3 PM, how can you do this?”

I was shocked by the result. 4 out of 5 users tapped on icon no.2, which was supposed to be for the health tips, while just one user tapped on icon no. 1, which was for the menu and settings. This meant that 80% of users expected to change delivery times using the middle button at the bottom. However, I didn’t rely on that result.

To make this clear enough, I created a simple test and iterated the same scenario after applying the UI and providing a finished prototype to another group of users. This time, 5 out of 5 users didn’t like the changing delivery time feature to be placed in position no. 2. The common reason was that they wouldn’t need to perform that daily, and instead, they might need the health tips to be placed at this position since they might need to use this feature more than once a day.

Wireframes come in two forms, digital and paper sketches. The main reason why wireframes were invented was that they were cheap and fast to create, but this doesn’t come free. There’s a hidden cost to that.

1. Cost of Educating

Although wireframes are fast to create and they seem to be a time-saver, they take up too much time in educating, especially in user testing. The time you save in producing them, you pay the double in educating users about them.

2. Misunderstood

What’s the difference between these two elements? Are they both images? Are they both icons? Are they clickable? What should they represent? Too many questions to process in the user’s head may lead to either making wrong decisions or driving them away from the central value.

3. Miss the Whole Experience

Making the user assume that a specific element may serve a particular purpose will not lead to correct research results. When you test with many users, the findings will not be accurate because each one will interpret the shapes in their own way, which will lead you to correct their understanding and guide them back to the right path, which is wrong in research and testing. You should not lead the user.

Feeling and living the whole experience is way better. Making the user live within a semi-real product, feel the interactions, sense the animations, and deal with colors and typography will lead to better and more accurate results.

So, Are Wireframes Useless?

Wireframes are plain, too neutral to be usable by actual users, but this doesn’t mean they are useless. Here is how and when to use wireframes:

1. Guiding You in Your Process.

Design wireframes for yourself to make it easy for you to structure the product you are designing. By creating wireframes, you pour all the imaginations in your head on a canvas or paper faster, organize your thoughts, clearly see where you are heading, and most importantly, iterate more quickly. Know where to place the right elements in the right place, either here or there.

2. Brainstorming and Generating Ideas With Your Peers.

Product owners, UI designers, UX designers, product managers, and developers—all of them can understand wireframes well; they may even add to it, generate ideas, and make a clear direction for the best structure.

3. Flow Design

Because wireframes are plain, you can use them as flow demonstrations with techies and developers. In this way, it will work better than the traditional user flow’s symbols and shapes.

4. Business Owners (Carefully)

Business owners are like users: they can easily misunderstand the wireframe and are time-consuming to educate. But the difference here is that the business owner is just one person, the time cost won’t be as much as educating many users, and in the end, they’re the business owner—you have to keep them involved and in the loop throughout the design process.

Conclusion

Actual users are ordinary human beings. They are not as deep into the technology or the product as you. You must do your best to talk to them in their language, not yours, so it’s better to do your research and usability testing using realistic prototypes instead of wireframes.

Lastly, creating and using wireframes is beneficial if created for people like you within your production environment.

The post Wireframes Are Bad… Don’t Use Them appeared first on UX Mastery.

However, handoffs are full of potential pitfalls that even the most experienced teams are prone to. In today’s article, we’ll take a closer look at the most important things to take care of when handing your design off. 

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

What Is a Design Handoff?

The design handoff is a point in the product development process where developers implement the finished design. In order for a handoff to be successful, a good designer-developer collaboration is vital.

But more often than not, this phase doesn’t go as smoothly as it should. Part of the problem is the designer’s perception of the process—many of us tend to think that this is where we reach the finish line, rest on our laurels, and let the developers “do their thing.”This perspective is conducive to a siloed and inefficient collaboration between the two tribes. So, let’s take a look at the things we should do to ensure a more productive designer-developer interaction.

Use a Library

Establishing a sense of continuity in your designs is imperative for a successful handoff. Fragmented design hand-off files and components here in there are a recipe for major headaches and confusion. 

As opposed to sharing individual assets directly with the developers or attaching files to the user stories/tickets/Jira or similar products, have them in a shared library or folder and use the links inside tickets. This will make finding assets significantly easier for developers.

An asset library, which is a part of the design system, should be the single source of reference. In Figma, for example, you can copy a link to a specific asset within the library. This is the link you should share in tickets. Not to mention there’s a plethora of plugins or native integrations among Figma, Sketch, and Adobe Products with project management tools like Jira.

Involve Developers Early

A common issue among teams is the assumption that designers should just drop their designs off to developers and let them figure the rest of it out. A better way of approaching this would be to involve developers as early as possible to provide them with insight into the various behaviors and states you’re working on. Otherwise, you might design something that’s not feasible to code, which is synonymous with wasting time.

Here are a few recommendations to ensure a smoother and more seamless handoff:

• If possible, include developers in calls with clients and stakeholders if they’ll be able to gather some essential insight about the product; 
• Communicate with developers to learn how design elements would end up being transferred to the end-product;
• Consult with developers during early prototyping to avoid any potential code-related issues later on; 

However, sometimes, if developers have a pre-established framework, it’s best to give them the freedom they need and take a look at the implemented version first, rather than insisting on your particular design decisions that may be complicated to implement.

It should also be noted that involving developers too much can also be an issue. In my experience, you can easily overwhelm developers at the ideation stage, since there are a lot of different concepts and changes, all of which might have their own technical caveats. 

That said, you should seek to strike a balance between keeping developers engaged and overwhelming them with concepts. 

Static vs. Dynamic Handoffs

There’s a case for both static and dynamic handoffs. The former implies that you’ll present your design ideas via basic illustrations. On the other hand, the latter comes with more specific requirements for interactions and overall user experience. 

Making the right decision in this regard is relatively simple—make sure to have an open and transparent interaction with the developer team.

Static handoffs are useful when the developers aren’t versed in Figma, Zeplin, or similar products. As a result, they might not intuit what information or specs they need to grab. What static handoffs provide is the ability to explicitly highlight essential information such as margins, paddings, font sizes, etc.

That said, static handoffs sometimes create more problems than they solve. The primary issue is the fact that this type of handoff requires a lot more time, since you have to do manually what Figma, for example, does for you automatically, which is marking distances among elements. Another challenge that is otherwise avoidable is the hassle with marking versions and changes, introducing layers of taxonomy, etc. As such, before committing to a static handoff, make sure the pros outweigh the cons.

When using dynamic handoffs, date the iterations and don’t change already shared designs, at least not without explicit communication with developers and a project manager or product owner. It’s very tempting to just update the same shared design and file, but that leads to confusion, especially when those links and files are in a user story. You, as a designer, can’t be certain that developers know what’s been changed and where. For all you know, they might be midway into the implementation.

SVG Is King

SVG is a vital format for defining vector-based graphics. It’s very handy when looking to increase development speed when working on projects that deal with a fair share of animation and design. Furthermore, SVG graphics use up less space, which is very useful in the long run. 

Here are a few essential benefits that should motivate you to choose SVG over any other format:

• When it comes to handoffs, size matters. Since SVG is pretty much XML code, files in this format are extremely lightweight. There was even a report suggesting that you can save up to 80% of bandwidth by switching from PNG to SVG. As a result, your products will load faster, which is conducive to a satisfying experience;
• SVG files can scale with no distortion. Respectively, these files can be used for anything from watches to giant outdoor banners without compromising quality during the resolution scaling;
• Given that these files have the styling information incorporated, this allows developers to create pixel-perfect prototypes without needing a stylesheet;
• Lastly, because an SVG is basically code, they’re fairly easy to edit or animate for developers, which eliminates the need for a designer to create multiple versions or states of the same element.

Avoid Doing the Work Twice

Creating a sense of continuity and consistency in your design library will benefit both you and the developer team substantially. Products like Storybooks, Figma, and Sketch are valuable tools that allow achieving this. What these products do is enable us to break the barriers between designers and developers by linking code to design elements.

