Yunnuo "Yuno" Cheng (程云诺) interned with Nielsen Norman Group 3 years ago. Jakob Nielsen caught up with her to ask how the internship experience relates to her current job and what advice she has for current students on what to look for in a UX internship.
A portfolio highlighting your design process and past work shows others who you are as a designer. The process of creating a UX-design portfolio allows you to reflect on your skills and achievements.
The portfolio of UX professionals (whether experienced, entry-level, or career-changers) should present both projects and deliverables. Tell a story for your user (the hiring manager).
A portfolio of past projects can advance the career of a UX researcher. Present the right work, summarize your findings, and communicate clearly to showcase your skills.
How to find a mentor, based on empirical research into mentorship in the UX field. A mentor can be a peer, supervisor, or someone in a role that you admire, inside or outside of your current workplace.
UX practitioners who feel inept at their job usually face far greater challenges than improving their design, craft or research prowess. Rather, addressing development schedules, Agile, Scrum, Lean, and team members’ roles can create the greatest challenges.
The field of user experience requires skills from many different areas. Because of this, there are many unique journeys into UX. Hear stories from NN/g conference attendees about how they got into the field.
What do successful user experience professionals have in common? Empathy. It’s the ability to understand the perspective and motivations of other people.
Many new UX practitioners often put pressure on themselves to be perfect and feel disappointed when things don’t go their way. There’s a lot more to UX than being correct.
UX constitutes many different specialties such as researcher, interaction designer, visual designer, copywriter, and information architect. Forcing one person to do it all is a prescription for mediocrity.
The UX profession has grown substantially since 1950 everywhere in the world. Even so, the expected growth until 2050 will dwarf anything we’ve seen so far.
Many organizations claim to be user-centric. Yet they fail to include users in the development process. Without customer input, organizations risk creating bad interfaces.
Over the last several years, entry-level UX salaries have dropped, while pay for experienced user experience staff has been more stable. (Updated to 2019.)
To develop UX insights and skills, define how many hours you should spend observing actual user behavior each year. Junior staff need more hours; senior people can get by with fewer annual user-exposure hours.
Across a thousand UX professionals we found high job satisfaction and extreme diversity in terms of hugely varying educational background, 210 job titles, and wide-ranging work roles and activities.
