Want to land your next (or first) UX job?UX is hot these days, but the competition for jobs is fierce. When it¿s you against 200 other applicants, you must stand out. Are you stressing over your portfolio? Second-guessing your resume? Obsessing about what crazy questions or design exercises they might throw at you during an interview?In How to Get a UX Design Job, UX veteran Lisa Murnan shows you how to:- Design everything for your ¿users¿ (hint: recruiters, hiring managers, and potential teammates) - Create an Applicant Tracking System-friendly resume that gets you noticed by a real, live person- Write a cover letter that shows off your personality- Design a UX portfolio with substance that will impress recruiters and hiring managers- Build a professional online presence with your website, LinkedIn, and other social media- Answer common UX interview questions with confidence- Master the art of the in-person design exerciseWritten by a UX designer for UX designers, this practical, tactical handbook will help you take your user experience career to the next level.

Real critique has become a lost skill among collaborative teams today. Critique is intended to help teams strengthen their designs, products, and services, rather than be used to assert authority or push agendas under the guise of "feedback." In this practical guide, authors Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry teach you techniques, tools, and a framework for helping members of your design team give and receive critique. Using firsthand stories and lessons from prominent figures in the design community, this book examines the good, the bad, and the ugly of feedback. Youâ??ll come away with tips, actionable insights, activities, and a cheat sheet for practicing critique as a part of your collaborative process. This book covers: Best practices (and anti-patterns) for giving and receiving critique Cultural aspects that influence your ability to critique constructively When, how much, and how often to use critique in the creative process Facilitation techniques for making critiques timely and more effective Strategies for dealing with difficult people and challenging situations

Since Don't Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug's guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it's one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject. Now Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don't Make Me Think a classic-with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it's still short, profusely illustrated...and best of all-fun to read. If you've read it before, you'll rediscover what made Don't Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you've never read it, you'll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites. "After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book." -Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards

Get Into UX book is a career advice book written to help new and experienced designers get unstuck in their pursuits to get UX jobs. The UX field has been booming for years, and as a result, a landslide of new talent has been flooding the market. All of the newcomers want to learn user experience design or research as fast as possible and get paid professional positions. However, only a fraction of them breaks into the field. On the one hand, you have young designers struggling to find jobs, and on the other hand, managers who can’t find enough experienced talent. Often this is attributed to uninformed gurus, hasty bootcamps and other get-into-UX-quick schemes that overpromise, but never make anyone fully market-ready. Why do they not work? As a discipline, UX is too complex to graduate into overnight. It requires months and often years of commitment to do it justice. That doesn’t mean you cannot shorten this journey. This book is a foolproof guide to correct course and help UX researchers and designers like you focus on the right things to get the job you want. Every chapter is written to give you insights and practical tools that you need to: Set yourself apart from the majority of entry and junior-level applicants by genuinely understanding what UX is and what it isn't; It's time to distil user experience design into an effective workflow that adds clarity and pulls you out of the crowd of the unsure. Set up your UX career for long term success; learn the craft that is challenging, rewarding and futureproof. This means buckling up for the long term development but starting now. Overcome the self-sabotaging actions by focusing on the right things. Have you ever wondered why some UX designers get ahead quickly, and others don’t? Hint: it's rarely to do with external factors. Shorten your journey from beginner to pro by using field-proven strategies and specific tactics. You’ll learn how to go from awareness to 'can do' without getting stuck. Ace your UX portfolio, resumes, and interviews by showcasing your skills in the right way and for the right audiences. We'll unpack the essentials and the small yet critical detail to get your foot in the door. In this book you will find a few sections with the following progressive to your journey chapters: I: Understand what UX is and what it isn’t II: Plan your future in UX III: Gain a deep understanding of UX IV: Practice UX and collect the evidence along the way V: Demonstrate the evidence VI: Get the job VII: Build forward momentum About the author Vy (Vytautas) Alechnavicius is a design leader, seasoned and award-winning user experience and user research team manager, hiring manager and design educator to many. Over the past decade, Vy has been involved in UX driven projects from public services, healthcare, finance, transport, retail, and many other industries. Vy has established and grown small-to-large experience design and research teams, mentored and up-skilled the up-and-coming UX designers, and helped shape local and wider-reach design communities. On a typical day, you’ll find him in his office working on the next project, most recently that’s been focussed on giving back to the wider experience design community.