Storybook, for instance, allows developers to access all the components in an organized manner. As a result, they’ll be able to use, share, and test all the elements in your design. Taking the time to merge your design with code via storybooks will save both you and the developers a lot of time.

The same goes for Figma, Sketch, and Adobe XD. All of these tools allow creating a design system, which, in practical terms, is either a separate page or a separate file with symbols (in Sketch) or components (in Figma). What components and symbols do is allow you to make global changes in all instances of a certain element. Say, you want to make all calls to actions green instead of blue—it’s as simple as a few clicks.

Conclusion

Great products rely on a great handoff. While this may often seem like a very technical process that enters waters that we don’t necessarily understand (front-end development), it’s essential that we take the time to learn how to do it. Furthermore, some of the facets of this process have nothing to do with code. They revolve around communication and productive collaboration.

The post How to Make Developers Love You as a Designer appeared first on UX Mastery.

UX design is a broad, multifaceted field that’s constantly evolving. The digital landscape is ever shifting, new technologies are emerging, and the principles of user experience design are constantly changing as a result. Today’s UX designers must stay up-to-date in order to act as mediators between humans and technology.

With so much opportunity to learn and grow, UX designers must ask themselves: What role do I want to play in this burgeoning industry?

No matter what stage you’re at in your career, it’s important to routinely consider the kind of designer you are now, and the kind of designer you want to become. Especially if you’ve been in the industry for a while, you might find yourself getting comfortable or losing sight of your aspirations.

This is where your UX career roadmap comes in: it’ll keep you focused on your goals, ensuring you’re constantly growing and developing as a designer.

In this guide, we’ll show you the value of creating a UX career roadmap. We’ll then lay out a step-by-step process you can follow to create your own roadmap from scratch. We’ll discuss:

1. What is a UX career roadmap?
2. Why create a UX career roadmap?
3. How to create a UX career roadmap: A step-by-step guide

Let’s jump in.

1. What is a UX career roadmap?

A career roadmap sets out a clear plan of action for achieving your career goals. It considers the following questions:

• Where am I now?
• Where do I want to go?
• How will I get there?

Mapping out your UX career is not just about progressing from junior to senior—nor is it about aiming for a certain salary or job title. While these are important factors, an effective career roadmap should also dig a little deeper. It explores your strengths and weaknesses, identifies areas for professional development, and helps you forge a career that aligns with your personal goals and values.

A UX career roadmap depicts your aspirations, laying out the blueprint for your path as a UX designer. Whether it’s a simple flow diagram or a true work of art, there are many benefits of drawing up a UX career roadmap. Let’s take a look at the most important ones.

2. Why create one?

A career roadmap might seem like a lot of unnecessary work—especially if you’re not a fan of planning ahead. But, if you’re serious about your career as a UX designer, it’s worth the effort. Why? Because an effective UX career roadmap will:

• Help you achieve career satisfaction: In order to forge a fulfilling career, it’s important that your day-to-day work mirrors your personal values. You need to feel like you’re learning, growing, and contributing. A career roadmap keeps you on the right track; not only by making you aware of your goals, but also by ensuring you’re taking the necessary steps to achieve them.
  
  
• Hold you accountable: It’s easy to leave your career in the hands of fate, or to blame external factors if things don’t go as planned. A well-thought-out roadmap puts you in control of your career path, giving you the foresight to see what needs to be done in order to reach your desired destination.
  
  
• Make you a better UX designer: A career roadmap is not set in stone; it’s a malleable plan that can be adapted along the way. Thus, it encourages continuous evaluation of your professional self: what kind of designer are you? How might you improve? This self-assessment alone will push you to get better at your craft.

3. How to create a UX career roadmap: A step-by-step guide

When it comes to devising a UX career roadmap, the process can be divided into three distinct phases: evaluating the present; setting goals for the future; and coming up with action points that will help you achieve these goals.

Based on these three phases, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to creating a UX career roadmap.

Step 1: Reflect on the here-and-now

This first step is a bit like the research phase of a UX design project—only this time, you are the target user! In this phase, you’ll take the time to self-reflect and evaluate your current position in the UX industry: Who are you right now? Where are you currently at in your career?

The purpose of this step is to build self-awareness, focusing on your skills, interests, and values.

To get started, write down your answers to the following questions:

1. What is my current job title?
2. What does my current role entail? List five-ten key tasks and responsibilities.
3. What hard and soft skills do I possess? List your main skills and give yourself a rating for each (basic, intermediate, or expert). It might be useful to enlist the help of a trusted colleague!
4. What are my three main strengths?
5. What are my three main weaknesses?
6. What do I enjoy doing at work?
7. I wish I could spend less time doing…
8. I wish I could spend more time doing…
9. What do I value about my current role? Here you should think not only about the role itself, but also about your working environment, your team, the way the company is set up, etc.
10. What are my main values when it comes to work? List three.

Don’t rush the self-assessment phase. Some answers might not be immediately obvious, so allow yourself plenty of time to reflect. Ask your colleagues for their thoughts, too—they may recognize strengths and weaknesses that you’re not aware of.

Step 2: Construct your ideal world

Once you’ve carried out a thorough evaluation of the present, it’s time to consider the future. For the purpose of this step, you’ll think purely in terms of ideals. In an ideal world, what kind of designer are you? What does your perfect working day look like?

When answering the following questions, try not to get too hung up on what you deem to be realistic; this phase is all about your dreams and aspirations!

1. In an ideal world, I would work for: myself / a large corporation / an agency / a small startup…
2. In an ideal world, I would work: full-time / part-time / on a project basis…
3. In an ideal world, I would design products for the following industry…
4. In an ideal world, I would be an expert in…
5. My ideal day would consist of the following tasks…
6. In an ideal world, my salary would fall between the following range…
7. If I could write my own job title, it would be…

Aim to tackle this phase in a more quick-fire fashion. It’s OK to be unrealistic at this point; you just want to uncover and acknowledge your intrinsic career desires! This will help form the basis of a more realistic strategy later on.

Step 3: Conduct industry research

With a thorough self-assessment completed and an abstract wishlist in mind, it’s now time to conduct some industry research. The purpose of this step is to learn as much as you can about the field: What opportunities are available to you as a UX designer?

Some useful areas of investigation include:

• UX job titles and career paths: What job titles fall under the UX umbrella? Within the field of user experience design, there are countless routes you can take—from specialist roles such as UX researcher or UX writer, to broader job titles such as product manager or full-stack designer. You’ll find lots of useful information in Career Foundry’s guide to UX designer job descriptions, as well as on job boards such as Indeed, Glassdoor, UX Jobs Board, and, of course, LinkedIn. This leg of your research should culminate in a list of potential job titles of interest.

• Salaries: When constructing your ideal world in step two, you came up with an ideal salary range. Now it’s time to gauge what’s realistic. Based on the job titles you came up with above, conduct some research into the average salaries for each. If the data is available, break your salary research down by years of experience and location. Sites like Glassdoor, PayScale, and Indeed provide up-to-date salary reports for the UX industry.

• Specialist skills: What skills do UX designers possess? What additional skills are associated with the specialist job titles you’ve come across? This part of your research will enable you to identify any gaps in your own skillset and to focus your professional development in the future. Again, job boards and networking sites are extremely useful here. It can also be helpful to chat to your peers in the industry—be it a mentor, a colleague, or a connection you’ve made on LinkedIn.

As always, the internet is an excellent resource for conducting quick and in-depth research. However, don’t underestimate the value of in-person inquiry! You can learn a lot about the industry by attending networking events and striking up casual conversations with those around you.

Step 4: Set concrete goals and timelines

Now for the tricky part: Setting goals and deadlines. What milestones do you want to aim for, and when?

Start with the “when”. It can be difficult to think too far ahead in detail, so you may want to break your roadmap up into manageable segments. For example: You can have a five-year goal in mind, but you might work towards it in one-year increments. You would then set milestones for each year, rather than for the overall five-year period.

