A quick technique to analyze the UX acceptance level in an organization during initial interviews and conversations.
Introduction:
You could be a fresher or an experienced user experience practitioner looking for an ideal company to work and leverage your career. There are several things that a person considers before deciding to join a company. One of those points could be preparing for the interview and acing it.
You would have come across several articles concerning the list of questions that provide the best user experience questions and suggestions towards preparing your responses.
The objective of this article is a little different. This article aims to prepare you to analyze the maturity level of user experience in a company during your initial interview process and more importantly during the initial round of discussions.
It is an attempt to guide any UX practitioner on taking a crucial decision. A decision in your career to accept the right offer and not to land in the wrong organization.
Most of the interview process would begin with one of the recruitment team members contacting for basic details and matching your skills and profile with their job descriptions.
As a design lead and manager, I have faced the issue of not receiving correct candidate profiles while recruiting user experience designers. It could be lack of experience of recruitment team in the field of user experience to understand the overall demand. It is our responsibility to assist them in selecting potential candidates like providing questionnaire, joining them in few shortlisting sessions and giving continuous constructive feedback.
After an initial discussion with the recruitment team, a phone interview is scheduled with a small group of interviewers. This is one of the best moments for a job aspirant to gauge the maturity of user experience in any organization.
There are few rounds of questions asked to the candidate to qualify for another round of interview process. These interview questions and statements during the discussions are the early indicators that could be categorized into the best and worst categories. It would be nice, to begin with, some of the worst questions and statements followed by the best. This could provide a better picture of understanding the overall maturity of user experience in an organization.
Worst questions and statements:
1. Show us your design portfolio (***UI Design!!!)
What interview panel means:
When this question comes too early in the interview process and the interviewer is interested in looking into the output and final designs rather than striking a conversation. It means the maturity level of user experience (acceptance and adoption) within an organization seems to be lowest. This could be one of those frequently asked “Dark Ages” questions to any user experience practitioner.
2. Do you just create sketches and wireframes? that’s all? (***Cost-effective resources !!!)
What interview panel means:
You need to understand that the interviewer is trying to find a UX unicorn who could deliver everything from user experience to user interface design and maybe further converting designs to HTML’s.
The panel aims to hire a swiss knife that could be used for all types of activities within the organization. It could be a good place for a multi-skilled individual at the same time the designer will not be provided enough time to justify each phase of the design. This will lead to designer skipping the important steps in the process of design and focus on specific deliverables.
3. We test our designs with our development team and present them to stakeholders and receive feedback to improve our products.
What interview panel means:
This statement indicates that the company has either never worked with any user experience designer or does not find any value in investing time and money on understanding user problems while interacting with their products.
These individuals look for a designer on command or design as a service at their disposal. They expect the designer to design a beautiful looking application, software, or website and reluctant to empower them.
E.g. The designers considered as painters in the process of construction. They are required once the building has been constructed and needs to be coated with plasters and beautiful vibrant colors. They do not need to review or question the overall structural integrity of the building.
4. Our clients have requested to get our product reviewed by a user experience designer and we are hiring for it.
What interview panel means:
This could be a tricky situation as the client has identified the value and the power of the user experience process. The hiring organization has not developed the taste of working along with designers in building their products. The designer could land in a position that could not be desirable as the client will expect the best experience and the organization will refrain the designer from proposing a better solution.
It is clear that the organization has a technical mindset and has a constant fear of scope creep and over-commitment from the designer. This could lead to rejecting the new approach of design thinking and providing the user experience. There could be a possible constraint to grow in this type of organization due to predicted challenges and constant push back from the strong community of technically driven management.
E.g. We have already built a very nice and robust box (software or application), and it works so nicely. You just need to build a great experience within it. Go ahead make it look beautiful, sprinkle your magic, but keep in mind no matter what happens DO NOT STEP OUT OF THE BOX!!! (sweetly and subtly).
Happy Reading!
Published:
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