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.

That’s why we decided to start the UX Mastery online book club! With so many fantastic books on UX and related topics, we hope we can give you that extra motivation to get reading.

Our very first book, decided by popular vote is The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman.

It’s available on Amazon2 for $12.85 (Kindle) or $13.61 (Print)

Here’s a blurb about the book:

How book club will work

All book club related activity will take place over in the UX Mastery forums in the Book Club category.

Every week we’ll read a chapter, then discuss in forums.

We will kick off each week with one or two broad questions to consider before reading, a couple of key observations to go through on your own directly after reading, and then open it right up for opinions and other questions in weekly discussion thread.

How to get involved

Book club officially kicked off on 5 June, but it’s never too late to join. Find all the details over in the forums.

Happy reading!

The post Join the UX Mastery Book Club! appeared first on UX Mastery.

How do you learn from mountains of data, and then make sure your insights create a tangible impact in shaping your product’s design?

We couldn’t think of anyone more qualified to ask than the prolific Steve Portigal, user researcher extraordinaire. From analysis and synthesis through to framing your findings, Steve walks us through a few post-research considerations to keep top of mind for your next research project.

What tips do you have for converting insights from research into action?

It’s a lot of work. According to Cooper’s Jenea Hayes, it’s roughly two hours of analysis and synthesis for every hour of research. I get grumpy when people talk about coming back from a research setting with insights. Insights are the product of analysis and synthesis of multiple sessions. It may just me being semantic-pedantic, but there’s something off-putting about the perfunctory way people describe: “Oh I come back from the session and I write up my insights and there you go.”

I see two different stages in making sense of research. Step one is to collate all the debrief notes, the hallway conversations, the shower thoughts you’ve had following the experience of doing the research. It’s a necessary first step and it’s heavily skewed by what sticks in your mind. It produces some initial thoughts that you can share to take the temperature of the group.

The next step is to go back to the data (videos, transcripts, artefacts, whatever you have) and look at it fresh. You’ll always see something different happened than what you think, and that’s where the deeper learning comes from. It’s a big investment of time, and maybe not every research question merits it. But if you don’t go back to the data (and a lot of teams won’t do it, citing time pressure), you are leaving a lot of good stuff on the cutting room floor.

I’m also a big fan of keeping the activity of sense making (what is going on with people?) separate from the activity of actions (what should we about it?). You want to avoid jumping to a solution for as long as possible in the process, so that your solutions reflect as deep an understanding of the problem as possible. Set up a “parking lot” where you can dump solutions as they’ll come up anyway. Depending on your research question, work your way to a key set of conclusions about people’s behaviour. Based on those conclusions, explore a range of possible solutions.

In your analysis, how do you decide what’s important?

Take time at the beginning of the research to frame the problem. Where did this research initiate? What hypotheses – often implicit ones – do stakeholders have? What business decisions will be made as a result of this research?

What research reveals doesn’t always fit into the structure that is handed to you ahead of time, so knowing what those expectations are can help you with both analysis and communication. Some things are important to understand because they’re part of the brief. But other things are going to emerge as important because as you spend time with your conclusions you realise “Oh this is the thing!”

I had a colleague who would ask, as we were getting near to the end of the process, but still wallowing in a big mess “Okay, if we had to present this right now, what would you say?” This is a great technique for helping you stop looking intently at the trees and step back to see the forest.

How do you make sure research data takes priority over stakeholders’ opinions?

So many aspects of the research process are better thought of as, well, a process. Talking to stakeholders about their questions – and their assumptions about the answers – is a great way to start. In that kickoff stage, explain the process. Share stories and anecdotes from the field. Invite them to participate in analysis and synthesis. Their time is limited, but there are many lightweight ways to give them a taste of the research process as it proceeds.

You don’t want the results to be a grand reveal, but rather an evolution, so that they can evolve their thinking along with it. If you’re challenging closely held beliefs (or “opinions”), make a case: “I know we expected to learn X, but in fact, we found something different.” Separate what you learned about people from what should be done about it so that you can respond to pushback appropriately.

