Macadamian Blog

Hiring a UX Designer - Part 1

Many of our customers are starting to build a user experience design team. The challenge is - if this is your first hire, and no one on the hiring team has a user experience design background, how do you make the right hire?

As someone who has hired dozens of interaction designers, user researchers, and visual designers over my career, I can tell you it isn’t easy. While experience certainly helps, with the following guidelines and an acute BS detector, you’ll do ok. In this two part series I’ll share with you my five tips to help you make your first UX hire a success:

1) Be clear about the role, and your long-term design strategy

If you have declared that design is strategic to your business, you need a different person than if you want to make modest improvements in the usability and look-and-feel of your products.

If design is strategic, and you are going to use design to gain competitive advantage, then you will need someone to lead a culture change. Not only should the person be an expert, but they need the determination and leadership skills to effect change.

Great design doesn’t start and stop with the design team – it will require changes to your development process to accommodate user testing and user input, and tight collaboration between the design and development team. Having said that, if this is your first hire, you need someone who’s also not afraid to roll up their sleeves and do design work while you build the team.

If, on the other hand, your goal is to make short-term improvements in the visual design and usability of your products, but you haven’t declared that design is strategic or you’re not ready to make that commitment, you should seek out someone who is at an intermediate level, and who has a mix of design and user research skills. Some research skills are key – as the lone UX designer, they will need to quickly get user feedback to validate their design decisions

2) Match your processes to their background

If you are a very Agile development team, you will frustrate someone who is used to working in a waterfall model. Your design process will need to fit your development process, so if you are Agile, you will be seeking user feedback on an ongoing basis, and not just at the front-end of the project.

Likewise, if you follow a Waterfall model, someone who is used to working in an Agile fashion may get lost in the amount of upfront design and process required. Look for experience working with teams that follow similar processes.