Critical Path Newsletter

A technical manager’s guide to hiring a UX designer

 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 that it isn’t easy. While experience certainly helps, with the following guidelines and an acute BS detector, you’ll do ok. 

Here are 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. 

3) Hire a UI designer, not a graphic designer

Maybe this goes without saying, but I still see people making this mistake. It’s easy to be wow’ed by a visually stunning portfolio.  That’s not to say there aren’t great UX designers that started as graphic designers. The important thing to discover is have they worked in a user centered design process?

Here are a few things to look for in a resume:

• Look for clues that they have worked in a UCD process. Do they mention things like getting user feedback, doing user research, or that they followed a UCD process? 

• Look for a progression of titles like “interaction designer”, “user experience designer” and “UI designer” as opposed to “visual designer”, “graphic designer”, or “web designer”

• Beware of too much emphasis on technical skill. User Experience Design is a science and a profession of it’s own. If they have spent a lot of time as a developer, or a lot of time learning programming languages, it’s unlikely they’ve had enough time to develop their skills as a designer.  Some companies call their front-end developers UI Developers or UI Specialists, so look out for this. 

• It’s a plus if they’ve worked at a company that takes user experience design seriously – Apple, Yahoo, or Microsoft for instance. They will have had great mentors and lots of experience working in a disciplined UCD process.

4) Probe to make sure that they believe in involving the user

If your candidate thinks that they can design in isolation, and come up with compelling UX design simply by thinking and talking it through, they probably aren’t a great designer, or at least not as good as they think.  In the interview, use open-ended questions to really understand how they think through a design problem. Ask them to take you through, in detail, how they arrived at one of the designs in their portfolio. Good designers can rely on experience to a certain degree to arrive at the right design, but be aware of designers that think they are always right – it’s a sure sign that they aren’t getting enough user and stakeholder feedback, and that their design solutions aren’t as good as they think. 

5) Look for an understanding and appreciation of the software development process

Successfully implementing a design requires close collaboration with the engineering team, and at least a high-level understanding of the software lifecycle. Look for experience working directly with engineering teams. Also ask them to describe, in detail, what deliverables they hand off to the development team, and how they support the development team throughout the development cycle. It’s very common for developers to have questions about the design, and for the designer to be actively involved in throughout the development process, as there are always screens that require more detailed design.