Ask HN: How do you find a great UX person? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find a great UX person?

3 pointsrahimnathwani5 comments

There are lots of people who can draw UI mockups, and do some minor tweaking to make something a bit better. But it's hard to find and select for people who can take a set of requirements (e.g. what data needs to be collected, how easy it should be for the user on a mobile device, what proportion of people are we willing to lose during the flow, what messages do we want the user to take away etc.), come up with a variety of design concepts that address the requirements, and then work with product and engineering to figure out the details to ensure the preferred (or best-performing in A/B tests of specific pieces) design can be implemented. And then iterating on the result based on metrics.

There are obviously other things that great UX people do, but I'm curious how, in general you can:

- find candidates

- interview them in a way that tests whether they are willing and able to do the things listed above, and the other things that result in great, usable, high-converting, UX

Hi, professional UX person here.

A lot of UX candidates are going to self-select out from this description, because you're bringing them in too late in the process. You're assuming that the requirements that someone (who?) has come up with are remotely correct, and an experienced UX person knows that's nearly never the case. (Perhaps you have a well-validated stack of customer and market research completed! But I'm going to assume that, like most product teams, you don't.)

Industry studies have found that features and product ideas developed in isolation are wrong, 1/3 to 1/2 or more of the time, where "wrong" is defined as "doesn't move the needle in the way it was expected to."

An experienced UX person is going to want to come in before requirements, to help collect the requirements through understanding users and use cases, and to do the "variety of design concepts" at that stage, often even with active participation from dev, PM, and other stakeholders. (You'll see this called "design studio" or other types of participatory, facilitated design.)

Metrics and measurements are also best developed at that stage, and actively tested to make sure the concepts will affect them in the way everyone expects.

You may be having trouble because "taking" requirements is often something only done by production designers: people who make the final graphics for implementation.

You might have the best success by visiting your local design meetups and looking for a freelancer or consultant with at least several years of experience doing design research, user research, and facilitation, the more experience the better. Hire them to vet and interview candidates; they'll want to understand how your team works and what your expectations for the role are.

Listen to them if they suggest your expectations are misaligned with regards to an effective design process.

Thanks. This is very helpful. I didn't articulate well enough how I see UX as part of the overall design process.

I agree with your comment that 'An experienced UX person is going to want to come in before requirements'. This is especially true for pure software products.

For some things, though, the software is only a gateway into a wider thing. So for requirements, I wasn't thinking of a list of features, but more like requirements for the outcomes: 'When a customer visits the AirBnB site, they should be able to find and book somewhere to stay within 5 minutes'.

Do you think it's OK to bring in UX even when some of those requirements have been drafted (though not set in stone)? Or do you think that would put off someone great, who wants to start from the problem definition rather than partial solution?

EDIT: When I described my problem to friend, he suggested that what I actually wanted is someone who might describe themselves as a 'product designer'. What are the job title(s) that would resonate best with people who do the type of work you described in your comment?

> So for requirements, I wasn't thinking of a list of features, but more like requirements for the outcomes: 'When a customer visits the AirBnB site, they should be able to find and book somewhere to stay within 5 minutes'.

Any requirements are going to be constraints, and may not be reflective of reality, good practices, market needs, user expectations, etc. In your example, discovery and purchase are often not performed in the same transaction/visit/mental process. Different modalities will result in different realistic time constraints. A UX person brought in to come up with "a variety of design concepts" is going to pitch discovery (vacation planning, pinterest-style aspirational ideation, reading travel stories, etc.) as independent from purchase (booking last minute, booking for the future, booking for a specific destination, booking for a specific cost, etc.). If time (efficiency, shorter is better) is a metric they're going to pitch time (time to bounce, longer is better) instead.

Any constraints are going to limit your possibilities, and might result in a local maximum. If you're okay with that, fine, just say it up front, so everyone is on the same page.

UX job titles are pretty varied, because UX roles tend to fill the space left by whatever expertise the product team is missing, whether research, or user contact, or interaction design, or visual design, etc. Again, I think you'd be better served by looking for types of experience.

Designer, UX designer, product designer, UX strategist, all might work as titles. Someone with research experience is probably necessary, but someone that is a dedicated researcher probably won't also be able to do the design work, and someone that specializes in visual design probably won't be able to do the research.

Does that help?

Thanks again.

Some constraints are inevitable in most businesses that are making money with a particular business model. So a UX designer brought in to a razor blade company that sells online may have to work with that and help sales of blades through the online channel, even if the research and intuition support some other better way to serve those customers (a chain of local barbershops), or that some other need (hair styling creams) will be more profitable.

What I'm understanding from your posts is that deciding what, if any, constraints there are up front, and communicating those to potential candidates, will help people self-select.

> - find candidates

In the past, I've used sites like dribbble, but that's not always a great indication of UX. Sometimes beautiful designs aren't usable at all, and UX really comes down to process (and being enthusiastic about tedious research and iteration).

Most recently, I just used LinkedIn to contact some UX people behind products I liked. If they weren't looking for a new job or a side project, they could usually recommend other people who were good and shared their values.

> - interview them in a way...

I think their past work is going to tell you more than the interview. You may have some core philosophy things that you want to be in sync on, but it's really hard to tell if someone can execute just by asking them questions that boil down to, "Can you execute?" Everyone thinks they can, and many of them are wrong.

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