There are too many UX roles in London right now to have enough qualified people to fill them all. I’m not the first to say it, but if you’re wondering if the grass is greener elsewhere, then now is the time to get out there.

Agency vs. Client

Don’t be too hasty to pick a side.

Agencies are in a massive state of flux. Those who have been genuinely practising a good design methodology and have been led well by a solid executive team continue to flourish. They are easy to spot. They have the luxury of cherry-picking their projects. They might have some ‘famous’ employees: well known in design and development circles. They might not pay the best salaries, but will offer fame and experience over fortune: a platform for you to build your personal brand while actually having the portfolio to back it all up.

If that’s your thing.

And then there are the rest. Those who have shoehorned ‘digital’ into a tired offering. The service design-hawkers. The tired agile manifesto documentation-bashers. The craft-obsessed former industrial designers. Those with no project managers. Those who like to ‘just go straight into PhotoShop’. Those that never get to go to conferences because their utilisation rate is their only genuine KPI. Harder to spot, but easy to discover if you ask the right questions.

Client-side there are interesting problems to solve too, and also better growth opportunities for the more senior among you who don’t really fancy going freelance. Companies large and small are skilling up in-house: largely due to the fortunes they’ve been paying for agency user experience work of vastly differing quality. This is a market-wide opportunity not to be sniffed at.

Go big

Your value and experience will be judged immediately on what basic salary you’re after. Don’t be tempted by utilisation bonuses, signing-on bonuses, profit sharing schemes or any of that nonsense. Ask big, and ask it confidently.

UX salaries have increased hugely in the last two years, especially among the shady ‘Senior’ or ‘Lead’ UX levels. Remember that very few agencies have the need or scale to implement an intricate pay hierarchy. State what you think you’re worth and add another ten grand.

If you haven’t had an annual pay-rise from your current employer, then start looking. Right this minute.

Once you’ve made the decision to start looking, then these are the guiding principles I used recently. Yours might not be the same, but it’s worthwhile thinking about them before you start interviewing.

Don’t stop learning

We all have areas of our field we’re not particularly good at, that go against our natural skills and experience. Find a job that stretches that. Skill up. Work in a business you know nothing about but don’t lose focus on what you can offer that business. And try to keep a vaguely standardised recognisable job title.

Find interesting problems to solve

When interviewing at an agency, don’t be distracted by how nice the meeting room is, or which model of iPad your interviewers have, or how many Bromptons there are neatly lined up by reception. The only thing worth focusing on is who the clients are, and what the specific projects are too. If you don’t fancy the sound of them, then don’t be beguiled by the surroundings. Focus on the work. The more detailed you are around what daily activities you’d like to be doing straightaway as well as where you’d like to be in twelve months or so will only help both parties in the long run.

Don’t judge clients by their face value though. There are interesting design challenges in even the most boring of companies. It’s what they need agencies for, after all. There seems to be a huge increase of ‘marketing communications UX work’, if there is such a thing. Make sure you know what that entails before signing up.

Don’t be the best

Being the best UXer in the room, unless you’re a contractor, is not always beneficial. Sometimes it’s not an option though. Many are bemoaning the lack of genuine seniority in our craft, especially among those who have talked their way into seniority without the chops to back up the chat. There’s a ton to be learned from business analysts, commercial folk, product managers and all sorts of non-UX people you’ll come in to contact with.

Profitability wins

There are some highly profitable digital businesses, doing great work and rewarding their staff as a result. There are also plenty of others struggling to make ends meet, some of whom will be hiring UX people as a human bandage to legacy design decisions. There is no emotional justification for joining an unprofitable business, or one that is shrouded in uncertainty and confusing share structures. Stick with the simple company that makes money from doing good work.
Therefore do a bit of background homework on potential employers. With agencies, check the obvious such as current client lists and be forceful about asking for contract values. Do they fight tooth and nail for five figure projects, or are they firmly in the six figure, long engagement leagues? With in-house roles, a quick glance at Companies House never harmed anyone.

And do a Google News search on them.

