A Quick Guide to Careers in UX
Wanting to get started in UX? Or just began your UX journey? Here are some career options for you to pursue!
UX design is a rapidly changing field with a projected 10-year growth rate of 15%. In fact, recruiters around the world are struggling to fill open positions for UX designers because the demand for people with these skills is outpacing the supply of available UX designers. That’s where you come in!
While it might be a little early to begin searching for jobs, its important context to know that “UX designer” is just one of many job titles within the broader user experience field.
To help you get started, this reading will explore a handful of different careers within the field of user experience.
Interaction Designer
Interaction designers focus on how a user interacts with the product and strive to make it easy to navigate and simple for users to interact with. They focus on designing the experience of a product and how it functions. They strive to understand the user flow, or the path, that a typical user takes to complete a task on an app, website, or other platforms.
Visual Designer
Visual designers focus on how a product or technology looks. They are often responsible for designing logos, illustrations, and icons, as well as deciding on font color, size, and placement. Visual designers focus on the layout of each page or screen and make all the design elements fit together in a visually appealing way.
UX Researcher
UX researchers conduct studies or interviews that examine how people use a product. UX researchers often identify pain points that users are experiencing and explore how products can help solve those problems. They also explore the usability of existing products, by asking users to complete tasks in an app or website, for example.
UX Writer
UX writers think about how to make the language within a product clearer so that the user experience is more intuitive. UX writers also help define a brand’s voice and personality. The work of UX writers often includes writing labels for buttons and determining the tone of language used within an app or website.
Motion Designer
Motion designers think about what it feels like for a user to move through a product and how to create smooth transitions between pages on an app or website. They may also create animations or visual effects to bring their design ideas to life.
VR/AR Designer
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) designers create products that provide users with immersive experiences, unbounded by the limits of the physical world. Virtual reality involves a wearable headset that takes over a user’s vision; it blocks out their physical surroundings and immerses them in a completely virtual world, whereas augmented reality uses the physical world as a backdrop and adds virtual elements on top of it. Users are still contextually aware of their surroundings, but their reality is augmented, or enhanced, by adding elements through a screen.
UX Program Manager
UX program managers ensure clear and timely communication, so that the process of building a useful product moves smoothly from start to finish. This might include setting goals, writing project plans, and allocating team resources.
UX Engineer
UX engineers translate the design’s intent into a functioning experience, like an app or a website. They help UX teams figure out if designs are intuitive and technically feasible.
Conversation Designer
Conversational interfaces are everywhere, from intelligent virtual assistants like Google Assistant and Siri, to interactive voice response systems like customer service systems you can talk to. Conversational interfaces even include automobile navigation systems and chatbots!
Conversation design incorporates natural, real-world conversational behaviors into the interactions between users and these systems.
Conversation designers make it possible for users to have natural conversations to get things done. They leverage user research, psychology, technical knowledge, and linguistics to create user experiences that are intuitive and engaging. Conversation designers develop the “persona” or personality of the voice, as well as the flow and dialog of the interaction.
Well, these are some career options you can pursue in UX!
Wishing you the best with your journey!
