User Experience Design

CHAPTER 48A NEWBIE PRACTITIONER’S GAME PLAN: The successful career transitions of an architect and a communication graduate

User experience practitioners have rewarding careers: They get to have a big impact on people’s lives, while enjoying a high level of intellectual and creative challenge. In addition, demand for UX practitioners has been growing globally: More than 100,000 are needed in the next few years. Needless to say, there is a huge opportunity for people with the right aptitude and mindset to make a shift into this new career path. Here are the scenarios of two newbie practitioners. Scott is an architect who wants to build a career in interaction experience design. Janet is a college intern at an e‐commerce business who wants to make an impact.

From Communication to User Research Practitioner: Janet’s Game Plan

Janet is a recent graduate with a major in communication and sociology. She’s intrigued by how people communicate and interact in different contexts and appreciates ethnography as a method to build insights. In her junior year at college, Janet worked at a technology company as a marketing intern. She helped create a few different campaign messages and could see the direct impact of messaging and human behavior on a marketing site. This intrigued Janet. As she wrapped up her internship, she started to look into user research as a career option and discovered ...