In summary, the best advice I can give right now is:

1. Make sure your portfolio is exemplary; you should be able to score an interview almost anywhere if it is. Check out Jason’s Better UX Portfolios site for more help on this.
2. Despite you, the candidate, having more bargaining power than ever before, don’t be a dick about it.
3. Take your time and interview generously. Don’t take the first offer that comes your way. Try not to be in a rush to find a new permanent role.
4. Be sensitive to little details that will make your future working life better. Environment and gear in particular are things that bother me if they’re not right.
5. Make sure your new creative leader / boss / line manager is brilliant and inspirational. Much of this will come over in how they choose to interview you. Some will be happy enough with a coffee and a chat, others will insist on the four hour half-day bootcamp approach. Therefore, pick your battles and value your own time. Turn down half-day interviews if you want. Large organisations don’t need you there for that long to make a decision if they have a great person looking after recruitment.
6. Try to get a good feel for the size and strength of the visual design and development teams. With the latter, I’ve become quite opinionated about which technologies afford me, the designer, the greatest flexibility. I’ll know whether we’ll get along based on those answers.
7. Strategic offers are brilliant. If the biggest, baddest agency in town wants to hire you, pursue that offer, even if you have no intention of working there. It’s good collateral.
8. Be wary of recruiters. Ask for recommendations from recently hired peers. Choose one agency if you must. No more.

Good luck out there.

A bit belated this, but here it is nevertheless:

It loses a bit of impact without the commentary, but you can get the main idea I think. I’d like to thank those that came along to listen and joined in with their own stories.
UXCampLondon was my first BarCamp experience, and it was brilliant. Thanks to everyone that put it together, there’s some absolutely fascinating work happening at the moment.

Last week Two weeks ago I was lucky enough to be sent off to a very big hotel in the middle of Berlin for Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive training course / conference thing.

It was really rather special. Special enough to warrant a proper blog post, so off we go:

The Adaptive Path Experience

This is the first time I’ve been to an AP event. They’re renowned for being a tad expensive, and for us Brits, often exotically located (San Francisco! Copenhagen! Other places that aren’t London!). I now understand why.

The consistent theme throughout was quality. From the small touches (branded sharpies and Moleskine cahiers) to theming the week around hotel experience and its associated design challenges (pretty savvy when most delegates are all staying in the same place).

Not only do the Adaptive Path crew know their stuff, they’ve succeeded at putting their UX expertise into an actionable structure. This is the one thing I think most UX practitioners can struggle with, especially when joint-managing a development team and managing stakeholder expectations. Agencies, startups, established companies, we all have the same set of challenges.

Each day was broken into the four main tenets of UX – design strategy, design research, information architecture and interaction design. After being dismantled into their component parts, they were ultimately reassembled into the ultimate breakdown of the *what* and the *how* of each phase, and most importantly, the deliverables each phase should generate.

My personal favourites were the first and last days, strategy and IxD respectively. This is probably because they’re closest to my current work and what I find easiest to deliver. The IA day just proved how much I’ve got to learn. Interestingly they steered clear of the traditional wireframe discussions, which was wise. If you put 100 or so UX folks in a room, they’ll happily talk about wireframing and present them to each other for *weeks*. IA was much more focused on controlled vocabularies, content analysis & modelling, site structuring and good old-fashioned metadata.

What can you actually cover in a day?

Quite a bit, actually. One of the most impressive things the APers pulled off is cramming so much content into each day. Not only that but they covered the most important elements in an order that made sense. This kind of event only works with a series of well planned practical exercises, and AP used a fictional California boutique hotel chain as our ‘client’. It helped tie each day together with a nice real-world bow.

Of course, much was missed out. It had to be. I think some of us were a little disappointed with the lack of hands-on prototyping (certainly of a digital nature, everything was strictly post-it note and paper-based). Having reflected on it though, and from talking to others, I think we’re all at a good standard when it comes to digital prototyping. Focusing on it more might have reduced the educational impact considerably and turned us into an OmniGraffle appreciation group. There is still a deep desire to share design prototypes with others though, just to get that reassurance from your peers.

Bringing it home

As with any good event, you always leave bursting with ideas. Since getting back from Berlin and resuming normal service in the office, I’ve been thinking about how to integrate what I’ve learned with our current workflows. It’s still going to take a few more weeks to nail it down and try to get everyone as excited about consolidating our UX and design processes into a leaner, meaner beast.

I’ve already extracted the practical techniques we’ve either not been doing where we should, or those we played at and not followed through properly. That’s a given. The really great part is having a list of deliverables that you can customise to your internal audience. That’s the stuff that I find really exciting – turning your findings and creative into the right kind of deliverable that will inspire fellow stakeholders, and most importantly, users.

Team Europe

UX Intensive is the first web event I’ve been to that’s been on The Continent. There were only two or so Brits there. A whole new experience.

