www.ic-creative.co.uk – now on mobile

Our new mobile website should run seamlessly alongside our current platform www.ic-creative.co.uk. 

The site provides a simple and easy user experience (as it should….) in terms of job search functionality and the ability to apply for UX jobs quickly and easily from all mobile devices.

If you spot any bugs please contact us.  Also any questions about a job, or the market in general, just email or call. 

Why You Need a Good Kick in the UX

Where Would Your Site Be Without Your User Experience Designer?

IC Creative is the industry leading recruitment consultancy for UX jobs. IC Creative asks: what is the point of a User Experience Designer?

So…what is UX? Isn’t it simply an effort to make a finished website look nice? Absolutely not! User experience should be viewed as equally important as any of the processes that go toward site construction. Too many companies believe that the UX designer provides a bit of “dressing-up” for the finished site, whereas they should be looking at user experience as a starting point.

According to Jared Spool, CEO of the world’s largest usability research company, User Interface Engineering (UIE), a lot of firms get it into their heads that “good experience design is an add-on, not a base requirement.”

The process of building a website should be about teamwork. Sharing an equal footing within that team should be the guy who writes the code, should be the copywriter creating the content and should be the UX designer.

It should be a consideration that the end user is a part of the team as well. UX is a constantly evolving process that has to be flexible. Learning what works best and then implementing it, constantly testing and experimenting; what works, what doesn’t, throw that away and move on?

UX isn’t a set discipline. What works for some sites will not be a good fit for others. It depends for what purpose your website is intended and what sort of audience you wish to attract and engage with. Always consider your demographic.

UX isn’t just about appearance; it’s also about interaction, accessibility, usability. It should be attractive, absorbing and fun. Look at it as a combination of logic and emotion: the user wishes to get a particular result from your site, wants to reach a particular page or item, so they want to follow a logical path; but let them enjoy getting there.

Where would a site be without UX? Probably nowhere. Users would be arriving there and not having enough to hold their attention would jump away to the next option. If they stayed because they believed they might find information they’re looking for, without a logical pathway and properly designed buttons, they may never find it. They could get lost in a maze and simply give up.

The problem is the average attention span is widely acknowledged to be dropping. This is especially true when visiting websites, with so much competition on the internet it is believed that the user spends less than one minute per site. It is the UX designer’s job to not only catch the users’ attention but to hold it. If you aren’t holding their attention, perhaps your competitor is.


UX Designers Quest for Clickability

The IC Creative Guide to Creating Buttons for Enhanced User Experience

IC Creative is the leading recruitment partner for the most recognisable names in the UX industry; they boast some of the most knowledgeable and experienced UX recruitment consultants available.

In the world of designing for user experience, one of the most important aspects and most easily overlooked is the design of buttons. It might seem obvious, but getting the button design right is a vital piece of the usability jigsaw.

What you will find below is not an exhaustive list, nor is it a technical manual; it is simply a few tips to keep in mind when designing buttons for a website. Apologies if some of what follows seems a bit obvious, but the best advice sometimes is.

Appearance is the key. Give the button a 3D appearance so it looks like it is an actual physical button that you could reach out and touch. Importantly, make sure the button has a hover state and an active state, using subtle changes in hue and shadow, to enhance its presence and make it seem more physical.  Here’s some advice on how to create a Slick CSS3 Button with box-shadow and rgba.
Giving it rounded corners helps differentiate it from a label. The rounded corners aspect has become a standard image and what the users expect to see.

The use of colour to make it stand out and get it noticed can be helpful, what’s the point of a white button on a white background? Consider, also, what the colour suggests to the user, for instance Red = warning, Black = uniformity, Pink = for girls (?) The use of colour and variations in size can give buttons importance; making them stand out more and making the user want to click them.

Wide, thin buttons are popular, with one to three words of text describing what the button does or where the user can expect to be taken upon clicking it. The shape is a lot less important than the appearance of clickability and what it represents.

Some sort of icon can be used with the text: an arrow to show that the user is heading for the next step or page; a magnifying glass for a search function etc. Just make sure that the icons are recognisable to avoid confusing the user.

The most important advice is: keep it consistent. The user doesn’t want to have to work out what is a button and what isn’t. Don’t go mad with button design, make it obvious what the function of each button is, and make sure they fit in flawlessly with the rest of the page design. They’ll be more attractive and won’t spoil the overall appearance of the site; which is, after all, the whole point of UX. 

Visit IC Creative for User Experience, UX jobs and recruitment services.

