It was June of 2008 and I was a research director, working in-house at K12.com. I had gotten in my head that maybe it was time to go freelance and after giving it a lot of thought, I decided that the decision was the logical ...
I represent the fifth generation of my family to live in Maryland and have spent about 35 years of my life here in the state. For the past 15 of those years, I’ve lived in the DC suburbs of Silver Spring in Montgomery County, solidly ...
As user experience professionals, we’re a passionate lot. We care deeply about the user – the customers that we design for. We look for meaning. We feel empathy, sometimes painfully so. But in our drive to help those users have meaningful interactions with the products ...
When I started in user research in 1994 I was titled a “human factors engineer” although I did neither human factors as we’d understand it today nor any kind of engineering. I’ve been privileged to watch user research evolve and grow and grow and grow ...
On turning 40 Since my teenage years, I’ve always tried to do some kind of exercise. In those days, I’d go running with my father, go biking on the streets of Baltimore County and go swimming at the pool where I worked as a lifeguard. ...
It was the end of 1994 and fresh out of college, I was hired for my first UX role as a research consultant. I proudly started out in the workforce as a “human factors engineer.” In today’s parlance, I was neither doing human factors nor ...
For the most part, my user research and evaluation freelance work comes through referrals. That means I spend my business development time on being visible and present in the UX/tech world, and then work comes through either people who know me personally or who refer ...
LinkedIn recently published a list of 50 Top Companies in the US and along with that list an inventory of the skills that hiring managers are looking for. As I reviewed the list of skills that were most in demand from the top companies, however, ...
I often hear from my UX colleagues that they are thinking of going off on their own. They tell me that they’re ready to make the leap to freelancing and think that they have found their first gig – maybe it’s a 3-month contract, or ...
For much of my UX career, I’ve been pretty solidly tied to the Washington DC region. While I’ve never committed to any one specific industry, just given the amount of Federal UX work that has been available locally, Federal-related contracts have been responsible for a ...
Right at the anniversary of my first Lynda.com / LinkedIn Learning course, I had the opportunity to head out once again to sunny Carpinteria, California. I got to record two new courses, both focused on a topic near to my heart - being a freelancer! ...
I’ve enjoyed working as a freelancer for the past 8 years and have largely found that I can maintain a workload that matches what can be done by myself and Edie (the second person on my two-person team). Occasionally, however, the workload goes beyond what ...
If you have seen “careers” and “artificial intelligence” in the same sentence, it’s likely because there is yet another article wondering whether certain jobs will soon be done faster and more reliably by an intelligent algorithm. Employers who hire UX professionals needn’t worry about their ...
As I considered the cover of the forthcoming UX Careers Handbook (and as a researcher myself), I did a review of the construction of other UX books to see how others had constructed their covers. A number of book covers only had stylized text. Others ...
As a user experience (UX) consultant/freelancer with a small business, whenever there is a new project opportunity, I need to decide whether or not to accept the project. I have to think about how well the project fits with the existing skillset and schedule for ...
No! Yet another [infographic / article / explanation] on what the true difference is between UX and UI design, or between UX and UI development, or between UX design, UI design and UX/UI design. Or between UX development, UI development and UX/UI development. Gah! It ...
Although I announced that I was writing a UX Careers Handbook in mid-December 2014, it wasn’t until mid-January that I actually started putting the virtual pen to paper and writing the book. I’m excited to say that two weeks ago—five months and 82,000 words later—I ...
As a user experience professional, you know that your field is a hot one, but in the grand scheme of things, UX careers as we know them today have not been around for all that long. So you decide that you need some perspective. You ...
While I’m aware that politically insensitive writing often generates way more discussion than writing that walks a political middle ground, I have always tried to keep my blog posts and articles appropriately balanced and written in such a way that nobody in the mainstream will ...
On a recent Saturday afternoon my kids were getting antsy, and as we watched the temperatures remain far below freezing, they turned to the bookshelf to see if they could find anything interesting. Before I knew it, my Randallstown High School yearbook was placed in ...