What are some common mistakes you see that stops research staying front and centre during the design process?

To summarise a few of the points I’ve made above, some of the common mistakes I see are:

• Not including stakeholders in early problem-framing conversations
• Not including a broader team in fieldwork and analysis
• Delivering research framed as “how to change the product” rather than “what we learned about people” and “how to act on what we learned to impact the product”
• Researchers not having visibility into subsequent decisions
• Failing to deliver a range of types of research conclusions

How do you make sure your recommendations make it through to the next design iteration?

It’s challenging to ensure that research travels through any design or development process intact. Ideally, you’re involved as the work goes forward, sitting in meetings and design reviews to keep connecting it back to the output of the research, but think about the different aspects of the research that might take hold to help inform future decisions.

Is it stories about real people and their wants and needs? Is it a model or framework that helps structure a number of different types of users or behaviours? Is it a set of design principles? Or is it the specific recommendations? Often it’s a combination of several of these.  

About Steve Portigal

Steve is the Principal at Portigal Consulting LLC – a consultancy that helps companies discover and act on new insights about their customers and themselves. He is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and recently Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. In addition to being an in-demand presenter and workshop leader, he writes on the topics of culture, design, innovation and interviewing users, and hosts the Dollars to Donuts podcast. He’s an enthusiastic traveller and an avid photographer with a Museum of Foreign Groceries in his home.

The post Making an Impact with UX Research Insights appeared first on UX Mastery.

As highlighted in this example, the reasons a person could be using your product with only one arm could vary from permanent injury, a temporary condition, to a new parent who only has one arm free while nursing a newborn.

Everyone is different, and we all have a role to play in creating inclusive (digital) experiences.

These talks and videos provide the foundations for what makes accessible and inclusive design, and will help you see the world through another’s eyes.

UX Mastery: Everyone is Different!

Duration: 3:56

Produced by us in partnership with the team from Accessibility Bytes (http://a11ybytes.org) for Global Accessibility Awareness Day, this video is an introduction to accessibility for creators of digital experiences.

More: http://globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/

Jinsop Lee: Design for All 5 Senses

Duration: 9:03

Good design looks great, yes — but why shouldn’t it also feel great, smell great and sound great? Designer Jinsop Lee shares his theory of 5-sense design, with a handy graph and examples. His hope: to inspire you to notice great multisensory experiences.

Michael Nesmith: Why We Need Universal Design

Duration: 10:29

Michael is a deaf and native American Sign Language speaker working as a creative designer for Amazon. Throughout his career, Michael’s visual/conceptual way of thinking and problem solving have served him both as an asset and a challenge. He finds solutions around his disability through Universal Design.

Microsoft: Inclusive Design Sprint: Team Xbox

Duration: 4:55

In an intensive one-week design sprint, team Xbox came together to re-imagine the possibilities in social gaming through the lens of inclusive design.

More: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/design/inclusive

Derek Featherstone: Accessibility is a Design Tool

Duration: 29:32
Designing for extreme use cases—outliers—results in a design process that leads to greater success in developing products that are more easily used by everyone. By systematically factoring these extremes into our designs we spark creativity and behaviours that encourage divergent thinking and help to ensure that what we create can be used by everyone, including people with disabilities.

More: https://simplyaccessible.com/articles/

Elle Waters: Lean Accessibility – Building inclusive design into your agile workflow

Duration: 53:42

Accessibility has a brand problem. But just as agile-minded thinking can transform your company’s culture, accessibility integration can actually serve as a catalyst for innovation and continuous improvement within your agile process. Learn how agile and accessibility make excellent partners in building a lean, cost-effective practice of user-centered, value-based design and development.