UX Final Showdown

Simplicity v Complexity in a Bitter Fight to the Finish

UX Design Professionals know that IC Creative is the best place to start in your search for your dream job in User Experience; IC Creative is renowned as the most experienced recruitment consultancy for UX jobs.

It is a UX design professional’s job to decide how simple or complex their creation is going to be for the end user. Make it too complex and not only can you put off many users, it will seem intimidating and it could be criticised for a lack of aesthetic beauty; UX designers very often tend to lean towards the simple, cleaner appearance. Yet is that always the best path to take?

Many people love the appearance of complexity; they believe it gives them an air of sophistication. Take, for example, the BMW M5: for performance it has few if any rivals in its class, a luxury sports saloon. It boasts phenomenal acceleration: 0-60 miles per hour quicker than you say “0-60 miles per hour,” yet to achieve the optimal performance you need to change so many settings, pressing buttons and turning knobs and making the correct selections and confirming those selections, that to get from 0-60 takes about 10 minutes; whereas a family saloon in which you get in, turn the key and drive away will get you to 60mph a lot quicker in real time. It’s the old “hare and tortoise” story. The BMW owner wants those complicated controls though because it’s part of the “ultimate driving machine.”

On the other hand, UX designers know that simplicity is something that users crave. How many older people have trouble with the remote controls for their television or DVD player? They want to push the ‘on‘ button and let it get on with its job, while the younger generation see more value in having more control over functions. Quite often it comes down to demographics; it is about knowing your target audience and giving them what they want.

Two examples of doing the same job but from different perspectives are Google and Yahoo. Google is a search engine, its homepage is clean and simple, its main component is the search box; this simplicity can mean more complexity because you are making your own way through to your end goal. Yahoo is a web directory, on its homepage there is a lot more clutter, more options, therefore more complexity; yet Yahoo’s complexity means more simplicity because the options for the user are laid out in front of them and they can choose what route they would like to follow.

These are two examples that demonstrate the difference between what Edward Tufte described as Adjacent in Space and Stacked in Time, two ways to present the visual layer of interface.

Think of Adjacent in Space as being like an aircraft cockpit: everything the pilot needs is laid out in front of them, making their job easier. This to the casual observer is an overwhelming amount of visual information, most of which is meaningless.

Stacked in Time on the other hand is splitting functionality into layers, functions and information are only presented when needed. This can present its own problems if the route to the users goal is overly long or complex, they could lose their way.

The UX designer should find a middle ground; enough information and simple functionality so the user can navigate successfully and complete their tasks quickly and easily, but without too much needless information and complexity immediately causing sensory overload. Designing for one’s audience is key.

UX, User Experience professionals - visit IC Creative for the very latest positions in this fascinating industry sector.

User Experience, CRM and the Rise and Rise of Social Networking

The UX Professional’s Role in Customer Relationship Management

User Experience design jobs at IC Creative, the industry leading recruitment consultancy for UX jobs. The traditional view of customer relationship management (CRM) is changing as the potential customer wants to interact with companies in a different way, welcome social CRM and the role the UX professional has to play.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is basically how any business manages its interactions with its existing customers and prospective customers. It relies on specialised software that reaps and organises information and simplifies business processes; mostly for use in sales, but it can be employed for other aspects of the business such as marketing, customer service and technical support.

The UX design professional has an important role to play in CRM. The process has to be user-friendly as customers lack patience with, or shy away from, things that seem over-complicated or uninteresting. They need to make it bug free so that it runs smoothly. They need to convince the customer/client that they want to take part, rather than feel they are being forced to give up information. Most importantly of all the customer needs to be convinced that their data will be handled securely and with sensitivity.

While CRM remains a vital business tool, customers’ habits are changing and so CRM has to change to keep up if companies wish to retain their client base. It is believed that by the end of 2012, a massive 20% of the entire population of the world will be interacting through social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc. Potential customers for products and services are turning to online peers and social influencers for buying advice; they like to share experiences and opinions. They do not respond as well as previous generations to direct marketing, preferring to be engaged rather that talked at. As companies realise this, they are trying more and more to involve themselves in these online conversations, we are seeing the emergence of Social CRM.

The most oft-quoted definition of social CRM is that which was given by Paul Greenberg:
 “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation.”
Companies initially engaged in social media monitoring which involved looking out for their product/service being mentioned and then reacting to it; now some brands actually build their own online communities. It is an important source for potential customers; it gives an idea of product preferences and spending habits and it provides crowd-sourcing solutions which are cheaper that traditional outsourcing. Maria Ogneva, Director of Social Media at Attensity describes the LARA framework they developed which addresses the end-to-end process of social CRM:

• Listen to customer conversations
• Analyse the conversations
• Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise
• Act on those customer conversations

Again the UX designer is an important player. If social network users feel they are being targeted by a direct marketing campaign, the possibility exists that the brand could suffer an adverse reaction with communities making negative remarks about it; therefore, it is important to engage the community members, make the brand interesting for them, for example, by designing interactive apps and games, adding valuable and relevant content and making the company’s page more attractive to visitors.