Once you’ve decided on a timeline, you can set your objectives accordingly. Based on what you’ve learned so far—about yourself, and about the industry—try to come up with three milestones for each roadmap segment. These milestones may relate to each other and feed into one main end goal (as in example one, below), or they may focus on completely separate areas (as in example two):

Example 1:

Our first example is a roadmap provided by Nadia Fedorova, UX Researcher and Designer at CareerFoundry. Nadia started her career as a data scientist before moving into UX as a research specialist. Her career roadmap is focused on her long-term goal of becoming a design all-rounder.

Five-year goal: To become a UX generalist and strategist. To lead projects at all stages in the design process, right through to implementation, as well as influencing an overall UX strategy for all the design initiatives.

Two-year interim goal (broken down into the following milestones): To land a role that combines UX research and UX design, with elements of UX strategy.

• Six-month – one year milestone: Develop a broader range of skills outside of UX research—such as mapping the overall design project strategy and identifying the most suitable UX methods for a given project. Familiarize myself with the tools that UX designers use (such as Sketch).

• One year – 18-month milestone: Gain practical experience in the broader UX field within my current organization. Find opportunities to help develop the strategy for UX projects, and to practice more general design skills beyond the scope of research.

As Nadia explains: “I moved from data science into UX as a research specialist. After some time in the UX industry, I realized I wanted to focus not only on UX research, but on the entire UX process—including design and strategy. I knew I would have to make a conscious effort to steer my career in a certain direction, so I came up with a five-year plan to make it happen.

My first step in the UX industry was a six-month internship which involved both UX research and design. Then I joined CareerFoundry as a UX researcher and designer, which fulfilled my two-year “interim goal” of landing a full-time role that combines both UX research and design and allows me to be involved in defining UX strategy. My next big goal is to become a UX generalist and strategist, looking at projects from a broader perspective. So, I’ll continue to get hands-on with UX strategy and learn as much as I can about converging business and UX!”

Example 2:

Our second example is a hypothetical UX career roadmap:

Five-year goal: To start my own business as a freelance UX consultant.

One-year interim goals: In one year’s time, I want to

1. Be a better communicator and improve my presentation skills.
2. Become an in-house advocate for good UX: organize and deliver a UX workshop for the whole company.
3. Have increased my salary by 10%.

These are just two examples of how you might set goals and timelines. As you can see, the first example is quite specific, focusing on one particular area of UX. The second example sets more general objectives within a shorter one-year segment.

How you set your goals is up to you. Even if you’ve identified a five-year goal, don’t feel compelled to fill in each one- or two-year segment straight away. Remember: it’s a malleable plan that can be tweaked, updated, or even completely overhauled as you progress throughout your career.

Step 5: Identify clear action points

You’ve established where you want to go; now it’s time to consider how you’ll get there. In this phase, you’ll come up with action points that will take you from A to B. How do you plan on achieving your goals? What tools do you need?

For each milestone laid out in step four, you need to set out a corresponding plan of action. This might include things like:

• Upskilling (hard skills): Learning additional hard skills such as basic frontend development or visual design principles—be it through self-study or a specific course.
  
  
• Upskilling (soft skills): Improving certain soft skills such as communication, teamwork, or collaboration by giving presentations, attending meetups, organizing team socials, etc.
  
  
• Networking: Some goals may require you to build a solid network of industry contacts—for example, if your long-term plan is to work as a freelancer. Your plan of action might be to attend five industry events in one year, be it conferences, meetups, workshops, or design showcases.
  
  
• Shadowing an expert: If you want to specialize in a certain aspect of UX design, one step towards your goal might be to find a mentor or shadow an expert in this particular field.

When coming up with action points, try to be as specific as possible. The clearer your action points, the easier it will be to implement them!

4. What next? Using your roadmap

So there you have it: Five clear steps to devising your very own UX career roadmap. In terms of actually putting pen to paper and drawing up your roadmap, treat it like a wireframe: be prepared to iterate several times, and only fill in the details once you’re happy with the basic foundations.

It’s important to remember that your UX career roadmap isn’t just a fixed, one-off plan. You need to review it regularly and move the goalposts as you progress in your career. Your roadmap isn’t there to tie you down to one single destination: you’ll learn new things every day, and your values and goals will inevitably change! The purpose of your roadmap is to get you routinely thinking about where you want to be, and how you can grow and progress.

With a clear UX career roadmap, you’ll never lose sight of the bigger picture. So: pin your roadmap somewhere visible and get to work on those action points!

The post Advice For Intermediate UX Designers: How To Create A Career Roadmap (And Why You Should) appeared first on UX Mastery.

Leading an organisation from this role is also a major challenge. It’s hard work implementing a UX focus in a company where none exists. There will be battles against corporate biases, conflicting business needs, and results-driven culture.

In such a difficult position, how can a UXer go about creating a culture of great user experience?

It’s imperative to establish a baseline process, socialise the benefits of great UX, and prepare for the long road ahead.

Above all else, establish a process

When starting a culture of user experience focus, the first step is to establish a clear UX process. 

“UX process is a cornerstone of UX design, it’s a make-it-or-break-it aspect of UX design,” writes veteran UX professional Nick Babich in his blog for Adobe.

“Without a solid UX design process, a designer could be completely moving in the dark. A clear and concise UX process, on the other hand, makes it possible to craft amazing experiences for users.”

Every UX professional should have a favoured baseline process. In fact, you’d expect this to be the first question in any UX interview. Part of any quality answer to this question should be to acknowledge the importance of context. No two companies or products are the same. Processes should differ depending on organisational needs, technology stacks, and delivery speed.

No process is bound to be the perfect fit. An initial process’s existence is more important than its perfection. Install a process to address the largest problems and work to resolve the kinks later.

Whatever process you choose, tailor it to your organisation’s needs. This will help you with the second facet of gaining UX buy-in: socialising UX benefits among stakeholders.

Socialise the benefits of UX among stakeholders

In his Forbes piece Good UX is Good Business, Andrew Kucheriavy, founder and CEO Intechnic, lays out the argument for the business benefits of an improved focus on user experience.

“Good user experience is clearly good for business,” he writes. “ Studies show that companies that invest in UX see a lower cost of customer acquisition, lower support cost, increased customer retention and increased market share.”

While the benefits are clear, you must be able to explain why the UX process is beneficial to your stakeholders. 

UX success hinges on the cooperation and participation of the business as a whole. While you are the engine propelling the car, the whole machine must move forward together. It’s often difficult for internal stakeholders to see the progress and impact of UX focus. By clearly explaining the benefits, you’ll bring your company one step closer to fully embracing a culture of great user experience.

I’ve written previously on how big of a part UX professionals play in facilitating internal communication. We sit at the epicentre of our business. We speak with our business partners to understand project requirements. We work with our technical teams to understand what’s viable, and to support development efforts. We talk with customers to understand their wants, needs, and expectations. An established process allows UX pros to speak about the project pipeline and its direct impact to any stakeholder.

If we are successful as UX professionals, the benefits we add to our organisations should be clear. Our business partners should have a better understanding of our customers’ needs through UX testing. Our technical teams will receive projects that are both practical and well-defined through iteration and revision with our business partners. And, most importantly, our customers receive a product that exceeds their expectations.

Be aggressive in explaining your expected benefits. Take advantage of your team’s rituals and culture to discuss your roll and how your process will benefit specific projects and initiatives. This gives UX pros excellent opportunities to speak on how and why our process benefits the company as a whole, and gain allies in promoting usability throughout the company.

Cindy McCracken, a UX professional with more than 10 years of experience working for the likes of Fidelity Investments, agrees.

“The more you work with co-workers such as support, sales and development and show them the value of UX, the more support you will have within the organisation,” she writes in her article Proven Strategies to Win Over Stakeholders for Your UX Project. “These in-the-trenches supporters will see the value of your work and the successes with customers first hand, and that will go a long way toward impacting workplace culture and filtering up to senior level support of UX.”

There are a few ways UX professionals can quickly integrate themselves into the rhythms of the business.

