On occasion, someone reaches out for advice about a career in User Experience (UX). I enjoy sharing my experience in the hopes it allows designers to progress quicker in their careers. One thing you'll find is that people come to UX from a myriad of backgrounds, and it's only a matter of filling in the gaps of knowledge.
Here are the four concepts I recommend gaining experience in:
Identify customer problems
Validate your design work
Facilitate collaboration
Develop business strategy
Identify Customer Problems
It's common for UX to be brought in to ensure something is designed with good usability. The problem with that approach is many decisions that will affect the final outcome have already been made. So while you may be able to create a usable design, we don't understand if we are making it useful by helping to solve a customer's problem.
There's a method called Customer Development, which turns the usual project process on its head. Customer Development is an interview-based method that allows you to discover customer problems or validate the existence of a problem you think they have. To learn more about this method, I recommend a book called Lean Customer Development.
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is another approach for discovering customer needs. It's a relatively new approach for User Experience designers. However, marketers have used it to position offers, and innovation teams use JTBD as a lens to develop new products and services. JTBD states a customer "hires" a product or service to help them make progress in their lives. The common phrase in JTBD is that "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" JTBD asks why they want a quarter-inch hole. If the customer wants to hang a picture on a wall, they may not need a drill at all. My article, Jobs to be Done Should be in Your User Experience Toolkit, talks more about Jobs to be Done.)
Regardless of which approach you use, make sure you involve your customers and users. You should validate your customers' problems before designing and developing a solution.
Validate Your Design Work
Getting customer feedback (interviews, usability studies, etc.…) is the most indispensable element of Experience Design. It is also, ironically, the most common step of the process to be discarded because of time pressure. Without customer validation for our work, we are just promoting the opinions of our business areas and ourselves. Closing feedback loops to learn how well our design works for our customers is critical to ensuring a project meets the customer's needs and business goals.
There are many books written on the subject. I find the Lean series to be excellent because they focus on closing feedback loops and learning, instead of building something for months and months (waste) without user validation. If your completely new to this, I recommend Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and Rocket Surgery Made Easy.
Facilitate Collaboration
This is where UX has the opportunity to be a leader. The idea of shared understanding is fundamental to UX. Involve everyone from the executives to the developers and in between. Use your facilitation skills to uncover tacit information that is valuable to the team and project. Ensure people genuinely understand the business goals, the target audience's goals, and the strategy that will bring it all together. There is a book I highly recommend called Gamestorming. This book is an excellent primer for the concept of divergent and convergent ideation and gives you a framework along with activities to run. The basic idea (which is also part of Design Thinking) is to think of many possible solutions to a problem, instead of one "golden" idea. For more information about facilitating collaboration, check out my article, Understanding and Influencing the User Experience.
Develop Business Strategy
In the past, UX has been the receiver of the business strategy. My goal has been to keep moving up the information chain until I'm part of the conversation. I've noticed the further up you go, the less you hear about actual customer problems. In my opinion, this is where UX has the opportunity to utilize the three previous skills I mentioned at a strategic level. Use the information you gained from learning about your customers to inform the business area as they make decisions. You can use your facilitation skills to help craft a vision and a mission for the strategy. Then you can speak with the customers to see if your solution actually makes sense and resonates. This is when you start to make useful products that solve customer problems. There has been plenty written on this by people a lot smarter than me. I recommend reading: The Design of Business, Playing to Win, and Running Lean. Also, look up the Lean Canvas for a framework for building a hypothesis to validate.
One Process Doesn't Rule Them All
If you haven't noticed, I don't believe one design process fits every project. I've used User-centered Design, Lean, Lean UX, Design Thinking, and probably many more processes over my career. I prefer to learn as much as possible from each approach and apply them as necessary to solve the problem at hand.
Thanks for reading! I hope you found this article helpful. Let me know your thoughts and any other topics I should cover.