Sara Wachter Boettcher: Design for Real life at Delight Conference

Duration: 42:18

We can’t always predict who will use our products, or what emotional state they’ll be in when they do. But we have the power—and the responsibility—to build compassion into every aspect of our products, and to advocate for experiences that support more of our users, more of the time. Sara will share principles and practical approaches from Design for Real Life, her new book with coauthor Eric Meyer.

More: http://delight.us/sara-wachter-boettcher-design-for-real-life/

Neil Harbisson: I listen to colour

Duration: 9:35

Artist Neil Harbisson was born completely color blind, but these days a device attached to his head turns color into audible frequencies. Instead of seeing a world in grayscale, Harbisson can hear a symphony of color — and yes, even listen to faces and paintings.

Elise Roy: When we design for disability, we all benefit

Duration: 13:17

“I believe that losing my hearing was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received,” says Elise Roy. As a disability rights lawyer and design thinker, she knows that being Deaf gives her a unique way of experiencing and reframing the world — a perspective that could solve some of our largest problems. As she says: “When we design for disability first, you often stumble upon solutions that are better than those when we design for the norm.”

Kevin Shaw: Design the Inclusive Experience

Duration: 19:00

Kevin Shaw’s talk is structured around the reality that a person isn’t disabled, rather the environment is. Kevin talks about his visual impairment and the work he has been doing with Zagga entertainment while emphasizing on the purpose of inclusive technology. Kevin tells the story of how he developed this service and discuss how tomorrow’s leaders can create inclusive experiences in media and other disciplines.

Ron McCallum: How technology allowed me to read

Duration: 15:44

Months after he was born, in 1948, Ron McCallum became blind. In this charming, moving talk, he shows how he reads — and celebrates the progression of clever tools and adaptive computer technologies that make it possible. With their help, and the help of volunteers, he’s become a lawyer, an academic, and, most of all, a voracious reader. Welcome to the blind reading revolution.

David Eagleman: Can we create new senses for humans?

Duration: 20:34

As humans, we can perceive less than a ten-trillionth of all light waves. “Our experience of reality,” says neuroscientist David Eagleman, “is constrained by our biology.” He wants to change that. His research into our brain processes has led him to create new interfaces — such as a sensory vest — to take in previously unseen information about the world around us.

Chieko Asakawa: How new technology helps blind people explore the world

Duration: 9:29

How can technology help improve our quality of life? How can we navigate the world without using the sense of vision? Inventor and IBM Fellow Chieko Asakawa, who’s been blind since the age of fourteen, is working on answering these questions. In a charming demo, she shows off some new technology that’s helping blind people explore the world ever more independently … because, she suggests, when we design for greater accessibility, everyone benefits.

The post 13 Inspiring Talks on Inclusive Design appeared first on UX Mastery.

We’re more excited than Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on Christmas Eve now that UXmas 2016 has officially begun. Along with Thirst Studios, we’ll bring you a daily UX treat in the lead-up to Christmas. 

Beginning December 1, a new window will open each day on the uxmas.com website to reveal a surprise gift. Since 2012, we’ve brought together some of the biggest names in UX with fun and insightful content, just for you—and this year is no different! It’s our way of giving back to you, the UX community. Plus, who could resist that pun? 

What can you expect? Anything! It could be an article, a video, a sketch, or something else—just like a real advent calendar, you never know what you’re going to get.

Hundreds of thousands of people have enjoyed the articles and emails over the past few years. From the streets of New York to the jungles of the Congo, from tiny 1-inch screens to huge video billboards, unwrapping a daily UXmas gift is an experience appreciated around the globe.

Join us this year on Twitter @merryuxmas, and sign up to the mailing list at uxmas.com for a daily #uxmas gift.

And most importantly, have a merry UXmas!

The post Wishing you a very merry UXmas! appeared first on UX Mastery.

Ahead of the Mobile UX London conference this month, we chatted to Sandra Gonzalez, conference host and Principal UX Designer at Just Eat. Since joining the online food order and delivery service at the start of the year, Sandra has built the company’s Digital Brand Studio from scratch and delivered the latest product redesign. Sandra talks to us about best practice in UX design, where she see’s the industry heading, and how UX design is making the world a better place.

