A jobseeker’s guide to UX – User Experience
Over the last decade, “user experience” (UX) has become a buzzword in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and interaction design.
User Experience is everything that involves the way any user interacts with the world around them. In UX, all stages of the customer’s interaction with the brand are considered, from the first “encounter”, to their post use, or consumption.
UX studies human behavior and the service offered to find ways to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is normally achieved through three pillars:
Usefulness – How useful the service is to the customer; how much better it is to do things using the service and not some alternative.
Ease of use – How easy and fast it is to use the service to solve a customer’s problem, compared to an alternative platform.
Pleasure – How pleasurable (fun, interesting, rewarding, etc.) it is to use the service and not the alternatives.
In the early 1990s, Don Norman was Vice President of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, and coined the term “UX” because he believed that definitions such as “User Interface” and “Usability” limited the understanding of what his work represented. Then, he renamed his division the “User Experience Architect Group”.
User Experience is indispensable in the digital environment, since this environment is a dynamic space, with a lot of information and options. Lots of different aspects will make a person choose your brand over the competition.
When creating a website, for example, many forget usability. This is a mistake, since this is the company’s main channel of communication with the public. Therefore, it needs to be complete in features and tools, yet simple, intuitive, and enjoyable.
In this career guide, we’ll introduce some of the most sought after job titles in UX. This can help you figure out the best career path to pursue, based on your interests, strengths, and professional goals.
We’re going to explore the following roles:
- UX designer
- UX researcher
- Information architect
- UI/UX developer
- UX writer
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- UX designer
The goal of a UX designer is to ensure that the user has the best user experience in relation to any product or service.
They are responsible for conducting various surveys to understand more about users, their customs, and their needs.
- UX researcher
UX research is the systematic investigation of users and their requirements, contextualizing, and seeking insights for the user experience process.
The research uses several techniques, tools, and methodologies to reach conclusions. These techniques include interviews and focus groups, which are used to establish the facts and find the problems in a website design or industry. This reveals valuable information for the design process.
In other words, it is the way to recognize a problem, and confirm or refute different hypotheses, in order to recognize the main needs and objectives of the target audience, through understanding different points of view and contexts. This helps to further improve all the user experience work.
- Information architect
In a very succinct definition, the IAI – Information Architecture Institute, explains what this discipline consists of:
“Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to organize the parts of something in a way that makes it understandable.”
Information architecture is a great pillar of technology and the organization of large companies, being part of a great context of digital transformation.
- UI/UX developer
A UI/UX developer is best described as part-designer, part-developer. This role combines user experience and user interface design with key front-end development skills such as JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
The big difference between UX and UI is that UX is the practical area, or stage of a layout design, generally more focused on the sensations and the feelings that the user will experience when clicking on certain buttons, menus, effects, and elements. The UI takes much more care of the user’s interaction with the interface, in other words, with usability.
In a startup, the UI/UX developer may be responsible for the entire product design and development process, whereas in larger organizations, they may serve as a bridge between the design and development teams.
- UX writer
This position has the responsibilities to create clear, concise and useful texts for the users of a given website or application.
Thus, the professional must offer an accessible and dynamic language to the public, and build a relationship of trust and loyalty. Currently, several companies have been looking for candidates to fill these kinds of vacancies, in order to precisely optimize communication with their customers.
