When you're introducing UX from the speaker's perspective, I wanted to find some objective material on what actually belongs in that pitch. What UX-related knowledge do people need in the field? One of the best sources for figuring out what companies expect from UX people is their job postings. So I took a look at UX-related postings from major companies in Korea and abroad.
Google Korea
- Google Korea is mainly hiring for marketing and partnerships. I checked the international pages too, and didn't really see any UX-specific postings.
Facebook
- At Facebook HQ, the UX posting I found is for a UX researcher — and as the 'researcher' title implies, the work looks mostly like user observation and big-data collection and analysis. It feels more tilted toward research/investigation than pure UX design.
Samsung Electronics
- Samsung's postings work on the principle that applicants register and the company picks from there as needed. Couldn't find related details.
Naver
- Naver used to have fairly specific postings for UX and web-planning roles, but right now there are no openings.
Apple
- And once again, the one place I could find a UX designer job posting was Apple. I try to use examples other than Apple, but in this area I keep falling back to Apple.. ^^
So let's look at what qualities a UX designer needs, based on Apple's posting.
Pulling out the main points, Apple lists the following qualities for the work and education requirements of an experienced UX designer:
Apple UX Designer — Description
- A passion for design, and an aesthetic sense
- An eye for detail, and the ability to find simple answers to complex problems
- Interaction design, visual design, and prototyping skills are a plus
- Strong problem-solving, fast learning, self-starting, and communication skills
- From brainstorming through implementation, working as a member of the design team in collaboration with engineering, marketing, and QA
- A passion for building products that are simple, elegant, useful, beautiful, accessible, and enjoyable
- Someone who pays rigorous attention to detail and pursues a particular level of aesthetic taste
Hmm… translating this in a rough pass, it kind of reads like all the nice words have been packed in. I have to wonder if anyone actually has all of those talents… Add the concrete education requirements below, and the bar gets even higher. (I was trying to keep this short, and it keeps ballooning… ^^)
Apple UX Designer — Education
- Interaction design, or visual design major or related experience
- A background in painting or illustration is a plus
- Desktop, mobile, and web-application design experience required
- Expert knowledge of user-centered design
- Proficient with design tools like Photoshop and Illustrator
- Ability to rapidly produce prototypes using Flash and HTML 5
- Proficient with OS X and iOS
- Strong written and verbal communication
- Strong collaboration skills
- Ability to deliver high-quality output under tight schedules
It feels like Apple is almost asking for a superman. If you set aside the specifics of the iTunes app situation and summarize, it comes out to something like the list below. (The post keeps getting longer… ^^)
Apple UX designer — required competencies (summary)
- An aesthetic sense rooted in fields like design and painting
- Passion for chasing the best design output and finishing to the last detail
- Ability to apply design techniques like brainstorming and prototyping
- Ability to rapidly build prototypes in design tools
- Expert knowledge of user-centered design
- Understanding of cross-team workflow and collaboration with engineering, marketing, and QA
- Other work-related skills
- Mobile and web planning
- Knowledge of visual design and interaction design
- Design-tool proficiency and project-management skills
- Writing/presentation and communication skills
Roughly summarized, it lands somewhere around there. Of those, items 1–6 are skills you need purely for studying or working in UX; item 7 covers topics discussed in adjacent fields (like web planning) and the soft competencies you need inside an organization (like doc-writing).
Looking at it this way, UX-field education should make 1–6 mandatory, plus the parts of 7 that are needed. Within 1–6, what you can actually teach — content on prototyping, design techniques, and user-centered design — has to be there, and the workflow of user-centered design plus the background needed to collaborate with other teams looks necessary too. And the process of rapidly prototyping, testing, and iterating is fundamentally about applying interaction-design principles, so that has to be in there as well.
Above all, you need to accurately understand user-centered design, and you need expert knowledge of the process of reflecting users' thoughts and goals in the design output. To do that work, you have to understand the various techniques for collecting people's opinions, observing their behavior, and baking it into the product. On top of that, depending on the design domain — web, mobile, TV, automotive, and so on — there's a variety of knowledge to track, which means the list of things to know just keeps growing.
Pulling the thread back, the core of UX education has to be the user, the human — the user-centered design techniques and process of designing with the human at the center can't be missing. Applying user-centered design in real work uses various research techniques and design techniques like prototyping too, so that can't be missing either. Rough outline below.
What you need to know for practicing UX design
Required content
- What user-centered design is, and why it's necessary
- The process and team structure of user-centered design
- Foundational design techniques like brainstorming, prototyping, and usability testing
- Getting comfortable with a human-centered design perspective (not a tech-first or feature-first one)
- The most foundational interaction-design principles
Domain-specific content
- An overall grasp of various research and design techniques
- Various design principles in visual design and interaction design
- Design principles suited to each area's characteristics — such as web and mobile (UI design, interaction design)
- How to build easy-to-follow documents and content
- Skills in tools and languages like Photoshop, Flash, and HTML 5
Content you need to run the work
- Project management techniques and software-development methodology
- Effective presentation and persuasion
- How to communicate effectively through conflict