Can you tell us a bit about your role as Principal UX Designer at Just Eat?

Just Eat is one of the most exciting places I’ve ever worked. As Principal UX Designer I am responsible for the UX vision at Just Eat, as well as ensuring a cohesive experience across all digital consumer touch points. What excites me most about working for Just Eat is knowing that the designs created by our team touch millions of lives on a daily basis in 12 countries around the world. To be quite honest, it is a very humbling feeling.

How did you get into UX Design?

After getting a triple degree in Computer Engineering, Mathematics and Education, I knew I was at my best working on multidisciplinary challenges. That’s why UX design was such a natural career progression for me after working as a online-producer, front-end developer, high school teacher and product manager. In 2008, I found myself in a UX Program Manager role at Microsoft. I was creating prototypes to validate ideas and experiencing the thrill of observing usability research on some of the suggestions I’d made for improving their search engine experience. I knew then that I had found my passion.

You’re working in food tech – an extremely competitive, fast changing sector. How do you stay ahead when it comes to UX?

There are two factors that I believe help Just Eat stay ahead in our sector. First, the ability to develop strong partnerships with industry leaders such as Apple, Amazon and Google. To give you an example, we were launch partners for the Amazon Echo in the UK. These opportunities put us in a situation where we have to push ourselves beyond the traditional UX process because we are creating experiences for devices that aren’t even available to our customers yet.

For these challenges we use lean methodologies to make sure we are continuously learning and testing our design assumptions. On the other hand, we are also solving one of the most basic needs any human experience — hunger. This means we need to always honour our human basic needs, regardless of the technology used to get our user closer to food. That’s where a deep understanding of the cognitive science can give us the edge in the food tech sector.

If you need to update a feature, what’s the design process you and your team go through?

Before thinking of features, we focus on the problems we are trying to solve. Stacking features on top of each other, in many instances, is a recipe for disaster. At Just Eat we identify the need to improve an experience through qualitative as well as quantitative research. On some occasions looking at tweaking a feature may be enough to solve the problem. On others, we may need to reconsider the end-to-end experience. In general, our process is divided into four phases: design strategy, ideation, user research and UI design. During this process, we work closely with product managers, researchers and engineers in order to collaborate and agree on the best approach to solve each design challenge taking into account user needs, business requirements and technical constraints.

What role does prototyping play in getting mobile and web users hooked on the app?

Prototyping plays an extremely important role in our design process. From low-fidelity prototyping to start conversations with our users or stakeholders to gather feedback at an inception stage, to using smooth high-fidelity micro-interactions while finalising the UI and everything in between. When it comes to getting our users hooked, we constantly research new interactions and experiences with our customers by creating prototypes and inviting them to give us feedback on their experiences in research sessions. We sometimes even pay them a home visit, just to make sure we can observe them in their natural environment where they’re more comfortable and relaxed.

What is exciting you about the industry at the moment?

One of the most exciting breakthroughs in the tech industry is the shift from continuous delivery to continuous learning. For a long time there was this expectation that, as a designer, you had the answer or solution to every design challenge. This created what Jeff Gothel in his book Lean UX calls Design Heroes. Now the industry is more focused on taking a more humble approach and allowing teams to learn in a continuous fashion.

As designers, we are now in a position where we can set up a hypothesis which can be validated through experiments in order to learn from our actual users, given that we could sympathise with them (as much as our personal experiences allow us to). However, that may not be enough in many occasions, so setting up experiments in order to learn more about our users is absolutely crucial. In a way, this has turned digital product design into more of a science than an art.

What key trends do you see emerging in UX? What changes will we see in UX in the next 5 or 10 years?

