Last week, we released the Guide to UX Careers to inform aspiring UX professionals, established UX practitioners, designers and hiring managers about the rapidly evolving landscape of the user experience industry. We timed the announcement of the new guide to coincide with Adaptive Path’s UX Week, and have been positively thrilled by the responses.
Members of the UX, design and job search communities from all over the world shared and commented on the guide so to everyone who contributed their thoughts, questions, comments and shares, we thank you!
Since the UX Careers Guide led to so much conversation, we thought it would be best to shed some light on the information we used to create the guide. Here’s a behind the scenes look at the making of the UX Careers Guide.
Job Opportunities for UX Professionals
We chose these six job titles because we received more job orders from our nationwide client base for these specific professionals in the past two years than all other UX related positions. The descriptions and responsibilities are based on conversations we’ve had with both employers and UX job seekers. While there is much more to say about each role, we kept things brief to ensure a straight-forward presentation.
Here are great sources of expanded information about these jobs:
- What is a Usability Professional? – Usability Professionals’ Association
- Information Architecture Careers – The Information Architecture Institute
- Complete Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture – UX Booth
- So You Want to Become An Interaction Designer – Adaptive Path
- What is User Experience Design: Overview, Tools and Resources – UX Design, Smashing Magazine
- The Expanding Role of User Experience Design – UXMag.com
- The User Experience Team Kit – Interaction Design Association
Salary
For our salary section, we gathered data for a the nationwide average for each profession from Indeed.com, one of the top job aggregators in the country, and other third-party salary providers, then compared it to the nationwide pay rates we have seen from our clients, and merged the two to provide an accurate and vetted range.
Experience level and location will always impact specific salary offers. The salary ranges we provided weren’t exactly highs vs. lows and we understand many may earn salaries outside the range we displayed, however the bulk of experienced UX professionals with a few years experience who live in any significantly-sized job market should be earning in that range or perhaps higher!
For more detailed explorations of industry salaries, please review the following:
- The Information Architecture Institute 2010 Salary Survey
- UPA 2009 Salary Survey
Please contact an Onward Search recruiter to learn about the salary ranges and jobs that are available near you!
Where are the UX Jobs?
We created this heat map by gathering data from SimplyHired.com for all of the top 100 metro areas in the U.S. We filtered by various radius matches to make sure certain cities weren’t gaining overlap from nearby cities and ultimately chose the top 20 cities based on the number of current employment opportunities within each city’s borders. The top 20 represent where the highest demand for UX talent exists right now.
Projects That Drive Demand For UX Professionals
These three categories come directly from requests from employers of UX talent and conversations with UX professionals about what projects they work on the most.
Breakdown of UX Job Titles
The percentages in this section are based on the total number of UX job postings we manage using Recruitics technology.
Skill Set of a UX Professional
In our search for a list of skills that came from a reputable source and painted the most complete picture of the incredibly broad range of skills UX professional possess, the “Claimed Skills” section of the A List Apart Survey, 2010 fit the bill on these two points.
With that said, we received great feedback on additional resources that offered more targeted and detailed explanations of various UX and UX related skills sets. We’ve included these links below:
- Essential and Desirable Skills for a UX Designer – UX Matters
- Competency Survey, 2004 – The Information Architecture Institute
- Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills – UIE.com
We appreciate all of the feedback regarding this section and understand that the UX community is passionate and filled with highly motivated professionals who aim to define their industry appropriately while it is in the high growth stage.
UX Tools of the Trade
This list of UX tools is the result of online research and conversations with established members of the UX community. Many of the tools in each section are interchangeable for a combination of research, design and prototyping purposes.
Here are just a few additional resources that explain the vast variety of tools used by user experience professionals:
- Learning IA, Tools – Information Architecture Institute
- What is User Experience Design: Overview, Tools and Resources – UX Design, Smashing Magazine
- 25 Great Free UX Tools – UX For the Masses
- User Experience Tools – UX Booth
- Prototyping: Picking the Right Tool – UIE.com
- 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources – Smashing Magazine
We hope this gives you more insight into the UX Careers Guide as well as a ton of other useful information that we just couldn’t fit into one infographic. We’ve paid close attention to every comment, suggestion and question you had and look forward to incorporating all your feedback into future iterations of the UX Careers Guide.
Thanks again for all the feedback and best of luck with your exciting career in user experience!