Attend development standups. Listen for blockers and speak about how your UX process will ease these issues in the future. Pay attention for upcoming work, and ask for inclusion where practical. 

“In planning meetings, be alert for extensive development work planned to go work with interfaces that clearly need to be redesigned,” writes McCracken. “Rather than just let them proceed, bring potential design problems and ideas for improvements to the team.”

Set meetings with your business partners. Work to understand their underlying problems. Explain UX’s role in fixing those issues. Find the low hanging fruit to get some quick wins on the board. 

Take part in retrospectives. Retrospectives are a great platform to show the type of value you can provide for your new team. 

Listen for issues on previous releases. Present your UX process after discussing these issues. Prepare to speak on your process, and how that will affect any issues raised. After your first couple of releases, plan on asking for feedback to adjust your basic process.

Get in front of your customers. Some would argue that it’s not UX unless you’re getting in touch with your users. This is where great UX starts and ends. Working with your clients shows your engaged in their needs. It allows you to talk about projects that are in development. And it allows you to understand wants, needs, and pain points. We take all this back to our business partners to help create a better product.

According to McCracken, a great way to do this early in the game is to test early iterations of projects with your clients.

“[Use] an online first-click test to see if participants go where you expect when asked to perform tasks,” She writes. “You can even ask what people notice first on a page. Better yet, run one study with an image of your current design, and one with an image of the new design to see how user performance compares. If you have a clear winner, it should be easy to get buy-in to improve conversions, which would be a great return on investment.

Prepare for the long road ahead

The road to establishing UX as a team of one can be difficult and lonely at times. Larger teams, for starters, can divide and conquer work.

A team of one, however, does not have that luxury.

As solo teams, it’s important to take some steps to avoid over-extension. With no one to pick up the slack, whiffing on an objective or project can have major consequences. What’s more, the stress of working alone can be intimidating. 

So how can you make life as a solo UXer easier on yourself?

Work with your higher-ups to set reasonable goals and benchmarks. Talk about when you’d like to have processes installed and how you’d like to go about its implementation. Make sure that everyone is clear on mutual expectations and goals. Review your progress and blockers regularly. 

Engage with the larger UX community. One mind rarely surprises itself. In larger teams, UXers have comrades to give feedback. In solo teams, isolation can inhibit creative solutions and stunt professional development. Go to UX meetups. Follow industry leaders on Twitter. Start a blog. Ask and answer questions on Stack Overflow. Join an online UX group like the wonderful UXMastery Community. Whatever you do, get involved with the UX world as a whole in some way. Your conscious and career will thank you.

Conclusion

Working as the solitary UX professional in your organisation is not an easy job, but it can be tremendously rewarding.

In Leah Buley’s The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Survival Guide, she makes the best case I’ve yet seen for the allure of working as a UX team of one. The team of one’s work is as close as one can get to the fundamental values of the UX community as a whole.

“UX is a force for good,” she writes. “[As a team of one,] you help spread the growth of a new and exciting field, one person, team, and company at a time.”

What do you think are the greatest challenges for the solo UXer? Share your thoughts in the comments, or join the conversation in our friendly forums.

The post How to Survive as Your Company’s Solo UXer appeared first on UX Mastery.

I get asked this all the time by people new to user experience (UX) design. Understandably, they want to learn the tools of the industry so they can get hired.

To celebrate the recent launch of the UI for UX Designers course in collaboration between CareerFoundry and InVision, I’ve put together an answer to this all too common question. 

Hiring someone based on the tools they use would be like hiring an artist because they have the right brushes. It’s not about the tools, it’s about method and craft. UX design relies heavily on process and the tools that I use mirror that process.

A design process is a recipe for creating great products. Everyone has their own way of doing it, and everyone uses different tools to make it happen. I’m going to try to share my recipe and the tools that I use along with a few alternatives.

Even better, most of the tools listed here are available on a freemium model and have a usable version for free. The exception is Sketch (good news- there are tons of free alternatives). The only requirement for these tools is a computer or tablet, but with UX design in general, all you really need to create a good user experience is pen, paper, and an inquisitive mind.

There are lots of things that should happen behind the scenes of creating a great product, such as user personas and customer journey maps. I’m just going to assume that you’ve already created these for your business and talk about my workflow from the first stage of inspiration, all the way to implementation of a new product or feature.

Inspiration stage

I know it’s tempting to get on Behance, look for inspiration, and then move straight into wireframes, but as a UX designer, you want to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. You’ll try to define the problem and create a competitive analysis to make sure that you’re solving the right problem in the right landscape. I like to use various survey and polling tools to define this.

Surveys

At CareerFoundry we have a very active student community on Slack so I will often create a Simple Poll in Slack as they’re quick, easy, and garner lots of participation.

For more in-depth surveys, you can use a survey tool like Typeform to reach out to your customer via email. I usually create a survey with a final question that asks whether the customer would be interested in a 30-minute video chat.

Interviews

I take a look at their answers and follow up with a video conference using my favourite video chat tool, Appear.in. Make sure you have a script ready, but more importantly, let the customer lead the conversation in the user interview so that you give them the opportunity to identify problems.

I love the combo of Typeform and Appear.in because all the customer needs to participate is a simple URL so the experience can be as simple as one click with no tools or downloads required.

Problem Solving

Once I have an idea of what the problem is, I use Google Docs to create problem statements and share them with my team for further collaboration.

In addition to understanding the problem, we often use “How Might We” statements, a tool pioneered at IDEO, to frame our approach to the problem.

Project Management

For project management, we use DaPulse at CareerFoundry and it’s great for keeping track of complex projects. I would also recommend Trello for project management, even if it’s just for your own daily work management. It’s an amazing tool and the free version is all you will ever need to manage your UX projects.

Ideation Stage

Now that you’ve built empathy with your customer and wrapped your head around the problem at hand, it’s time to start experimenting. As I mentioned earlier, all you need for this phase is paper and pen, as the goal is to keep things as sketchy as possible until you have experimented enough to discover the solution.

Sketching ideas

When I began sketching ideas, I typically just use standard A4 paper cut in half to create a tablet sized canvas. I always start with mobile and sketch my ideas with a marker so that I won’t get too detailed. Ideally, this is a collaborative process, and I would encourage you to have all of the stakeholders attempt to sketch solutions in a brainstorming meeting along with you.

Whiteboards are excellent for collaborative sketching so I recommend you have several around your office for this purpose. Create several sketches to experiment with (I recommend at least 5 novel directions) checking that each idea is feasible with your stakeholders.

You can scan your sketches into your computer and create a “Preference Test” in Usability Hub if you need help deciding on an approach. You could also use your team’s internal channels like Slack for stakeholder feedback. The important thing at this stage is to allow your team the opportunity for feedback so that you can narrow down the solutions to only those that are achievable.

Wireframes

Once you have a few approaches in sketch form, it’s time to create wireframes. If you already have some design skills, try using Sketch or Illustrator. Vector-based tools like Sketch offer a lot of power, but it can be tempting to jump to high-fidelity designs.

If you find yourself tweaking fonts or adding colour to your designs (a common tendency for UXers with visual backgrounds like myself), switch to a tool that only does wireframing like Balsamiq. I use Sketch for wireframing because it’s faster, but I like to use wireframing kits so that I’m not wasting time creating visuals that serve only to distract.  Whether you use a digital tool or even just pen and paper, the important thing is that you stress functionality over aesthetics at this stage.

Prototypes

Experimentation is a pivotal part of any UX designers workflow, and any simulation of what might become the actual product is called a prototype. There is a saying at IDEO that goes, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” A good UX designer will spend a lot of time prototyping ideas so make sure that you find a tool that you love.

My favourite prototyping tool is InVision because it covers all the basic functionality in a really intuitive user interface. Of all the prototyping tools I’ve tried, InVision is the fastest way to get something clickable. It’s such a life-saver when you have a user testing session in an hour and your boss is asking you to make changes to the prototype.

