Learning from My UX Interviews

by Sarah on August 28, 2010

Suit Speak by Jon Turner

illustration by Jon Turner

Some of you expressed some interest in what I learned from my experience interviewing, so I’m going to take a stab at that here. Sorry about the delay, but starting this new job has been both time- and mind-consuming, and has necessitated lots of other changes in my and my family’s lives that have kept me busy hustling around while the dust settles. But now that I’m a few months in I can say that I am 100% glad I made the move. The job is interesting, educational and fun, I work with great people who both appreciate and challenge me, and I see an excitingly long road of potential and possibilities ahead.

In order to get to this great new job I had many, many interviews over the course of a few months, which was quite an educational process. I learned (or re-learned) many things.

  • I learned that connections are great but not everything. I got this job at Belkin through a cold drop of my resume into Belkin’s online resume submission system.
  • I learned that you shouldn’t count on having internet access during your interview. That seems obvious now, but I made that mistake until I was without it in an interview—one that definitely could have gone better.
  • I learned that you should always offer a copy of your resume. If your interviewers feel awkward asking for one and you don’t offer, you could leave them with the impression that you didn’t come prepared. This one I also learned the hard way.
  • Most importantly, I learned that an online portfolio of shiny designs and documents is good to get you in the door, but not that great after that.
Explode by Jon Turner

illustration by Jon Turner

Presenting Past Work
Learning how to tell a compelling story about my past work was my biggest challenge over the course of my interviews. I had read Whitney Hess’s excellent article about telling the story of your process in interviews, and thought I was prepared to do just. But I found that without specific preparation, talk would always circle back to the documents, and I would have trouble making that story as focused and clear as I wanted it to be.

What worked the best for me in the end was to create a Keynote presentation around a few specific projects. Preparing my “portfolio review” as a presentation made it easier for me to plan the arc and pacing of the story I wanted to tell. The slides provided visual anchor-points to the story for both me and my interviewers, and gave me a clear place to show mid-process artifacts like sketches, storyboards, and photos of testing. I tried to follow presentation best practices and keep the slides text-light and as support rather than the focus of my story. I was surprised how little detail about the final solutions was necessary in this context. Of course, I also had final designs and documents on my hard drive to show in case my interviewers asked to see them.

I told my project stories with the product as the protagonist and myself as a supporting character. There was exposition, action, conflict, resolution, and dénouement. Although this sounds kind of formal, everyone likes to listen to a story, and a good presentation is a fun experience. It helped me be more confident in my material and it gave ample openings for questions and discussion about the process, which is preferable to the dreaded, “Why did you choose yellow?” It also allowed my interviewers a chance to assess my presentation abilities, which are an important part of a UX design skill set.

Finding a Good Match
I also learned that the job market is pretty darn good right now for experience designers. Most companies that design interactive products not only know what “interaction design,” “UX,” and “IA” mean, they also feel an urgency to integrate these practices into their process. Although many places are still working out the best way to do this, the fact that they see it as vital to their success is a big change from 5 or 10 years ago. So it seems that there are more openings for seasoned UXers than there are seasoned UXers as the recession begins to turn around.

This means that employers need to pay close attention to how they are performing in the interview process, because it is a two-way sale. The current economy might tempt interviewers to feel they hold all the power, but waiting to begin the sales pitch until a candidate has been fully vetted would be a mistake. I know that it was important to me to feel wanted, to be excited about the role, the company, the team, and the projects—and some interviewers had given more thought to this than others. So for anyone out there looking to hire, I recommend evaluating your interview process from the candidate’s perspective and discovering what story it is telling about your company. After all, job candidates are doing their best to showcase awesome experience design; I think it’s fair for them to expect hiring UX departments to do the same. And when both parties get it right, it can feel like a match made in heaven.

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Embarking on a New Adventure

by Sarah on May 17, 2010

This Thursday will be my last day at Yahoo! After three and a half years, I’ll be packing up my design books, dismantling my forest-cube, and turning in my purple badge. And then, after a very short break I’ll be joining the small but formidable UX team at Belkin.