The A-to-Z guide to spotting and fixing usability problems Frustrated by pop-ups? Forms that make you start over if you miss a field? Nonsensical error messages? You're not alone! This book helps you simply get it right the first time (or fix what's broken). Boasting a full-color interior packed with design and layout examples, this book teaches you how to understand a user's needs, divulges techniques for exceeding a user's expectations, and provides a host of hard won advice for improving the overall quality of a user's experience. World-renowned UX guru Eric Reiss shares his knowledge from decades of experience making products useable for everyone...all in an engaging, easy-to-apply manner. Reveals proven tools that simply make products better, from the users' perspective Provides simple guidelines and checklists to help you evaluate and improve your own products Zeroes in on essential elements to consider when planning a product, such as its functionality and responsiveness, whether or not it is ergonomic, making it foolproof, and more Addresses considerations for product clarity, including its visibility, understandability, logicalness, consistency, and predictability Usable Usability walks you through numerous techniques that will help ensure happy customers and successful products!

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of the site owner and its users. There’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, management skills, and business savvy. That’s where the updated edition of this important book comes in. With new information on design principles, mobile and gestural interactions, content strategy, remote research tools and more, you’ll learn to: Recognize the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives Understand approaches such as Waterfall, Agile, and Lean UX Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep Conduct user research in person or remotely, and document your findings Understand and communicate user behavior with personas Design and prototype your application or site Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance

Whether you’re designing consumer electronics, medical devices, enterprise Web apps, or new ways to check out at the supermarket, today’s digitally-enabled products and services provide both great opportunities to deliver compelling user experiences and great risks of driving your customers crazy with complicated, confusing technology. Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines. It also takes the ability to come up with the big ideas that make a desirable product or service, as well as the skill and perseverance to execute on the thousand small ideas that get your design into the hands of users. It requires expertise in project management, user research, and consensus-building. This comprehensive, full-color volume addresses all of these and more with detailed how-to information, real-life examples, and exercises. Topics include assembling a design team, planning and conducting user research, analyzing your data and turning it into personas, using scenarios to drive requirements definition and design, collaborating in design meetings, evaluating and iterating your design, and documenting finished design in a way that works for engineers and stakeholders alike.

The User Experience Team of One prescribes a range of approaches that have big impact and take less time and fewer resources than the standard lineup of UX deliverables. Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you're a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.

In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at interaction designers. It shows how to drill down and simplify user experiences when designing digital tools and applications. It begins by explaining why simplicity is attractive, explores the laws of simplicity, and presents proven strategies for achieving simplicity. Remove, hide, organize and displace become guidelines for designers, who learn simplicity by seeing before and after examples and case studies where the results speak for themselves.

This second edition of The UX Careers Handbook offers you all the great advice of the first edition—freshly updated—plus a new chapter on critical soft skills, much more on becoming a UX leader, and a 17th user experience (UX) career pathway. The UX Careers Handbook, Second Edition, offers you an insider's advice on learning, personal branding, networking skills, building your resume and portfolio, and actually landing that UX job you want, as well as an in-depth look at what it takes to get into and succeed in a UX career. Whether your interests include design, information architecture, strategy, research, UX writing, or any of the other core UX skillsets, you'll find a wealth of resources in this book. The book also includes: Insights and personal stories from a range of industry-leading UX professionals to show you how they broke into the industry and evolved their own careers over time Activities and worksheets to help you make good decisions and build your career Along with the book, you can explore its companion website with more resources and information to help you stay on top of this fast-changing field. Not only for job seekers, The UX Careers Handbook, Second Edition, is a must-have for Employers and recruiters who want to better understand how to hire and keep UX staff Undergraduate and graduate students thinking about their future careers Professionals in other careers who are thinking about starting to do UX work Cory Lebson has been a UX consultant and user researcher for over two decades. He is Principal and Owner of a small UX research consultancy, a builder of UX community, and a past president of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). Not only a practitioner of UX, Cory teaches and mentors to help professionals grow their UX skills and conducts regular talks and workshops on topics related to both UX skills and career development.