They are always adding new features, including a Sketch plugin to prototype in the popular design program. There are a ton of prototyping tools, and most of them are browser-based so all you need is a computer and an internet connection. If you want more in-depth interactions and complex animations, I recommend you buy Flinto for Mac. For on-the-go prototyping, there is even a tool called Prott that allows you to create an entire prototype on your Android or iOS device. Check out uxtools.co for a really nice breakdown of these and other prototyping tools.

Don’t worry about the learning curve involved with these tools. You can also use paper prototypes to test your idea. It all depends on how real you want the prototype to feel. Once I’ve worked out all of the kinks with my team, it’s time to test these prototypes with real users.

User testing

Designing for the user is fundamental to being a UX designer, and you will want as much face time as possible with your users. At first, getting in touch with your user can seem like a daunting task, but don’t worry, there are a million ways to get access to people for testing.

You can find groups on Facebook that fit with your target market. You can create a print ad and put it up in an area where people are likely to fit your demographic. If you’re feeling brave, you can just walk into any coffee shop in the world and find people willing to try out an idea. Keep it simple and try to offer some sort of compensation for their time. Ideally, you should schedule at least a 30-minute usability test and you should be testing with at least 5 participants.  

I really like PowWow for scheduling interviews, and you can schedule up to five on the free trial. If you have more than five interviews to do, I would recommend the paid version or a more powerful tool like Acuity.

You will want to record these interviews if possible and take plenty of notes (I recommend getting a partner for this). Any note-taking program will do, but I recommend using something with a search functionality. I like to use Google Sheets so that I can keep my interview questions and all the responses in one browser tab that is easily searchable.

For recording interviews, I really like Vidyard GoVideo, a really neat Chrome extension that allows you to record the user, the screen, or both in a very simple interface. This works well for testing as it allows you to record the user’s face and the interactions that they have with your clickable prototype. Another alternative would be QuickTime’s screen recording setting (warning: this will create huge files) or even just your phone and a tripod.

CareerFoundry is based in Berlin, but most of our users are in the United States, so we often do remote user testing. The only difference here is that we have the user share their screen while they’re testing the prototype. Offering compensation from across the ocean can be tricky, so we use a tool called Rybbon that offers international gift cards.

Implementation stage

Once you are satisfied with the direction of your idea, it’s time to present your findings to your internal stakeholders. Presenting your work is extremely important for UX designers because many people still don’t understand the process that goes into creating a user-centric product. If they understand all of the steps you went through to get to your final solution, they will be more likely to adopt your approach.

Summarise the testing and pull out your top learnings. Don’t forget to illustrate these with quotes from the testing. I generally use Google Slides for presenting internally because it has excellent commenting and sharing abilities. Sharing your slides afterwards is just as important as presenting your solution! If I want to include more design elements sometimes I will use Keynote as you can drag elements from your wireframes directly from Sketch or Illustrator into Keynote.

Most UX designers won’t get into high-fidelity designs so I’ll keep this phase brief. The UI portion of this process would involve taking your low-fidelity wireframes and turning them into polished designs that are ready for development. I prefer to use Sketch for high-fidelity designs for its ease and simplicity, but some designers still prefer Illustrator or Photoshop or Adobe’s newest design product, Adobe XD.

The important thing to remember about high-fidelity designs is that you clearly present the concept to your development team. One of my favourite tools for this is Zeplin, a program that turns a Sketch or Photoshop file into something that a developer can work with. It pulls out things like hex codes, CSS and fonts allowing them to be previewed through their web app. This is very important because not every developer will have access to Sketch. Use your Zeplin project as the final source of truth between design and development. Having one source of truth will help your developers keep track of the design through the inevitable changes in the development cycle.

In summary

Breaking my process as a UX designer down into three stages, here are the tools I use most often and would recommend.

Inspiration

• Simple Poll in Slack
• Surveys with Typeform
• Interviews using Appear.in
• Google Docs for Problem and How Might We Statement and user stories
• DaPulse or Trello for project management

Ideation

• Pen, Paper, Post-Its
• Get internal buy-in with Usability Hub
• Wireframes in Sketch
• Clickable Prototypes with InVision
• Find participants with Slack, FB, Print Ads
• Scheduling Testing with PowWow
• Take notes in Google Sheets
• Record Interviews with Vidyard GoVideo

Implementation

• Telling the Story with Google Slides
• Sketch for Hi-Fidelity Designs
• Zeplin for Dev Handoff

Bonus tools (a few more of my favourites)

• Chrome
• Trello
• Balsamiq
• Flinto
• Prott
• Acuity
• Rybbon
• Keynote

I hope this has given you a glimpse into the process and tools that go into making a digital product. UX as a discipline is constantly changing and challenging the accepted norms. You should be constantly experimenting with your own tools and process until you find something that works for you. There’s much room for improvement with the current design tools available, so I’m sure our workflows will look very different in just a few short years. 

What’s your favourite UX design tool? Leave a comment and let us know! 

And if you’re interested in levelling up your UI design skills, take a look at CareerFoundry’s new course: UI for UX Designers.

The post The Workflow of a UX Designer: The Process and Tools You Need appeared first on UX Mastery.

UX research can be extremely helpful in crafting a product strategy and ensuring that the solutions built fit users’ needs, but it can be hard to know how to get started.  This article will show you how to set your research objectives and choose the method so that you can uncover the information you need.

When to do research

The first thing to know is that there is never a bad time to do research. While there are many models and complicated diagrams to describe how products get built, essentially, you’re always in one of three core phases: conceptualising something brand new, in the middle of designing and/or building something, or assessing something that’s already been built.

There’s plenty to learn in each of those phases. If you’re just starting out, you need to focus on understanding your potential users and their context and needs so that you can understand your best opportunities to serve them. In other words, you’re trying to figure out what problems to solve and for whom. This is often called generative or formative research.

Once you’re actively building something, you’ll shift your focus to analysing the solutions that you’re coming up with, and making sure that they address the needs of your users. You’ll want to assess both conceptual fit and specific interactions quality.  We usually call this evaluative research.

When you have a live product or service, you’ll want to continue to assess how well you’re serving people’s needs, but you’ll also want to use research to discover how people change and how you can continue to provide value. At this point, you’ll be doing a mix of the generative type of work that is generally in the conceptual phase and evaluative work.

There is no cut-and-dried guide of exactly what methods to employ when, but there should never be a time that you can’t find an open question to investigate.

Determine your specific research objectives

At any given time, your team might have dozens of open questions that you could explore. I recommend keeping a master list of outstanding open questions to keep track of possible research activities, but focusing on answering just one open question at a time. The core goal of a study will determine which method you ultimately use.

If you need help coming up with research goals, consider things like:

• the stage of the project you’re in
• what information you already know about your users, their context, and needs
• what your business goals are
• what solutions already exist or have been proposed
• or where you think there are existing issues.

The questions might be large and very open, like “who are our users?” or more targeted things like “who uses feature x most?” or “what colour should this button be?” Those are all valid things to explore, but require totally different research methods, so it’s good to be explicit.

Once you’ve identified open questions, you and the team can prioritise which things would be riskiest to get wrong, and therefore, what you should investigate first. This might be impacted by what project phase you’re in or what is currently going on in the team. For instance, if you’re in the conceptual phase of a new app and don’t have a clear understanding of your potential user’s daily workflows yet, you’d want to prioritize that before assessing any particular solutions.

From your general list of open questions, specify individual objectives to investigate. For instance, rather than saying that you want to assess the usability of an entire onboarding workflow, you might break down the open questions into individual items, like, “Can visitors find the pricing page?” and “Do potential customers understand the pricing tiers?”

You can usually combine multiple goals into a single round of research, but only if the methods align. For instance, you could explore many different hypotheses about a proposed solution in a single usability test session. Know that you’ll need to do several rounds of different types of research to get everything answered and that is totally OK.

Looking at data types

After determining your research goal, it’s time to start looking at the kind of information you need to answer your questions.

