Demystifying
UX


Perspectives from Nielsen Norman Group's Survey on UX Careers and more

The Nielsen Norman Group, considered as a key leader in user-centric design, defines User Experience (UX) as “[encompassing] all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
While this definition covers the nature of UX, it does not reveal what entails in a UX practitioner’s job and skill sets. As a newcomer to the field, it’s difficult to figure out where you fit the best within the design process. Moreover, compensation differs between position titles and skills, and it can be a driving factor to which role you want to pursue.
We present this visualization for prospective and aspiring UX professionals to explore the relationships between UX skills and UX positions, in hopes of demystifying this exciting field.


Academic Diversity of UX Backgrounds

Google To start out, let's look at the backgrounds of current UX professionals. In the following visualization you will be able to see that people come to the field of UX from a variety of disciplines. UX is a highly inter-disciplinary field that pulls from social sciences, humanities, engineering, and more. So if you think you don’t fit in, think again.

Educational Backgrounds of UX Professionals


Source: Nielsen Norman Group User Experience Careers Report 2013



Another interesting facet is the educational level of UX professionals. Of those surveyed for their backgrounds, the majority held Masters degrees as their highest academic degree achieved.

Education Degree Levels

Degree Levels of UX Professionals

Source: Nielsen Norman Group User Experience Careers Report 2013



UX in the Tech Industry

Now that we have seen where people are coming from, let’s look into what UX roles are like at top tech companies and design agencies with sophisticated UX teams. We chose 6 companies and examined their UX positions’ job descriptions and salaries.
Google Facebook Amazon Microsoft Huge IDEO


Fit in Design Process

We took the job descriptions data and mapped out where different positions for the various companies fall in the design process defined by Nielsen Norman Group. The first stage is Discover, where you try to understand what people’s needs are and figure out what you don’t know yet. In the Explore stage, you analyze the information you have gathered under Discover. You then use the insights to produce prototypes and test them in the Test stage. Finally, you gather feedback on your product during the Listen stage. The design process is iterative, and depending on your project needs, these stages might get repeated multiple times until you arrive at the final design. Each stage has a variety of activities which are carried out by different roles, and the position titles of people conducting the activities vary from company to company.

Google

Google

Facebook

Facebook

Amazon

Amazon

Microsoft

Microsoft

HUGE

Huge

IDEO

IDEO

Source: Nielsen Norman Group, & UX Positions and Skills, accessed on April 25, 2018



Skills of the UX Trade

Let’s now dig deeper into each position title and what skills are expected. We pulled from the job descriptions for different UX position titles. The width of each chord corresponds to the percentage of job descriptions that mention the particular skill. Some interesting things to look at are how the same skill is required by different positions titles. For instance, wireframing is used across 4 of position titles that are visualized here.
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Source: UX Positions and Skills, accessed on April 25, 2018

Show Me the Money


Salaries vary not only between different UX position titles, but they also vary between different companies. These average base salaries across UX position titles and companies were taken from Glassdoor.com.


Source: glassdoor.com, accessed on April 25, 2018



This Is Not The End

With this information, we hope you have gained a better sense of UX careers and what different roles do. UX is an ever-evolving field since the people we design for are constantly changing. Therefore, what we are doing here is not saying that the position titles, skills, and salaries will stay the same, but this is a snapshot of UX in 2018.

This visualization was made by Varshine Chandrakanthan, Michelle Chen, and Kaushiki Priyam for InfoViz Spring 2018. Graphs created using D3 Starburst, D3 Loom Chart, and Tableau. Source code can be found here. UX positions and skills data were collected by us; dataset can be found here.