I see this transition in titles all over the place at big SF companies like Adobe, which is disheartening because now I'm expected to have a dribblesque visual/graphic design skill set (least interesting aspect of design imo) with less emphasis on design thinking, more on delivering assets, front-end code and letting UX researchers focus on generative (most interesting)/evaluative (mostly interesting) research to inform us designers on what visual assets to design for developers (so much for that HCI degree!).
I feel like a commodity more often than not when competing with generic 10-week General Assembly UX grads that can throw together a sleek graphic heavy portfolio while my HCI degree is collecting dust because no hiring manager is going to read the pages of user research that back up my design decisions and because I lack the flashy, material designed dribble UI polish that is largely an exercise in branding, typography, and basic color theory than actually understanding user needs through traditional UX methods based on best practices.
The exception is at larger companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google who appreciate HCI grads but their projects often relate to advertising or some obscure product platform I could care less about. Maybe it's time to throw in the towel? Maybe I'm burnt out working on the usability of legacy products and making it look nice with the latest material design trends on top.
I'm interested in working on/solving big, "wicked" problems through UX design like self driving cars or improving healthcare. Should I get a PhD in HCI and focus on something fulfilling rather than improving the UX of boring SaaS CRUD apps?
There is a design pyramid which unfortunately build on top of each other for the majority of business use cases:
Graphic Designer -> UI Designer -> UX Designer -> Product Design -> Service Design
These are the levels of the pyramid at which the design process revolves around, depending on the need, for most products or services:
Visuals -> Web -> Experience -> Product -> Service
The narrative of it closely mirrors the history of many orgs:
Visuals: Hey our website looks like a database written by engineers, maybe we can make it pretty?
UI -> hey, we really need it to look like it belongs on the web, not just a RISD grad's art project, let's get someone who understands web design
UX -> okay, now our site looks like every other site. But no one uses it because it's still just a database with lipstick. Let's get some experience designers in here to make it better.
Product -> Okay, now our site has some nice experiences... but they are all disjointed and random and don't account for business needs... Let's get some product designers in here.
Service -> Okay, our product now is pretty cohesive and quite good... but there's a whole realm of things we have to do outside our product (Customer Service, service processes) that suck and are bringing the user experience down as a whole. Let's get some service designers in here...
In my opinion, this is the way most businesses think about design.
The key is that you're far along enough in your career that you should never be applying blind. Always try to get a warm intro and always try and schedule an informal meeting with the hiring manager before you go through the formal interview process. That way, they're not just reading pages of user research, they're seeing how that user research affects your process & how you think about problems.
Almost nobody who is currently being hired to work on big wicked problems are getting there by throwing their resume into a pile so the process isn't designed to see those people out. The way to get those jobs is to be the only person they were ever even considering for that job.
They are getting closer, but not quite. Consider two analogies:
1. Craigslist v. AirBnB to get a short term rental apartment. Both are arguably the same "product", the differentiation is that AirBnB has a much better UX experience.
2. eBay v. Sothebys to put goods on auction. Here, it's not really UX that differentiates them, it's product-market fit.
In the second example, a product designer would arguably be a better fit for differentiating the technical and business processes. A UX designer would then implement those ideas in the precise user flow.
To me product designer means someone who's a hybrid, an alrounder - basically a UX designer with following traits:
- good research and analytical skills
- decent or great visual design skills
- ability to create sophisticated prototypes (not just creating hot-mapped images)
- someone who has good technical knowledge, so they don't design something that's going to be really difficult and expensive to build
- someone who considers product and business matters, i.e. ability to strike the balance between user and business needs.
What are you hoping a PhD will give you?
I'm not sure where you are, but if you want to use your skills for something good, why not try to help your government - improving their online services etc.
See for example what the UK did to their government sites - a great investment that made it easier for millions of people to understand and use their online services.
One example: https://beta.nhs.uk/service-manual/design-principles/
edit: formatting issues
For the most part, HCI professors don't care about healthcare and healthcare mostly doesn't care about HCI, for non-obvious reasons.
If you want to work on self-driving cars, maybe get a MS in machine learning and HCI (or human-centered AI if you can make that happen)? If you want to improve healthcare, maybe get a healthcare degree.
(Update: if I were a professor in HCI I might actually tell you yes, come work with/for me ;)
We need more people with these ambitions. Maybe you should be looking to create a forward-looking design firm focusing on the hard problems, rather than looking for a “job”.
Having said that, I know folks with master's degrees and PhD degrees who are great UX and product designers doing cool work on autonomous vehicles, drones, etc, so the path really depends on what you're most interested in as well as how lucky you are in finding a good match.
Material Design is especially bad on just about every level, including taste and animation accessibility. (People should do more research on animation accessibility before making things move on the page.)
If you want to focus on visual language, iconography, and how graphics communicate, an unconventional, yet highly-regarded choice is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What Norman does for interaction, McCloud does for visual communication (and does so, appropriately, in the form of a comic book).
I'd also highly recommend Spence's own book: Information Visualisation. I don't work in HCI/UX at all, but I enjoyed it a lot; it does an excellent job of showing that it's much more than 'just' (sorry!) artsy design.
I'm familiar with the academic research in paper prototyping (for background, I have a Ph.D. in CS [HCI], have been a HCI course assistant, and published in academic HCI/design conferences).