There are two main types of data: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative data

Quantitative data measures specific counts collected, like how many times a link was clicked or what percentage of people completed a step. Quantitative data is unambiguous in that you can’t argue what is measured. However, you need to understand the context to interpret the results.

For instance, you could measure how frequently an item is purchased. The number of sales is unchangeable and unambiguous, but whether 100 sales is good or bad depends on a lot of things. Quantitative research helps us understand what’s happening and questions like: how much, how many, how often. It tends to need a large sample size so that you can feel confident about your results.

Common UX research methods that can provide quantitative data are surveys, a/b or multivariate tests, click tests, eye tracking studies, and card sorts.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data is basically every other sort of information that you can collect but not necessarily measure. These pieces of information tend to provide descriptions and contexts, and are often used to describe why things are happening.

Qualitative data needs to be interpreted by the researcher and the team and doesn’t have a precise, indisputable outcome. For instance, you might hear people talk about valuing certain traits and note that as a key takeaway, but you can’t numerically measure or compare different participant’s values. You don’t need to include nearly as many sessions or participants in a qualitative study.

Common UX research methods that can provide qualitative data are usability tests, interviews, diary studies, focus groups, and participatory design sessions.

Some methods can produce multiple types of data. For instance, in a usability study, you might measure things like how long it took someone to complete a task, which is quantitative data, but also make observations about what frustrated them, which is qualitative data. In general, quantitative data will help you understand what is going on, and qualitative data will give you more context about why things are happening and how to move forward or serve better.

Behavioural vs attitudinal data

There is also a distinction between the types of research where you observe people directly to see what they do, and the type where you ask for people’s opinions.

Any direct-observation method is known as behavioural research. Ethnographic studies, usability tests, a/b tests, and eye tracking are all examples of methods that measure actions. Behavioral research is often thought of as the holy grail in UX research, because we know that people are exceptionally bad at predicting and accurately representing their own behaviour. Direct observation can give you the most authentic sense of what people really do and where they get stuck.

By contrast, attitudinal research like surveys, interviews, and focus groups asks for self-reported information from participants. These methods can be helpful to understand stated beliefs, expectations, and perceptions. For instance, you might interview users and find that they all wish they could integrate your tool with another tool they use, which isn’t necessarily an insight you’d glean from observing them to perform tasks in your tool.

It’s also common to both observe behaviour and ask for self-reported feedback within a single session, meaning that you can get both sorts of data, which is likely to be useful regardless of your open question.

Other considerations

Even after you’ve chosen a specific research method, there are a few more things you may need to consider when planning your research methods.

Where to conduct

It’s often ideal to be able to perform research in the context of how a person normally would use your product, so you can see how your product fits into their life and observe things that might affect their usage, like interruptions or specific conditions.

For instance, if you’re working on a traffic prediction application, it might be really important to have people test the app while on their commute at rush hour rather than sitting in a lab in the middle of the day. I recently did some work for employees of a cruise line, and there would have been no way to know how the app really behaved until we were out at sea with satellite internet and rolling waves!

You might have the opportunity to bring someone to a lab setting, meet them in a neutral location, or even intercept them in a public setting, like a coffee shop.

You may also decide to conduct sessions remotely, meaning that you and the participant are not in the same location. This can be especially useful if you need to reach a broad set of users and don’t have travel budget or have an especially quick turnaround time.

There is no absolute right or wrong answer about where the sessions should occur, but it’s important to think through how the location might affect the quality of your research and adjust as much as you can.

Moderation

Regardless of where the session takes place, many methods are traditionally moderated, meaning that a researcher is present during the session to lead the conversation, set tasks, and dig deeper into interesting conversation points. You can tend to get the richest, deepest data with moderated studies. But these can be time-consuming and require a good deal of practice to do effectively.

You can also collect data when you aren’t present, which is known as unmoderated research. There are traditional unmoderated methods like surveys, and variations of traditional methods, like usability tests, where you set tasks for users to perform on their own and ask them to record their screen and voice.

Unmoderated research takes a bit more careful planning because you need to be especially clear and conscious of asking neutral questions, but you can often conduct them faster, cheaper, and with a broader audience traditionally moderated methods. Whenever you do unmoderated research, I strongly suggest doing a pilot round and getting feedback from teammates to ensure that instructions are clear.

Research methods

Once you’ve thought through what stage of the product you’re in, what your key research goals are, what kind of data you need to collect to answer your questions, and other considerations, you can pinpoint a method that will serve your needs. I’ll go through a list of common research methods and their most common usages.

Usability tests: consist of asking a participant to conduct common tasks within a system or prototype and share their thoughts as they do so. A researcher often observes and asks follow up questions.

Common usages: Evaluating how well a solution works and identifying areas to improve.

UX interview: a conversation between a researcher and a participant, where the researcher usually looking to dig deep into a particular topic. The participant can be a potential end user, a business stakeholder or teammate.

Common usages: Learning basics of people’s needs, wants, areas of concern, pain points, motivations, and initial reactions.

Focus groups: similar to interviews, but occur with multiple participants and one researcher. Moderators need to be aware of potential group dynamics dominating the conversation, and these sessions tend to include more divergent and convergent activities to draw out each individual’s viewpoints.

Common usages: Similar to interviews in learning basics of people’s needs, wants, areas of concern, pain points, motivations, and initial reactions. May also be used to understand social dynamics of a group.

Surveys: lists of questions that can be used to gather any type of attitudinal behaviour.

Common usages: Attempting to define or verify scale of outlook among larger group

Diary study: a longitudinal method that asks participants to document their activities, interactions or attitudes over a set period of time. For instance, you might ask someone to answer three questions about the apps they use while they commute every day.

Common usages: Understanding the details of how people use something in the context of their real life.

Card sorts: a way to help you see how people group and categorise information. You can either provide existing categories and have users sort the elements into those groupings or participants can create their own.

Common usages: Help inform information architecture and navigation structures.

Tree tests: the opposite of card sorts, wherein you provide participants with a proposed structure and ask them to find individual elements within the structure.

Common usages: Help assess a proposed navigation and information architecture structure.

A/B testing: Providing different solutions to audiences and measuring their actions to see which better hits your goals.

Common usages: Assess which of two solutions performs better.

Christian Rohrer and Susan Farrell also have great cheat sheets of best times to employ different UX research methods.

Wrapping up

To get the most out of UX research, you need to consider your project stage, objectives, the type of data that will answer your questions, and where you want to conduct your research.

As with most things in UX, there is no one right answer for every situation, but after reading this article you’re well on your way to successfully conducting UX research.

Want to dive deeper into UX research methods? Try Amanda’s latest course, Recruiting and Screening UX Research Participants on Skillshare with 2 months’ free access.  

The post Choosing the Right UX Research Method appeared first on UX Mastery.

James Brown, that funky Godfather of soul music, held an important contrast: “Thank God for the journey”. 

Between the depressing scepticism of Nietzsche and the enduring passion of Brown, there lies some wisdom for how we can approach our vocations.

There isn’t a clear-cut, authoritative approach anywhere that can guarantee a successful career, whether that be in user experience design or any other field.

This is both daunting and exciting; daunting because achieving our dreams is a unique and slippery struggle, but exciting because identifying, planning and thriving in a career can be one of the most meaningful and satisfying things we ever do. 

We might begin surmounting the daunting pathway by simply taking pause to mindfully assess our position and set some goals; once we’ve set our goals we can start taking the steps to make them happen. 

For example, we might be strategic and deliberate about our next career move, whether it’s that promotion to product manager, moving into a coveted in-house role, or striking out on our own as a freelancer.

There are troves of career advice all over the internet, but sometimes we must wrestle and go a little deeper to find wise and honest help. And that’s where it pays to pick up a book to explore the heart of your strengths and weaknesses and for gaining a more complex understanding of something outside your own experience.

Here are seven of our favourite books we recommend you dive into for the next step in your UX career.