We are getting better at breaking down the barriers between machines and humans. The fact that I can have a silly conversation with some of the devices in my home is just mind-blowing. To give you an example, my five-year-old son asked Alexa (on Amazon’s Echo device) if she wanted to be his girlfriend and instead of getting an error message, Echo handled the situation very gracefully. We are at a point where we are blurring the lines between very rigid interactions and more human experiences with our devices.

The main change I think we’ll see in the discipline of UX is a deeper understanding of who we really are as humans. Up until now, creating an experience that was clear for the user to navigate in order to complete a task was considered good UX. In the next 5 to 10 years, creating an experience where the user may forget that they are interacting with a device at all is what will be expected.

Where do you look for inspiration?

I find inspiration listening to stories about how people solve incredible challenges. I try to not only listen to design talks but any talk about solving a challenge. I find TED one of the most inspiring places on the internet and that’s where I usually go for inspiration.

What other brands do you think are doing great UX work?

I’ve been quite impressed with Google’s wearables. Given my line of work, I am on the iOS platform for two weeks and I then switch to the Android platform for another two weeks and so on and so forth. This way, I get to experience the two main platforms that my team designs for and it enables me to have a user-focused opinion when designing for either.

Having used the Apple Watch alongside Android Wear, I’m impressed with how Android handles the user experience contextually. To give you an example, my Android wearable knows how to stack my apps in order of importance, reflecting what matters to me at any given moment, without me ever having to program or manually prioritise it. If I’m listening to Spotify, regardless of what I was doing prior to that or if I have an incoming email, my music controls are always at the top of the stack. However, if my Uber is arriving then information on the car and driver takes over the experience as I look into my watch, without the need to even touch the watch. I know this is going to sound funny but the first time I used an Apple Watch I literally ran into a pole because I needed to look up the Uber’s information late at night, and the Apple Watch doesn’t easily surface this information; as I was trying to dig it out of the watch and continue walking, I went head-first into a lamppost. It got even more awkward when I got into the Uber and the driver couldn’t stop laughing. We ended up talking about UX all the way home.

This year you are hosting the Mobile UX Conference – what can attendees expect from the event?

The Mobile UX Conference will be a great event when we all come together as a UX community to learn from world-class UX leaders. Attendees can expect an inspirational day, full of new methods and techniques as well as amazing stories behind how these came about.

What talks are you most looking forward to hearing?

I’m especially excited to hear Hara Mihailidou talk about her work at Just Giving because something I am extremely passionate about is UX in non-profit organisations, which is why I founded UX for Change.

You’re also involved in UX for Change, a UX community founded to “share the goodness of UX to change the world”. Can you tell us more about it?

Yes! I founded UX for Change with the intention of connecting humanitarian projects and the public sector to UX designers who wanted to share their knowledge and skills on a pro-bono basis. We work on great initiatives such as teaching UX design in primary and secondary schools and helping design technology within a humanitarian context, for example, refugee technology with the focus on women’s health.

How can UX be used to change the world for the better?

The field of UX combined with a user-centric design approach focuses on understanding our needs, our fears, our desires and behaviours in order to design products that make our lives better. The discipline of UX enables us to create user-centric solutions to daily human challenges. By its very nature, UX has already changed the world for the better.

If UX designers ever wonder what they can do with this amazing opportunity to change the world, I recommend they look into teaching our craft. I have been very outspoken about how UX design should be taught in primary schools, given that children now have the tools to design their very own experience with games such Minecraft or Inventioneers. I believe teaching UX is a way to change the world for the better. This is one of the reasons I’ve been so actively involved in the Apps for Good programme is because it allows me to inspire children all over the world to create technology that makes a difference within their communities.

The post UX Design: So much more than great products appeared first on UX Mastery.

Finding the most useful method is the first challenge, but how do we choose the right UX research tools for the job?

Luckily, there’s an abundance of tools—whichever method you use. We’ve already got the 100+ Awesome Tools for UX Designers, but we still wanted to hear what people are currently using, and why. So, we asked you, the UX Mastery community, for your favourites, and this is what you came up with.

