Experience design draws on users’ needs, feelings, contexts, and mindsets to design experiences that centre on them. The popularity of experience design has expanded over the last decade. With this, the role of an experience designer has become more in demand. These changes have been coupled with advancements in technology that brings prototyping and coding closer than ever — and enhanced access to end users for remote testing — hiring an experience designer has become increasingly complex.
An experience designer’s role needs to span visual, interaction design and research expertise in order to efficiently deliver a product’s value in a way that is consistently usable, appealing and accessible. However, recruiting a candidate that ticks all those boxes is not straightforward.
According to John Jarosz, Partner & Co-Founder at Sightglass, the ideal approach a team approach, with each individual offering a set of complementary capabilities.
Jarosz explains that hiring a well-rounded design team with varying skills and capabilities is highly effective. More specifically, Jarosz recommends how to think about experience design as a group versus an individual role when recruiting and hiring.
In terms of the important expertise to look for, Jarosz points out:
Visual Capabilities
This includes visual communication, such as data visualization, infographics, typography, colour theory, general accessibility. Also of importance is creative design, including creative planning execution, hi-fi prototyping, marketing and brand collaboration, and creative team management/participation, with familiarity with design systems.
Interaction Design Capabilities
Interaction design, such as animations, system feedback, user touchpoints, mobile and channel design, each represent key skills. To add to this is interaction design such as animations, system feedback, user touchpoints, interaction models, mobile and channel design.
Other in demand skills include front-end development, agile and pair programming practices, UI tech stack advisement, responsive design and development, design system experience. Furthermore, employers are also looking for concept generation like lo-fi sketching, collaborative design, and development analysis facilitation.
Research Capabilities
Experience with human-computer interaction (HCI) and user-centred design (UCD) are important, each demonstrating knowledge in human-computer interaction principles, user-centred design principles. It is also important for candidates to understand information architecture, including information design, navigation, system structure mapping, scenario mapping, site mapping, and journey mapping. To add to this, employers are looking for concept generation like lo-fi sketching, collaborative design and facilitation, and analysis facilitation.