1. The UX Careers Handbook – Cory Lebson

Cory Lebson’s definitive book on UX careers is for newbie and experienced designers alike. Industry-leading UX professionals share how they got their start and how they evolved their careers over time. Across four sections, the book covers career pathways, learning, personal branding, networking skills, building resumes and portfolios, and actually landing a UX job.

Cory is a strong believer in education as the foundation for success for UX professionals, including continual learning. He also shares our opinion that UX has many pathways—that there is no one single career trajectory within UX.

The book has an accompanying website full of links to resources building on the foundations of the book. In particular, Cory provides further reading and study options for each UX profession, including recent articles and study options from content strategy to service design. It’s a great online reference to find out the specifics of each UX stream.

Read more reviews and details about The UX Careers Handbook »

2. How to Get a Job as a Designer, Guaranteed – Ram Castillo

This is great one for newbies. Ram Castillo’s blog-turned-book is pitched at students and new graduates looking to break into the industry. The title makes a pretty big promise, but Ram does cover all the essentials to prepare for your first design job: education, design, networking, interviews and building a portfolio.

The content is grounded in Ram’s own experience working his way up the ranks in his first agency job, and he aims to help others learn from the successes (and mistakes) he made along the way.

Read more reviews and details about How to Get a Job as a Designer Guaranteed »

3. Stand Out – Denise Anderson

For designers and UX practitioners, a portfolio is a key collection of evidence about your experience. Denise Anderson’s Stand Out is an excellent guide for creating a portfolio that demonstrates your strengths. While it’s primarily aimed at helping students, many seasoned pros will also benefit from revamping their portfolio following Denise’s guidance.

The book takes you on a step-by-step journey, beginning with defining your personal brand and brand story. Once you’ve understood this, you’re ready to start building your portfolio, choosing the most appropriate projects, and designing a portfolio that communicates who you are and what you do. You’ll also find helpful handouts on the book’s associated website to help you through each stage of putting your portfolio together, and eventually building your ideal career.  

Read more reviews and details about Stand Out »

4. Pivot – Jenny Blake

Having no single entry point, people often come to UX from a multitude of different careers. Jenny Blake’s Pivot is designed to help you harness your existing skills and strengths and translate them into a new job. While not UX specific, it’s a practical read for side hustlers or anyone looking to harness an existing skill set for a career in UX.

Jenny advocates a cautious approach in her four-stage process, drawing from her own experience moving from Google to launch her own book and brand. The book teaches you how to test ideas by running small experiments, and how to learn from failure. Plenty of agile development analogies in here!

Read more reviews and details about Pivot »

5. The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Survival Guide – Leah Buley

More survival guide than career planner, this book by Leah Buley teaches readers how to make the most of working as the only UXer in a cross-functional environment. It’s aimed at helping UX professionals understand the other members of their product team, and helping those other product team members understand (and potentially cross over into) a UX role.

If you find yourself in a UX team of one, you’re likely to be charting your own course and figuring out your own career path, without many close role models to follow. Leah works through the foundations of building your team of one, first explaining the fundamentals of UX and how to build support for your work. She then goes on to work through research and design methods, and how these can be adapted (you guessed it) for a team of one.

We suggest reading it cover-to-cover and then using the techniques section as a reference when you’re embarking on a new project.

Read more reviews and details about The User Experience Team of One »

6. Mike Montiero – Design is a Job

A must-read for anyone working with clients—which is essentially all of us, whether we work agency, freelance, or in-house with internal stakeholders. Written in Mike’s irreverent style, Design is a Job is packed with pithy advice based on Mike’s personal experience managing design businesses for the past 20 years.

Mike Monteiro guides designers through designing their business, from choosing the right work, following process, presenting design, and managing feedback— including all the nitty-gritty details of contracts and actually getting paid.

An easy, personable read packed with insightful gems, you can easily read this over a weekend afternoon. But you’ll spend years remembering the lessons it contains. Pick it up if you want to improve your design business savviness, or if you need a new approach to managing clients.

Read more reviews and details about Design is a Job »

7. Get Started in UX – Luke Chambers & Matthew Magain

Of course, no list of UX career planning titles would be complete without our very own ebook Get Started in UX.

We wrote this because there was nothing else like it available anywhere—the UX community was asking the same questions but no-one had put together the essential, practical advice for aspiring UXers in such a straightforward fashion. So we collated advice from our own experience into six steps for building your UX career, starting with options for education, and assessing your current skills.

From there, all the basics are covered; from choosing the right tools for the job to building a portfolio, getting a mentor, and finally, landing that dream UX gig. You’ll also find plenty of useful templates to help you out at each step. Overall, this is a concise and highly practical guide for those looking to break into the field.

Read more reviews and details about Get Started in UX »

For more books covering every UX topic under the sun, make sure you check out our top recommendations in the epic list of UX books.  

The post 7 Books to Level Up Your UX Career appeared first on UX Mastery.

Since then, I’ve had countless conversations with other UX professionals who are considering moving to freelancing as their next career step.

They usually say they’re looking for freedom, more money, the ability to work on more interesting problems or learn new things – or even just the chance to work in their pyjamas regularly. Since I started consulting, I’ve expanded my focus into more strategy and product work across a wide variety of industries, and have met all kinds of interesting, smart colleagues.

While I wouldn’t change a thing about my situation, I’m always cautious about encouraging others to jump into the freelance world, because it’s definitely not for everyone. Here are some things I’ve learned along the way to consider before you quit your day job.

Freelancing pros and cons

Yes, it’s true that I spend most days in yoga pants, travel frequently, and work on some pretty cool projects. But consulting isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. There are many things that are great about consulting, some things that aren’t so great, and some things that just depend on the day.

Schedule: One of the things I love most about consulting is being in total control of my schedule. There’s no expectation that I’m at my desk from 9 am to 5 pm. Sometimes I get in a zone and finish an entire report in one very long day and take the next morning off to let ideas percolate. Of course I have meetings and deadlines, but I can usually finagle things to work well for my clients and myself.

On the flip side, juggling your schedule can be difficult. I’m quite disciplined about getting things done, but I’ve never quite figured out a way to create a consistent schedule. Sometimes I’ve had priority work on different projects collide at the same time or I’ve said yes to a few too many things and ended up working crazy hours to get everything done. Such is a consultant’s life.

Money: I absolutely find that I make more money freelancing than when I worked in-house, even in leadership roles. I’m still experimenting with how I bill, but I tend to use value-based pricing for entire projects rather than charge hourly. I often ask clients to pay me 50% of the total upfront and the rest upon project completion, which can make managing money tricky, especially when you’re used to a consistent paycheck.

You also have to know that you’ll never be able to collect money as though you’re billing 40 hours a week, every week. You have to account for supplies, tool costs, benefits, and set aside time for administrative tasks like sending invoices, business development, and, of course, downtime. No one gives you sick time or vacation days when you freelance.

Inevitably, I’ve also run into time periods where I don’t have anything billable booked. An open schedule can be scary, so I use this time to do things like reach out to colleagues or potential clients, write articles, research new tools, try to learn something new, or catch up on administrative work. One of the benefits of this downtime is the space to learn, exploring the vast array of available online courses or just experimenting with a new method or tool.

Work environment: I mostly work from home, which means I wear what I like, can pet my dog throughout the day, don’t contend with traffic, and for better or worse, have all day access to my kitchen. All great, but it also means that sometimes the only person I see in the flesh each day is my husband.

I have to make an extra concerted effort to hang out with colleagues, so I’ve become more active in my local meetups and groups (shout out to Ladies that UX Durham – love yall!) I also found I need to be more social during the week, even if that means going to a fitness class instead of biking solo or talking on the phone while I shop.

What services will you provide?

I’ve been focused on research and strategy for most of my career. I won’t rehash the “Should I be a unicorn?” or “Do designers need to code?” debates, but I’ll admit that when I first starting freelancing, I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to find enough work without doing visual work. Turns out, I was totally wrong. Phew!

You absolutely don’t need to be a unicorn or try to tackle projects that aren’t your speciality. But it helps to have a broad set of experience and at least one area of deep expertise you can market and use to define your services. You can match what you’re good at and what you like to define the kind of projects you target, the projects you’re OK with taking, and what you will certainly turn down.