I’m really excited about this new job. I’m excited to get my hands on the UX and interaction design of physical products, something I’ve been passionate about since my product design days at Stanford. I’m excited to work for a company that understands the value of UX, that wants to build products whose enjoyment and ease of use is a core differentiating feature. I’m excited to work for a company that is going to be a part of the future of green technology. And I’m excited to work for an innovative company that digs design.

My time at Yahoo has given me invaluable experience, inspiration, and friendships over the last three years. I’ve learned so many things, like how to design for global audiences, what it’s like to launch a product to millions of customers, the difference between designing for entertaining diversion versus specific tasks, and so much more. I will miss all of the incredibly smart and talented people I met there, and sincerely hope I’ll get the chance to work with them again in the future.

Hopefully once I get into the swing of things at the new job, I’ll be able to resume posting here on a reasonable schedule, now that I’m done with all of the time and effort of interviewing. (By the way, I have a lot of ideas for posts based on my experience interviewing as a UXer, so let me know if you might be interested in hearing about the things I’ve learned.) In the mean time I’ll be packing boxes, spending a few days outdoors away from the computer, and generally getting myself psyched up and ready to dive in to my new adventure. Here’s to new beginnings!

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Spotted: Floss!

March 21, 2010
Floss hack

I’m hard at work on an evening design project (which you can see sneak peeks of here and here). In the meantime I thought I would share this wonderful hack I spotted in my dentist’s office this week:

Isn’t this use of dental floss somehow poetic and beautiful?

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Spotted: Safety on a Plane

February 28, 2010
Safety messaging on an airplane

On one of my recent flights, this was the view of the tray table on the seat-back in front of me, pretty much at eye level:

Staring at it through my normal take-off angst, I found myself trying to imagine who had decided this was the right text to inscribe on every tray table. It’s hard [...]

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Interaction ‘10

February 22, 2010
Sketch - thoughts on IxD10

It’s been almost two weeks now since I returned from Interaction ‘10 in Savannah, which was a fantastic conference packed with phenomenal people and content. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect (and recover from post-conference illness), here are some of my takeaways.

Meaning
Finding and providing meaning in the products and services we create was [...]

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Apple iPad: an Antisocial Device

January 28, 2010
Apple iPad mocked up to show video chat

Unless you’ve been deep in a cave for all of last week, you probably heard that Apple announced their new product yesterday, the iPad. Opinions about the device, including mine, have been somewhat split. I’m going to leave the general pros/cons discussions for somewhere else, but I wanted to discuss one aspect I find particularly [...]

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Case Study: Awards Shows

January 25, 2010
Yahoo Golden Globes site screenshot

The 67th annual Golden Globe Awards were just a little over a week ago, and within two days (Sunday and Monday) the Yahoo Golden Globes site served over half a BILLION page views. On that Monday alone, which was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and a work holiday for many, there were eleven million unique [...]

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Spotted: Use in Case of Fire Only

January 19, 2010
Elevator button reading To Be Used in Case of Fire Only

I’m not sure why elevators seem to be magnets for confusing interfaces (although I probably could take some guesses). To add another example to the list, my friend Scott recently sent me this picture:

How great is that button? Apparently it was on a wall all by itself, with nothing at all to indicate what happens [...]

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Scratching an Alignment Itch

January 8, 2010
Toyota Avalon dash display with alignment issues

This is the LCD info display in the dashboard of my mom’s 2002 Toyota Avalon. (Please excuse the blurry iPhone photo.)

During my last visit, I think I spent too much time in the car, because that display really started to bug me. I just cannot for the life of me imagine a designer could look [...]

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UX Origin Stories

January 5, 2010
UX Origin Stories

In one month I will head off to Interaction 2010, a fantastic UX conference put together by IxDA. I was fortunate enough to go last year, and had an overwhelmingly educational and inspiring time. One of my favorite aspects, and something I am really looking forward to again this year, was simply being surrounded by [...]

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