Hiring for UX — and Why You’d Better Hurry
Originally posted on the projekt202 blog
Business in 2017 is undergoing a transformation, as digital capabilities are harnessed and strategically leveraged to deliver better user experiences. How does this impact today’s companies and what qualities should business leaders expect in software development? As businesses are transformed by mobile, increased expectations for ROI, and other factors, they’re ramping up their digital capabilities. This usually starts with development teams, but soon they realize, without customer understanding or well-designed experiences, they won't meet their user goals and, by extension, their business goals. I’m in the Dallas area and it’s just now reaching that tipping point. I've worked in the user experience (UX) field for more than 15 years. There was a time not that long ago where every software designer in Dallas could fit in a single room. Today, there are many more designers, but really good UX designers – those who have a balance of gathering customer insights, designing great solutions and working with development teams – are hard to find. There are only a few schools in our region that holistically address these areas.
“If companies want to outplay their opponents, they need to genuinely understand their customers and deliver an outstanding user experience every time.
When looking at designers, we look for passion and raw talent. Working for projekt202 signifies someone who has that spark to deconstruct what's there today, has empathy for people and understanding their challenges, and can vision out a better solution. That’s another defining asset that projekt202 brings to our clients.
Good software experiences are relativity new. The iPhone is a good primary example of something that showed everyone that software and hardware can work seamlessly together. You know that awful experience you've been having with your software, accounting application, online banking, retail shopping and other areas? That isn't necessary.
Fast forward to today and the bar for customer expectations and UX is much higher. It's a new and highly-competitive playing field. If companies want to outplay their opponents, they need to genuinely understand their customers and deliver an outstanding user experience every time.
For what I'd call "modern product companies" – such as Google and eBay, for instance – experience-driven software development is gaining traction. Most companies on the West Coast, for example, have the people, process and buy-in to properly create experience-driven applications.
That said, there are many more who are still not feeling the pain yet, but this window is rapidly and decidedly closing. If you're the 800-pound gorilla of your industry and the only one in the space, you can still get away with it for some amount of time, but those days are numbered.
With the rate of startups, customer and user expectations, and lower bar to entry, companies that are slow to act will quickly have organizations nipping at their heels. When their competitors start to eat their lunch – many times purely based on a "better experience" – that’s when they'll take notice, but by then, it may be too late.
Companies must evolve or die. The stakes are that high when it comes to ramping up digital capabilities and delivering software that customers love to use.