Clearly defining your services and interests are important because it tells other people what to turn to you for. if I know someone has great interaction design skills and tonnes of experience with financial products, I’ll suggest them anytime I see a project like that. If someone tells me they’ll do anything that comes their way, they probably won’t come to mind for any projects I know about.

How will you find clients?

This is a question that I get asked time after time, and the answer is incredibly simple in concept but hard in practice: treat your clients and colleagues as you would users and provide them with a good experience working with you.

More specifically, you have to do good work and other people have to be willing to talk about it. This can either mean that your clients are pleased with your work and will re-hire you or tell other potential clients, or that your peers in UX like your work and can refer you when they need help or can’t take something on. It really is true that a huge amount of success in consulting is based on networking and who you know, but that only works to your advantage if the people you know have had a good experience working with you. Right now, every single one of my clients is someone I’ve previously worked with or have gotten a good reference.

This is where, once again, it helps to have a clearly defined, slightly unique set of skills or interests. There are tonnes of researchers and tonnes of designers, but if you’re known as a researcher who loves qualitative work and medical products, people will think of you whenever they come across that kind of project. Just be sure that you don’t define yourself too narrowly.

You can also use job boards to identify potential projects or try recruiting agencies, but I haven’t found either as fruitful as having my name passed on from a previous contact. More on finding freelance UX work here.

Are you really suited for all that?

Even if all the potential pros sound amazing to you and you have the skills and network to pull off freelancing, take a moment to reflect on your personality and soft skills.

Are you detailed, organised, and willing to juggle many different client requests and manage your own schedule? Are you a natural risk-taker who can cope well with slow periods or lack of viable work? Are you assertive enough to negotiate terms for yourself? Do you mind working by yourself a lot?

There’s a lot to think about before leaving the security of a full-time job. I love freelancing, but it’s worth carefully considering the pros and cons and your skillset and personality before taking the leap. Best wishes for whichever path you choose! 

Do you have experience or tips on freelancing for UX professionals? Leave a comment on the blog or in the forums! 

The post Is Freelancing Your Next UX Career Move? appeared first on UX Mastery.

What’s important to this discussion, is that I wasn’t a junior anything—I was just a no-prefix practitioner. There were other roles in the company I was working for that were specifically earmarked as senior, however.

So why was that? I’ve always figured that for a consulting agency, referring to a senior-level practitioner and a no-prefix practitioner probably sounded better to a client as we bid on projects – and there’s probably still some truth in that.

I’d like to take this discussion one step further, however, by saying that both practitioners and employers should be aware that these “junior” and “senior” categorisations are fuzzy at best. They don’t always tell the full story of your experience when it comes to expertise and years of experience. Knowing which roles are right for you will help you navigate the job market and pave your own career pathway.

It’s simpler to classify job experience into buckets – but it’s not always so simple

People like categorising others into buckets. This is certainly true for job background and experience, where there is some value to this categorization in the employment sphere. Does a job candidate have enough experience or not? Does this person have a UX brand or not? Is this person a UX leader or a leader in any way?

When all these experience-based considerations get rolled up into the title of a job description, they are often simply classified as “junior” or “mid-level” or “senior” or perhaps “director” or “principal” or (occasionally) “intern”.

UX roles are fuzzy to begin with. And while these titles may be a good place to start, it’s also important to remember that along a number of axes, these titles may always remain fuzzy.

Years of experience

Back before my freelancing days when I was responsible for hiring, I recall candidates who had limited experience yet came across so polished that I couldn’t help but imagine them in a senior-level role. On the other hand, some candidates had years of experience but couldn’t fully explain their background or their understanding of UX. Then when I looked them up online, I found little more than self-created and not particularly impressive social media profiles.

I’ve seen job descriptions that demand 10+ years for a senior-level practitioner, and I’ve seen job descriptions that ascribe only a minimum of 3 years of relevant experience to such a role (with “relevant” being a way to add even more fuzz).

Years of experience could be considered a rough—if not the roughest—way to classify a job description. I’d encourage employers to approach this classification with caution, or at least with an allowance for *very* wide ranges of experience.

Practitioner experience

While years of experience may be a bit fuzzy, it’s certainly fair for job descriptions to ask for certain kinds of experiences. A senior-level hire should already have decent experience—if not expertise—in whatever UX areas are most core to the job. On the other hand, a junior-level hire should have enough basic knowledge to get started, but experience can be limited and expertise is not necessary.

Always remember that as long as you have a good UX base knowledge and demonstrate fit in some functional areas of UX, other areas can be learned. So good employers should prioritise a desire to learn over exact match skillsets.

As a word of caution to employers looking for a UX unicorn —those with the ability to do everything, be it design, research, coding, information architecture, strategy, etc.— These hires are fine for a junior role which lets them sample a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But positions classified as “senior-level” will likely require solid experience and an area of expertise.

Wanting this solid experience and expertise everywhere is not fair to the designated hiring manager (good luck to them!) and not fair to you if you’re a senior-level hire who needs to be everywhere with less opportunity to build expert skills – a topic which I delve deeper into in The UX Careers Handbook.

Leadership

While senior-level positions may be equated with leadership, just what does leadership mean anyway? It could mean that you’re a manager of people—responsible for hiring, employee reviews and overall management of other individuals. Or it could mean that you’re a leader of UX projects and managing UX workflow of others within a particular project. Or perhaps you’re a senior-level practitioner on a project with one or two others—and if it’s a consulting project, perhaps you’re the person who interacts most with the client.

But leadership isn’t only at work, and UX leadership value can be found in thought-leadership (writing, speaking, and posting on social media about UX) as well as UX voluntary leadership, such as running a meetup. While these examples may not represent exact matches of leadership experience with most job descriptions, they can feed into a big bucket definition of leadership seniority.

Finally, with respect to leadership, leadership has to start somewhere, so being a senior-level hire may also mean that you are at least ready for workplace leadership of some kind. As a junior-level hire, on the other hand, you certainly have no need or employer expectation of any kind of leadership, at least for the short term.

What should employers do?

It’s okay to use classifying terms like junior, or senior, or mid-level as a general description, but beware that these can be interpreted by potential candidates along a wide range of expectations.

So keep your funnel wide! Remember that UX-ers are often hard to find, so don’t eliminate good candidates by implying hard and fast rules. And when you do talk with or meet these candidates, even if you’ve set specific criteria, be ready to bend the rules when you see alternative backgrounds that you may not have anticipated.

Look beyond the UX work experience – A passion for UX that extends beyond the workplace is a good indicator of someone who will be passionate about the UX work that they do for you. A desire to continually learn and grow even beyond the job is a good sign that as a new hire they’ll have a passion for learning things that you need them to learn.

What should you do when you’re looking for a job?

Look beyond the classification – If you’re truly just starting out, a junior-level job is probably a good place to start. But if you’ve been in the field a few years, focus on the job description more than the junior/senior/something else marker in the job title.

Be ready to challenge – If you truly believe that your background and experience are a good fit for a position but you don’t quite qualify in some area, such as years of experience, remember that it’s okay to make the case for why you really are someone they want. Just remember that you’ll need to provide solid evidence for your case.

Build up your UX brand now – When an employer looks you up, if you truly end up being liminal to UX seniority, remember that your UX brand—what an employer will find when you are Googled—could be the thing that offers you credibility and the opportunity to take on a position that you really want.

Let’s leave these levels vague

There are no hard and fast definitions for junior, senior, director, principal or anything else. And let’s leave it that way. Loose ideas of what should make a good fit are fine for some general guidance, but both employers and potential hires should do what they can to keep their options open and see what UX adventures may await them!

What strategies have you used to navigate the UX job market? Leave a comment or let us know in the forums.

Just starting out in your UX career? Make sure you consult our ebook: Get Started in UX

The post What Does it Mean to be a Junior or a Senior UX Professional? appeared first on UX Mastery.