What Do You Need to Be Successful in Your Usability Job in 2009?
Posted on January 7th, 2009 in Usability | 8 Comments »
There are some big changes coming for me in 2009 and I’m really excited about it. My career and my personal life are going to morph substantially. It’s really exciting.
I know that some people are really being squeezed right now but most of us still have work. We’ve got jobs or clients to help. We’re all still fighting to get ahead and improve. We’re trying to live a meaningful life while doing usability and user experience work.
Well, I’ve got a favor to ask you. I need to know what YOU need to succeed in your usability career. I’m not talking about help with your job exactly. I’m looking to better understand what tools and information you need. Please post your comment.
There are no wrong answers. And, I think that other usability professionals will appreciate your requests. Please really think about what will make your job rock and roll. I’d love to know.
~ John
8 Responses
Since 2009 will be the year, I’ll write more in English, I would like to know where to find the profession trainer that I pay to teach me English at expert level, I pay him some virtual gold, and fire will be all around me, and then I’ve learned it. Just like in World of Warcraft.
Too bad that isn’t possible in real life, too ;-)
Okay, seriously, I would like to know where to go to improve my English next to perfection. I’m talking about grammar, spelling, expressions etc. (I have WhiteSmoke.)
Two word: dreams and aspirations.
They motivate you and keep you passionate to do your job.
1. To get a CUA
2. More reading and learning
3. Inspiration from Usability Kings
4. Growing recognition
In 2009, it will become more important to show the value of usability professionals in agile development environments. Gone are the times of long expensive projects. We need to be able to show tie our work to executive and management priorities (increase revenue, reduce cost), not only for the company we happen to work for but we need to help the clients we have achieve these goals too. These priorities have always been there, it is just more important then ever to tie what we are doing directly to executive priorities.
Like @John Muller writes, the key to being a better UX/usability consultant will definitely be tied to being able to adapt to a much more “perpetual beta” world of development. My little company here in Montreal has been around for ten years doing usability, UX and AI work, and gone are the long-winded web projects that required multi-user, multi-week testing and tweaking. I personally think the classical “website” and the “web page” is concept is done for. Web strategies now span multiple sites, most of which are not even under our control (facebook, for example). It is harder and harder to design and own the user experience in the way we once could. This will require huge change in thinking for a lot of practicioners. One thing I am doing is evolving towards merging Web analytics and UX. There is a great deal to be done in this area, and it is in direct continuation with the more “scientific” approach already used by a lot of usability research methods.
Like Jean-francois Petit says, i find that its important for UX specialist to use what they can learn from SEO, analytics, social media marketing, Adwords, landing page optimization to improve the contribution we make
I think what I need is to conduct more case studies and field tests than I do now, it will also be great if I can do some usability tests using eye tracking and analyze more click trail heatmaps, search logs, and users log files to find trends. Understanding user behavior more and more is my target for this year.
For people to understand the value of ongoing and iterative research to help uncover and design forward — all this towards understanding customer need and business value.