Notes From the Field
Part 1: Entering the Human Factors Job Market
by Andrew Wong
Last year, I had a first-hand look at the job market for interaction designers. This series documents my experiences, and will hopefully provide some insight for students about to make a similar move.
At the beginning of 2004, I was the sole user interface (UI) designer for 2Wire, a San Jose company that makes the popular HomePortal residential gateway. I was hired in 2001 to primarily handle the interaction and visual design for the HomePortal UI. At the time, my main deliverables were final art and static prototypes for the engineers to integrate with their back-end code.
Then, around the beginning of 2003, my role seriously shifted from UI design to almost entirely UI development. The new work was interesting and I learned a lot, but by Spring 2004, over a year had passed and I had not done any significant design work. Recognizing this, I wanted to return to a user-centered, design-oriented team environment.
Because usability research was not on the horizon at 2Wire, I began looking for other companies that value the iterative user-centered design process. By working as an individual contributor and designing on my own for so long, I felt isolated from the design community, and out of touch with what companies were looking for in my line of work.
My first step was to restart my professional network. I joined BayCHI and began volunteering as a developer on their intranet. It proved to be a fruitful networking opportunity, as I was able to meet some of the top HCI professionals in the area. I didn’t start out as an interaction designer from the HCI discipline, so it was good for me to gain more insight into the field.
SURVEYING THE FIELD
I also began subscribing to the BayCHI Job Bank, a weekly newsletter for members. It features job listings from employers and recruiters seeking UI design and usability research professionals. I studied the qualifications that employers were requiring, and began applying for the opportunities that interested me.
I found that the job title associated most often with what I wanted to do was “interaction designer.” It seemed that the term “information architecture” has become more or less a relic of the dot-com era. Also, while there were still several openings for jacks- or jills-of-all-trades, “UI” was becoming more specialized.
Back in the old days, designers like us did everything: the user-task analysis, wire-frames, flows, specifications, look and feel, and prototypes. Now there are distinct roles for interaction designers, visual designers, usability researchers, (occasionally) information architects, prototypers, and UI developers or engineers. The job descriptions vary for these roles, but there is definitely much more specialization within the field now than there was five years ago.
At the time, around the end of 2003, there were very few openings in the Bay Area — the economy and job market were still really hurting. I was betting it would improve in 2004 because it would be an election year. But because the job openings were so scarce, employers were being extremely choosy with their hiring, often listing requirements so steep that the crop of qualified candidates would be extremely narrow.
Some employers were asking for designers with deep usability research or cognitive psychology backgrounds, and also with technical implementation experience! Surely candidates who are equally strong in development, design, and research — so strong that you could dedicate them to any one of the three areas — would be few and far between.
HUMAN FACTORS IS HOT
While the job descriptions looked unrealistic, they did give me an idea of what was out there. I noticed a trend: organizations are increasingly looking to HCI and human factors professionals to handle UI design, specifically interaction design. There appears to be another kind of conservative swing these days: an industry backlash against creative types (graphic designers or multimedia producers) designing UIs.
I think this is a result of the dot-com bubble, when organizations tried to top one another in making web sites and user interfaces cool and hip. A lot of creative folks also got hired over HCI people during that time, when more and more software started moving toward web-based interfaces, and companies confused web-based UI design with web site design. Ultimately, companies got burned when they alienated users with attractive, clever but unusable products.
So in some ways, the demand for human factors expertise has increased for the wrong reasons: some companies don’t necessarily understand the value of user-centered design, but just want to play it safe. They seem to be following a trend: overlooking creative and visual aspects of design in favor of academic backgrounds in HCI, human factors, or cognitive psychology. To them, these are more reliable and easier-to-measure indications of a designer’s ability.
The message seems to be that if you have a creative background, or if your portfolio is flashy and aesthetically appealing, you can’t possibly be a serious UI designer! Hiring managers are pigeonholing candidates with creative backgrounds, without looking beyond their actual expertise and experience. Some of the hiring companies I encountered in the past two years have solid reputations in the CHI community, and established organizations dedicated to best practices in user experience design. Others seemed to be hiring human factors people just because it was what everyone else was doing.
TO BE CONTINUED… See next issue for insight on going back to school and the interview process.
