Career Boosters is a monthly e-panel discussion that scouts out leaders in the marketing, digital, communications and advertising space to provide their perspectives on industry topics related to career development, talent acquisition and hiring practices.
Today’s panel: Paul Crimi is a product designer at BNotions. Simona Mindy is a partner and an experience and information architect at This Way Digital. Jason Sao Bento is the lead mobile user interface and mobile user experience designer at Google Fiber.
What is a UX Designer?
Paul Crimi
Paul Crimi: The ongoing conception of ideas and creation of hypotheses that aim to ignite, enable and enforce behaviour to make life better for people using the technology of the time.
Simona Mindy: A UX designer seamlessly bridges the gap between intended functionality and the actual experience of using the product or service.
Jason Sao Bento: Someone who can design in a user-centered way and measures success by the user’s enjoyment. A good UX designer needs to be around different types of people to gain insight to how a user thinks.
Some of your favourite pre-screening questions when identifying UX Design talent are..?
Simona Mindy
Paul: I look for three traits in people:
1. Empathy. Hands down the most important trait to have. The UX designer must feel what the user feels and influence and anticipate that user’s needs and actions. Often this comes with experience.
2. Design instinct or disposition. We want people who are passionate about design. I look for someone who has great design instinct, who has a natural understanding of great products, what makes them great, and why people love them.
3. A sense of curiosity and exploration. If you’re not growing, you’re dying. Our UX designers must want to constantly learn, grow themselves and play with new technologies. A sense of curiosity leads this.
Simona: What’s your ideal process for a project? How do you feel about collaboration? Who do you closely collaborate with? How do you balance business needs and technical restrictions with good design? Have you ever experienced a situation where your recommendation was not taken? How did you handle it? What are your interests outside of work?
Jason: What is your favourite app and what would you change to make it even better?
Tips for individuals looking to move into a UX Design role?
Jason Sao Bento
Paul: Read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think to learn about simplicity in design. Read Jeff Johnson’s Designing with the Mind in Mind to understand how design decisions influence behaviour. Read Susan Weinschenk’s 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People for an intro to psychology and how it is influenced by design.
Simona: Read a lot and keep up to date on what’s going on in the domain. Find a mentor and ask lots of questions. Get your feet wet even if it’s not in a professional environment. Pick a design problem and create a solution for it, then get it critiqued. Did I mention read a lot?
Jason: Use self-initiated projects to show your UX skills, like redesigning an existing app or website to improve/show your UX skills. Join an industry association like IxDA and start going to events. Pay attention to interactions/interfaces and notice what works/doesn’t. Keep a file of screenshots of things you think are really great UX or really shit UX. Read books like Jon Kolko’s Thoughts on Interaction Design, the Rosenfeld books, A List Apart, Smashing Magazine‘s The Mobile Book.
What’s the one thing a UX Designer does that most people wouldn’t assume they do?
Paul: We spend a lot of time playing NHL 95 for the Sega Genesis. Not only is it the greatest sports game of all time, it’s still fun to play 18 years after its release. Downtime is needed when we’re stuck on a particularly difficult problem. Hitting the restart button, so to speak, and returning to a problem with a fresh outlook often leads to a clear solution.
Jason: Many people think UX designers are just pushing pixels around on a screen or making pretty pictures for users, but most of a UX designer’s time is spent doing a lot of user research and working with engineers trying to solve user problems.
Rachel Scott is the marketing and communications coordinator and Trina Boos is president of Boost Agents, a specialist recruitment provider to the marketing, advertising, design and communications industry.
