What Makes You a Senior UX Practitioner?
Over the last several months, while browsing LinkedIn, I’ve noticed an influx of early career UX designers and User Researchers updating their titles to a senior level designation. I’ve had the privilege of both privately mentoring and teaching UX and Design Research at a local college to some very talented students who are well on their way to establishing themselves in the field.
I also personally don’t believe the amount of years you’ve been practicing UX and User Research to be a true measure of whether you are senior or not. Nonetheless, I began to wonder “What exactly does makes you senior”?
Here are 4 key learnings I’ve picked up through “trial and error” that I believe separate the beginner from the seasoned UX practitioner.
1.Think like a UX strategist…and a business strategist
You’d be surprised how many UX practitioners rely solely on UX concepts and orthodoxy without understanding the DNA of the business they're helping. This goes well beyond the standard understanding pain points and gathering of requirements. Consider the following. Clients are for the most part highly knowledgeable in their roles, their business and industry. If you want them to accept and follow your design decisions and strategy, it’s incumbent upon you to intimately understand both their business and their industry. UX is not a one-size fits all process. Your approach needs to be aligned with all the nuances, background, context and constraints of the business you’re helping. If you pull UX terminology and jargon out of your back pocket, without relating it back to their business, industry and their goals, then you’re dead in the water.
2. Break down UX concepts to relatable experiences
If we agree that UX can be an abstract concept for most clients to understand then think twice before you pull out pearls of UX wisdom and jargon like Information Scent, Cost of Interaction, Miller's Law, Controlled Vocabulary etc…Instead try using storytelling devices that are relatable and universal, followed by the applicable UX terminology. For example, I like to describe information scent (and information foraging) by using an airport analogy. Imagine getting off a plane in a foreign city airport and you’re looking for a taxi to your hotel. I usually point to the common user behaviour of using physical signage as wayfinding clues and how users interact with these sources of information to fulfill an information need. I’ll then relate this to the same principle of how users interact with page components like buttons, links and web copy on a page to find content they’re looking for. I’ll finish by anecdotally mentioning: In UX, we refer to this as “information scent.”
3. Design for scope, Design for what comes after UX strategy
As UX practitioners we are taught early on about having empathy for users. I would add having empathy for the teams that will bring your strategy to fruition, namely UI Designers and Developers. It’s crucial to pay close attention to the overall project scope (eg. budget, time, constraints and requirements). Features and functionality are the biggest culprits that affect scope and lead to “scope creep.” Thinking about designing a map that’s not in scope? Think again. Maps are notoriously complex and labour intensive to design and develop. Apart from being prone to usability and accessibility issues, the design approach for a map, on desktop and mobile, can be vastly different. This can add considerable scope and extra effort to the development process and budget. As UX practitioners it’s very easy and very common to have tunnel vision when it comes to UX deliverables (eg. wireframes). A seasoned UX strategist should strive to have a 360 vision of the entire project, it’s dependencies, constraints and team resources.
4. Make sure they really answer your questions
This is a biggie and we’re all guilty of it at some point; It’s also something that really does truly come from experience and trial and error. It’s very common, especially during requirements gathering, that clients may sometimes provide answers that range from either vague to completely off topic. They may go off on a tangent and don't accurately address your questions. Subsequently, It’s also common for us to gloss over responses that are sub-par out of shyness, time constraints or being intimidated by a client. Remember that the feedback you get from either clients or user interviews during a research project, provides vital insights that will guide and inform your approach, process and overall quality of work. In most cases you only have one shot to get this right. It takes some time, experience, skill and finessing to coax the answers that will be most valuable to inform your work. A good rule of thumb is taking a brief pause in between questions to think about the information that was just shared with you before moving too quickly to your next line of inquiry,