In todays class we looked at what it is actually like working in the UX industry, and what our role is in a company as a UX designer.
We started off the class by going onto LinkedIn and actually looking at jobs ourselves that are going at the minute. In our groups we noted down what qualifications, requirements, skills, qualities, and traits they are looking for in UX designers. I chose Perforce, a DevOps company based in Belfast. What I found was what I expected, with skills such as user research, usability testing, sketching and mockups, wireframes, technical skills etc. What did surprise me was the emphasis on communication and team-working ability. This is because you would be working a lot with developers, engineers, project managers, and business analysts. Being able to present and communicate solutions and ideas to these people is just as important to actually designing them. Affinity diagraming what we found helped us organise and analyse what aspects are most important to the job
When developing real life projects, it works a bit different than the way we do our projects here in university. We will be working under a project manager, who’s job it is to ensure that the project meets the deadline. A business analyst aims to meet the goals and targets of the business, whereas we as UX designers we focus more on the users who are actually using the product, so that the product designed around their need. Developers build the code for the product, and QA engineers will check the code and ensure that it can’t be hacked or bunked, and meets quality standards.
Agile methodology is an iterative approach to developing software, which focuses on flexibility and collaboration. It focuses on smaller areas and cycles, which are called sprints. This is different to the waterfall approach, where products are developed in a large, single delivery. Agile helps to get a MVP out, and able to be used for testing and iteration. Sprints normally last 2 weeks or 10 days, and focus on building each user story at a time. At the end of each sprint, the aim is to have a piece of code that is able to be tested. Agile is used a lot in the industry, as it known for getting things moving and designing iteratively and incrementally. UX designers will work ahead of the rest of the team, to allow time for research, ideation, wire-framing, and design.
Todays class was very interesting. It was cool to look at UX jobs and understand better what skills and qualities that the industry is looking for. Learning about the development process and the different team members was interesting, as this is such a key part of a UX job. Understanding agile methodology was helpful as this is a common way that companies develop products, so learning how it works will be helpful, especially going on placement next year.