To say that paper prototyping is the best implies a certain design philosophy, team structure, and organizational culture. It requires a certain buy-in, level of trust, and design pace that are not appropriate for all industries. There are reasons why most professional UI/UX design tools go to the pixel level, and why sketching interfaces never took off in practice.
That said, there are great benefits to paper, prototyping, and sketching skills. But there are also drawbacks which are not immediately obvious in reading the research literature or taking academic HCI classes.
Yes, you're right that it does suggest a certain kind of corporate culture and mindset. A common big challenge with UX is educating the rest of your company about best practices, and most importantly, demonstrating results.
Convincing (say) skeptical engineers of the value of user studies can be hard. A common technique is showing videos of user studies and people failing to use the product. Another common technique is to bring an engineer to a site visit and get first hand experience of the pain points.
If you haven't guessed already, my background is engineering. So you read from that what you want, but I've crossed paths with a very large number of engineers who dismissed or diminished their own ability to form judgement on UX because of a general sense that the "consensus" was that engineers aren't good at that, and have seen several cases where the decision model in organizations was specifically tailored to tune out engineers from UX decisions. Both of these things are wrong from my pov. I certainly don't want to diminish the value of having UX as a specialization. However, I cannot recommend a title whose narrative champions one set of professionals at the expense of others.
Just last week, I had the very first design meeting for a new project and a veteran engineer was invited. He didn't even let the presenter finish before talking about how the backend should be built and how much time it would take. That wasn't helpful.
I think engineers who are good at design are immensely valuable, but most engineers suck at it.
Perhaps the engineer was contributing something crucial to the product design, you just couldn't grok it.
Product design is so much more than UI/UX, fwiw.
I worked on one product which involved a massive store of XML documents and a suite of somewhat complicated serializations and transformations. It was the right architecture for the project, for sure. And it was definitely the fundamental gene of the product; all of the product's design had to flow from this XML-heavy information architecture and backend.
But most of the products I've seen are not so unique. For the vast majority of web products out there, simple CRUD apps backed by a relational database, I don't think the information architecture needs to be front and center in product design conversations. People can make assumptions about this kind of app and they usually won't be too far off the mark.
I recently got his other book, Emotional Design, I just haven't gotten to it yet.
https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-the-design-of-everyd...
Although, I can't walk through half the doors in the world it seems without going "why the hell does this pull door have a push handle!!", so there is that side effect.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_on_design_and_emotion/u...
As a graduate of University of Washington's Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) master's program, I would recommend that if you are interested in understanding 'what' makes a good UI or UX instead of 'how' to make a good UI or UX.
How has HCI given you an advantage over a UX bootcamp grad that can speak the lingo and mastered Photoshop/sketch?
I think my advantage is being more aligned with the 'what'. A UX bootcamper could come in and whip something up quickly that looks pretty and win over the hearts and minds of the project sponsors, but (I assume) said bootcamp isn't teaching different theories of cognition or offering practical experience in designing studies in which to test some new interaction.
I even had my Software Engineering students read excepts this semester.
- The designers / developers thinking that they are typical users, and that they know how things work ("You are not the user" is the phrase we repeat a lot here at CMU)
- A lack of education about how to design things (e.g., basics of perception, design patterns, basic interaction principles, conventions)
- Time and money
- A common mentality that "we can fix the UI at the end"
- Legal requirements, marketing, corporate partnerships, etc, that is all of the cruft that doesn't focus on user experience
- For popular products, a very large user base, which means legacy support (people don't like change), and different people using different features (I once heard that people only use ~20% of features in MSWord, but it's a different 20% for different people)
Better UI/UX doesn't always lead to better business outcomes.. Sad, but true.
It's (arguably) a young[er] field, relative to software or hardware engineering. Maybe things will get better :)
If anything, the public(consumer)'s appetite for graphic/visual/UX design has gotten a lot stronger in the decade since research was done on paper prototyping. High-quality animations and subtle interaction techniques, explosion in form factors and devices / mobile operating system [versions], and the rise of non-technical app builders may have also encouraged the development of such tools.
Funny looking back at it now.
Most prototyping tools let you export to PDF on PNG, but they usually aren't going to be open source.
Its a short and easy 2 hour read but the level of paradigm change you receive if you're being exposed to hci for the first time is immense.
I even found its thinking useful from the developer side of things, as in, writing software libraries that were obvious and easy to use.
Well, [expletive deleted].
For best books, it depends on if you want to understand users or do implementation. But generally, I'd highly recommend Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things to improve how you look at the world, and Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think for simple and practical design tips.
For tools, the best is paper prototyping, where you have your team just draw it out on paper and simulate the UI. It's simple, fast, and cheap, and from a cognitive perspective, you can explore more of the design space (think breadth-first search instead of depth-first), and you don't get overly attached to your designs.
In my course on UX design, we also use Balsamiq and InVision, though other tools seem fine (e.g. Marvel, Figma, etc). One of our alums created this great chart comparing different prototyping tools: https://www.cooper.com/prototyping-tools
For schools, some to check out would be Georgia Tech, University of Washington's Master's of HCI, Indiana University, University of Michigan iSchool, and (of course) Carnegie Mellon's Master's of HCI.
And lastly, here's a slide deck I put together and used at my startup several years ago. It was intended as a short 1-hour crash course. https://www.slideshare.net/jas0nh0ng/01-1hourcrashcourseuxhc...