It was great to mix with people who don’t judge your work based on who your employer is. We’re not a big site in Europe really, due to a strategic UK/USA focus (and lots of other more boring reasons), so it was nice to be relatively care-free on that front.

I could show other designers some prototypes completely fresh, with no historical baggage that can accompany a well-known, highly trafficked and *old* website. It was really inspiring to see that newness of the P2P fundraising concept once again at a human level. It’s been a while, especially now that we’ve seen tons of sites spring up trying to replicate our success. It’s amazing to watch how a concept becomes commoditised and then carry on designing the secret sauce that keeps it successful.

I also made some great new friends from Sweden, Norway, Germany, Denmark and everywhere else inbetween. I think we all enjoyed mixing with like-minded individuals for what turned out to be nearly a week. UXers are often teams of one, maybe a couple more. Putting that many of us together from all over the world leads to some absolutely superb conversations, both in and out of the sessions.

Denmark’s Facebook penetration, for example, is something I knew nothing about and is scarily huge (it’s half the adult population or something). It’s also refreshing to see the same issues are prevalent across Europe; one particular example that fuelled lots of debate was the ongoing identity crisis UX designers tend to have: what to call ourselves.

Oh, and Twitter really isn’t a big deal outside of the UK. Not yet, anyway.

So what’s your job title, then?

Yep, we all struggle with it. Even the eminently practical Germans. Most of us are User Experience Designers, some are strategists, others were IAs or a mixture of all three. I’m sure there were a few evangelists scattered about too. The common issue is that when talking to people outside of the web industry, they have no idea what a UX designer is. We didn’t find a solution, but it’s something that bothers lots of us. The relative nascence of user experience as a subcategory of design leaves the door wide open for a little bit of controlled vocabulary of our own. Something that everyone can understand.

The way forward

So I’ve got a ton of content to distil and share with my team, I’ve got a physical workspace to help redesign and a brand new technology platform on which we can once again change things for the better, on a pretty grand scale. The timing of UX Intensive couldn’t have been better for me, and I’m really excited for June’s UX London event and the great stuff that will bring too.

I’ll share how we fare over the coming months as much as I can. Thanks to all those who attended too and made it such a memorable experience – you all know who you are and I hope you guys go on to do even greater things with what we all learned together in a questionably four star hotel in Berlin. Maybe we can all squeeze a bit more budget out from under the sofa for UX Week in September.

More stuff:

The group flickr photos and my specific set

A flurry of #uxintensive tweets

This past week was the Carsonified crew’s second biggest event, Future of Web Design in Kensington.

Traditionally, I’ve always preferred the vibe at FOWD a bit more than FOWA. It may not have the same globally recognised internet-rock-star line up, but the focus on creative brilliance is far more inspirational. There’s also less attention given to entrepreneurial fluff which personally I find can get a bit nauseating.

This is my first big web event in 2009, and I’ve been wondering if there would be a conference downturn to fit with the times. Sure enough, the perks have nearly all gone. Microsoft (the diamond sponsor) just brought a telly with some beanbags, no Guitar Hero. Embarrassed themselves with their Table tech by ruining Watchmen for all those who haven’t seen it (and those who have). No more sexy printed name badges. Little things, but all noticeable.

Trouble is, I don’t think the content suits the event anymore. Designers, on the whole, like to see what others are up to creatively and cultivate tips on working better and smarter. Unfortunately FOWD didn’t really deliver on that, not for me. As an IxD type, the content is not intended for me but I like to keep up with what’s going on. There are clear parallels we can all work towards to achieve better results and better websites.

The big theme, instead of riffing on the future of design, was much more a retrospective of what’s gone before. And I don’t think it was even intentional. Lots of snickering over Photoshop 2. Seeing the guy who designed the original MTV2 brand play all the shorts (very cool, I was a big fan). But I can’t connect the dots between digital stuff that was done in 2001 and the future of web design nearly halfway through 2009.

Only Mark Boulton‘s talk on Typography was genuinely inspirational.

Often overlooked and very important for sites that thrive from user-generated content that is written. The question I’ve taken away is how can we help users tell powerful stories by using great typography and design, and integrating that into the page in a more holistic fashion. I’ve ordered his lovely looking book.

There is no clear message or trend going forward, and that’s what has left me a bit cold. FOWD needs to be more practical, maybe a workshop only event. But maybe as a UX person, I should stick to my own scene?

My buddy Kai did his superb doodle notes again, so check them out:

*Update* – Mark’s talk can be listened to here.