It’s been only a little over two months since I announced that I’d be starting on a new journey writing a book about UX careers - in fact, the first book that comprehensively covers the broad umbrella that makes up this hot career field since, well, ...
I am excited to announce the kickoff of one of my most intriguing adventures yet: writing a book on UX careers for Focal Press! While there are plenty of career books and plenty of UX methods books on the market, there is no one comprehensive ...
At least once a day I get a message from a recruiter offering some new job for which the recruiter thinks I’d be a great fit. While I do appreciate knowing that I’m findable and in lots of databases of potential candidates, I am often ...
Note: The basic tenants of a “UX adventure” are covered in more detail in the UX Magazine article: UX Adventure: Enhance your resume, improve your career potential, and feel the excitement! In London this past week at the UXPA 2014 conference the closing keynote speaker, ...
While “white-labeling” has been associated most commonly with limited-edition musical recordings, it has also come to refer to a situation where a product or service is provided to a company and that company then sells that product or service under their own brand. For a ...
As a senior in college in 1994, I started my first job in my existing career pathway. I got an internship with a relatively new company, Man-Made Systems (later known as UserWorks), as a human factors engineer, doing today what would be termed user research ...
I frequently receive email messages from recruiters, asking whether they can submit my name to their client for some UX job or other. I always like reading the job descriptions because they help me to stay current on what skills are most in demand in ...
I was in Austin, Texas recently and, following the rules of UX Adventure, I took the opportunity to coordinate with some Austin UXers to meet at a local bar. On the day of the meetup, I checked my Twitter account and noticed that our rendezvous ...
Since I left the W-2 world in 2008, my work flow has been pretty much non-stop with an average of perhaps 35 hours a week of billable time and another 10 hours per week of non-billable time. The non-billable time was spent largely on things ...
In early November 2010, I was finishing up my first year as the president of the UXPA DC chapter and was in San Antonio on a separate user research project with the then UXPA DC VP, Jen Romano Bergstrom. One evening, after the research had ...
For most of my career as a UX consultant, I have worked full time on some company’s payroll. A number of years back, one very large consulting organization hired me for a 6-month, full-time gig, working on site for a client. When, at the appointed ...
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard UX professionals say that they are introverts. Sometimes they tell me directly, and sometimes it just comes up in a group conversation. At other times, I’ve heard it from speakers at conferences. Is it true? ...
Investors are advised to make sure that they have diversity in their portfolio. By diversifying into multiple types of investments and different kinds of industries, there is a safety in knowing that if one type of investment fails, there are other investments that will still ...
I’ve been an avid reader of RSS feeds for many years and use a number of RSS feeds to stay on top of things in the UX world. If you’re not familiar with RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, it represents a data feed. With a ...
While at the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) International conference last month in Washington, D.C., I spent a lot of time talking with attendees. I heard all sort of interesting things there, but one simple comment resonated with me: as an attendee looked around the ...
For many of us who have UX careers, it's likely that we find numerous aspects of our work pretty exciting. But exciting work will always wax and wane as UX projects come and go. While your salary may be constant, you may not always enjoy ...
Networking is critical regardless of what your career is. That said, by definition user experience is centered on understanding people: the people we design for, the people that participate in our research studies, and the people that ultimately use our end products. Give your UX ...
Update 3/29/13: This blog was the basis for: Article: Lebson, Cory. 2013. "UX Adventure: Enhance your resume, improve your career potential, and feel the excitement!" UX Magazine, Article No. 983. March 22, 2013. Radio Show: Lebson, Cory. 2013. "How to Turn your Tech Career into ...
[Update 3/29/13: This post was part of the basis for Lebson, Cory. "Care About Your UX Career? Network Now!" User Experience Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 1 (First Quarter 2013).] By the time Twitter emerged into the public sphere, I was already primed as a regular LinkedIn ...
[Update 3/29/13: This post was part of the basis for Lebson, Cory. "Care About Your UX Career? Network Now!" User Experience Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 1 (First Quarter 2013).] It was 2003 and a good friend from high school who had moved to Japan sent ...
