It’s always great to see former colleagues doing awesome things. Take Daniel Makoski, who I worked with at Microsoft a few years ago. He’s now with Motorola Mobility, and he led the Project Ara team. Here’s his TEDxSanDiego talk about it:
Monthly Archives: February 2014
Q&A: Good websites for user researchers looking for a job
On Quora, someone anonymously asked me to answer this question:
What are the best job boards or professional organizations with job postings, specifically for User Researchers?
I’m not sure that there is a best job board for User Researchers. There are many fewer jobs for researchers than there are designers, which makes finding positions more challenging.
For positions in the San Francisco Bay Area, BayCHI is an excellent resource. You have to pay for a annual membership to get access to its Job Bank, which is well worth it. BayCHI also gets some job postings for companies who are headquartered in the Bay Area (or have a significant presence here) but are looking for people in other locations. BayCHI covers all of user experience, not just research; my unscientific glance over the past few weekly emails says that 10-20% of the job ads posted there in any given week are for researchers. Also, the monthly BayCHI meetings are good places to network, which might be an even better way of finding out about a position.
On Twitter, there are a few UX job aggregators. The one that I’ve found with the most researcher jobs is @UXdesignjobs. It, like BayCHI, does not focus on UX research jobs, so you will have to filter out the design jobs that aren’t relevant to you. They do have a good mix of jobs at US companies.
A good Glassdoor search can also reveal appropriate user researcher positions, and they will automatically email you with new ads posted that meet your search terms. Glassdoor shows more jobs outside of the Bay Area. A good search is more likely to result in user researcher jobs; a few non-research jobs still sneak in. In general, the jobs that show up on Glassdoor are at larger companies, and their daily email can be repetitive.
Since you asked, I will note that my team at VMware is hiring user researchers. You can ping me directly if you’re interested in this role.
I’m not aware of a great job posting site for UX positions outside of the US. Perhaps someone else can share insight there.
I’ve generally found that having a robust LinkedIn profile is an excellent method for getting approached by recruiters. This might be a Bay Area bias showing, I’m not sure how pervasive LinkedIn is outside of the Bay Area. I do regularly get contacted by recruiters on LinkedIn from outside the Bay Area. I sometimes hear from recruiters who don’t get the difference between UX design and UX research, and I occasionally get recruiters who see “researcher” and think that I’m conducting scientific research. Overall, though, I think that my LinkedIn profile is one of the most useful tools when I am looking for a job.
on letting go
When I first started at VMware, I noticed that there was my User Experience team (about 25 people at that time, working mostly on vSphere and related applications), and that there were several individual interaction designers sprinkled throughout the company. I proposed that we all get together, and eventually, a two-day internal UX conference was born. I chaired it the first year and the second year.
Then I had to let it go. I explicitly said this to my conference committee, as well as my management, as I was working on it for the second year. This conference couldn’t just be my thing. If it was to have any legs, it had to become a VMware thing. So, vUE 2014 planning kicked off, and I am not part of its conference committee. I provide whatever assistance they ask me for, but I’m explicitly not part of the conference committee.
I did a lot to try to set up the future iterations of the conference for success. The first year, I did pretty much everything, with assistance from a small conference committee. The second year, I made some changes to the conference committee: I broke up the work into Conference Chair and Technical Chair (following the model used by many academic and industry conferences), and I made sure to choose my successor so that she could learn as much as possible from me. I was also aware that I was setting precedents, so I was very careful about what I chose to do (or not do).
Letting go is hard. I have a big investment in this conference. But it can’t be mine. It has to become something that VMware’s UX community owns. From the outside, they seem to be doing a fine job. It’s a bit odd to see the announcements coming out about the theme and how to submit papers and not be the one who sent them. I’m sure it will be even more strange to attend the conference as an attendee and not as its conference chair.
I’m so glad to see it continuing forward without my involvement. This tells me, more than anything, that it was truly something that VMware needed and continues to need. It tells me that it’s something that the VMware UX community values. It tells me that UX at VMware is vibrant and growing. It tells me that it was the right thing to do. I know some of the evolution that it has already undergone with new leadership (some that I anticipated and tried to make sure things were set up so that it could evolve in that direction, some that I never anticipated), and I’m sure that I’ll see more evolution when the event itself arrives.