A quick caveat; this is by no means an exhaustive list, and is missing few key methods – contextual enquiry, user interviews, collaborative design, territory mapping, analytics review, competitor analysis. Have we missed your favourite tool? Let us know in the forums.

Without further ado, here’s a roundup of the UX Mastery community’s current favourite UX research tools.

For usability tests

Usabilityhub is a clear favourite for remote usability tests, impression tests and split testing designs. Jacqui Dow has one word of caution: “UsabilityHub is great for running quick tests and getting almost instant feedback, only downside is often the demographic is a bit skewed.”

Luke has a few more suggestions: “UserTesting.com is handy for recruiting remote participants and getting video recordings of them completing specific tasks or UI flows. I know whatusersdo.com is fantastic too.”

Usabilla gets the thumbs up for usability testing from Brad Watson.

For card sorting

A trusty technique for information architecture, digital tools make card sorting even more convenient. For Brad Watson and Luke Chambers, the go-to is Optimal Workshop’s OptimalSort.

For online tree tests

For testing and validating information architecture, Gillian Halba says you can’t go wrong with Optimal Suite’s Treejack. “I love the Optimal Suite, especially Treejack. It’s great when you have a few options to test as you can get a steer on which works best and what titles users seem to be responding to.”

For sketching and prototyping

As an essential part of the UX design process, it’s no surprise that we have a few favourites for sketching and prototyping.

R Meyer is an Axure fan for wireframing and prototyping: “If you use it to wireframe, you can take those wireframes and add functionality as you iterate – adding interactions, fidelity, and anything else, as needed. No need to recreate anything. I also love the ability for multiple designers to work on the same project at the same time, and the sharing service where you can provide links to your boss and other stakeholders.”

For testing hand-sketched clickable prototypes, Luke Chambers says you can’t beat Marvel. “Just take a photo of the sketches and add hotspots and head off to find a test participant.”

Steve Crow recommends Sketch for wireframing and prototyping. He says:

“I think the main advantage is that Sketch is made specifically FOR UX designers. So you have easy access to symbols and interface elements that are specific to that function.”

Honourable mention: good old pen and paper.

For online surveys

An article we published earlier this month had excellent recommendations on how to design a survey. As for tools for the job? Brad Watson says your best bets for online surveys are SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Google Forms.

For heat maps

For better or worse, it seems that there’s no such thing as too much information when it comes to tracking how customers use your product. Favourites for heat mapping are Neo Nester turns to MixPanel, Gillian Halba prefers Chalkmark and Sarah Hawk recommends VWO. Take your pick!

For A/B testing

If you’re looking for A/B testing tools, dougcollins has a few recommendations, depending on your objective: “unbounce is more geared toward reducing bounce rate with effective landing pages. Zarget is geared towards improving conversion rates. KissMetrics is more generalised.”

Sarah Hawk on the other hand, is a fan of VWO for personalised content, A/B testing and conversion rates.

Don’t forget to take a look at our list of 100+ awesome tools for UX Designers for a full catalogue covering every facet of UX design.

What are your favourite UX research tools? Let us know why in the forums!

The post Favourite UX research tools from the UX Mastery community appeared first on UX Mastery.

Then, a post popped up in the UX Mastery forums that caught our attention.

Forum member Inca431 posed the question: “Does this job exist?” Almost at the end of an intensive online course, she was feeling upset and frustrated at not being able to find a job she felt she was qualified for:

“Now that I’m starting to look at a ‘real’ career, I’m worried that it might not exist? I’m not an expert at anything, I was never a graphic artist (my background is broadcast video editor), I am a ‘generalist’, I love working together with a group to come up with ideas.”

As a newcomer to the field, she wanted to do a bit of everything – research, wireframing, interviews, graphic design and problem solving. But she wasn’t sure whether this was what she was supposed to do, or whether she needed to focus on just one area.  

The issues that Inca raises are common struggles for many new UXers. Particularly while there’s a debate currently raging about UX education. Are students being promised too much from relatively short training courses? It’s tough when you’ve been told you have the right skills, yet when you go out into the world to look for a job, you’re not as prepared as you thought.

As always, the ever-supportive UX Mastery community rallied behind her. In doing so, they raised some of the major themes we talked about in August.

So, we’ve collected some of the most helpful responses for everyone’s benefit. The thread is still open if you want to join the conversation.

The strongest theme of all was the importance of perseverance and persistence. Keep trying and you will find your way.

Here are a few more helpful tips from our community.

UX Unicorns are few and far between

The role of the UX designer is famously undefined. This becomes very clear when you start searching for jobs. As in Inca’s case, you’ll find some recruiters advertise for an extensive list of UX skillsets – everything from research through to design and coding.

And while there are few so-called ‘unicorns’ who have the skills to do it all, they are few and far between. These job ads are a result of a poor understanding of the industry.

Amanda Stockwell explains that most UXers “a big, driven, smart group of kick ass people”, aren’t experts in everything. It’s much more about knowing a little about a lot of things, and learning as you go.

“That’s one of the best parts of being in UX – there is ALWAYS new stuff to learn, new technologies to adapt to, new methods to try. And, people come into UX from all kinds of areas – library science, engineering, journalism, graphic design – heck last year at UX Australia there was a story about someone who came to UX from truck driving!”

maxflyer adds that most people get frustrated at some point, but that “if you love UX don’t give up, ever. Use this time to develop the fighter inside you.”

“Everyone can learn concepts and everyone can practice. Those two things, in my experience, make all the difference…. Once you start understanding those solid concepts, it will show in everything you do; your interviews, your designs, your advice, blogs, etc. You WILL get there if you fight.”

It’s fine to be a generalist, just keep learning

Although new UXers tend to feel stressed about a lack of specific expertise, it’s not necessarily unusual or unwarranted. A sufficiently developed general skillset can make you a more valuable designer than someone who only knows a very narrow specialist skillset.

Did you know that Joe Natoli, with more than 25 years’ experience in the field, considers himself a generalist? It’s kind of the deal, he says, because you need broad knowledge across so many subjects. From product design to development, psychology, communication, and more. He adds:

“Forget the fact that you’re not an “expert” at anything — focus instead on what you DO have to offer in a problem-solving situation, because that’s what design of any kind (including UX) is. It’s not what you do with your hands — it’s how you think and why you do those things. Your mind and diversity is what’s most valuable, both to you and any employer or client.

Hang in there and keep putting one front of the other.”

Steve Crow also considers himself a generalist. His goal, he says, “has always been to be proficient, to add value when and where I can.”

“There’s a famous quote from someone I can’t remember advising folks in our position to just ‘jump off the cliff and build our wings on the way down in order to eventually soar’ or something like that. Now I assume they were talking about jumping off a symbolic cliff of indecision and self-doubtt, not a literal one.”

Look after yourself

Take care of yourself and connect with your community. Whether that’s meditation, yoga, or just making sure you take regular breaks – not looking after yourself is a recipe for disaster.

Leo Vogel points out that UX Meetups happen all over the world – there’s bound to be one near you. If you’re struggling with depression or anxiety, Leo recommends the guided meditation app Headspace, or When Panic Attacks.

And lastly: “Go for a walk, get some sunlight, get some exercise.”

We love to see the UX Mastery community help each other out with a pep talk and practical advice. There’s always someone there to help, and nudge you in the right direction when you need it.

I’ll leave you with these parting words from Amanda Stockwell:

“Keep practicing the things you’re already good at. Be honest about your weaknesses and work on those too. And keep relying on the support of this awesome community!”

What are you waiting for? Head over to the forums and start a conversation. 

Just starting out in UX? Launch your career with UX Mastery’s Get Started in UX guide.

The post This job does exist: Persist to find your way in your UX career appeared first on UX Mastery.