User experience jobs, Usability, Information Architecture (IA), Interaction Design and Visual Design jobs, visit IC Creative.

User Experience Jobs: Design for the End User

User Experience Jobs at IC Creative

User Experience Jobs are available at IC Creative. The primary recruitment partner for some of the most important names in the industry, IC Creative is looking to recruit the best UX professionals.

User Experience, or UX as its practitioners refer to it, is one of the newest disciplines in the world of website design, but it is growing at a startling rate as more online businesses realise its importance. No matter what business it is, online competition in this digital age is going to be fierce, and business owners know that they need an edge, they need visitors to their site to stick around and not give up and go to their competitors’ sites because theirs is more user-friendly and easier to navigate. UX professionals can make that difference.

Traditionally (a strange word to use to describe technology as young as the internet), the website usability decisions have been made by graphic designers who look at the site in terms of its aesthetics, or engineers whose goal is efficiency. What was needed was someone to take up the middle ground between these two extremes. What was needed was someone who understood what the user wanted because they had looked at it from the end-users perspective; what would the user want in terms of functionality? The best way to find out is to ask them and test out ideas.

Some of the biggest players on the internet, such as Google for example, employ hundreds of user experience researchers worldwide, setting up laboratories to test website usability. Sitting users in front of monitors and asking them why they chose button ‘A’ over button ‘B’ or what would the user like to see. What would make their experience better? These researchers are looking for patterns in site visitors’ behaviour; they are also looking for new ideas: a suggestion made by one user might become a preference for many. From the data gathered UX designers can optimise the usability of their site. It can be complex like a revamp of the whole homepage or a different list of menu options; sometimes it is as simple as adding some explanatory text or changing the appearance of buttons.

Much of the art/science of user experience can trace its origins to the work of the academic Donald Norman in the 90s. Norman wrote “The Design of Everyday Things” which looked at the psychology of good and bad design. He advocated user-centred design (UCD), which argues that the primary goal of the designer should be to meet user needs; other things like aesthetics should be a secondary consideration. The role of the designer should be one of simplifying tasks and making things visible; the User Experience professional’s job is to build the site around how users can, want, or need to use the site, rather than making the users change their behaviour to accommodate how the site is set up.

IC Creative would be pleased to hear from you at any time. For an informal and confidential chat about any recruitment issue you wish to discuss, please contact one of their experienced recruitment consultants now.

IC Creative: Recruiting the Architects of the Digital Landscape

IC Creative recruiting design professionals for user experience jobs

IC Creative is proud of its reputation for service excellence within the vital – and growing – User Experience community.  Many of the world’s most influential companies involved in this science/art, regard the recruitment agency IC Creative as the first point of contact when recruiting for user experience jobs.

IC Creative has, for a number of years, been growing a reputation as the first choice for companies that are looking to recruit design professionals for specialism that has grown up as user experience. A very particular skill set is needed to fill this role and IC Creative fully understands what is required.

As part of the IC Group, this reputation for professionalism is well-deserved and is also demonstrated in abundance time and again by the other members of the IC Group:

IC Resources: offering a recruitment service for the semiconductor industry.
IC Software:  for embedded jobs, software jobs, DSP jobs and toolchain development jobs.
IC 3E: serving the electronics industry.

What sets IC Creative, and its sister companies, apart from other recruitment agencies is the fact that each recruitment consultant has their own specialism to offer advice about. Many of the consultants at IC Creative have joined directly from the user experience (UX) industry. This gives them a unique insight into what UX jobs entail and what the clients require of their candidates.

This industry-specific working experience stands IC Creative’s consultants in good stead and has enabled them to build up trust and long lasting relationships with employers. In turn this has led to IC Creative becoming the primary provider, or in many cases, the sole provider of user experience creative professionals to some of the industry’s biggest names, filling the many roles on offer in this fascinating field.

IC Creative offers permanent and contract / consultancy user experience jobs from graduate to Director level, including Usability consultant, User researcher, User tester, User experience architect, User experience designer, Mobile UX Designer, Customer experience design, Web Information Architect, Front-end designer, User Interface Designer and UX strategist.  Clients include  top firms in the UK, across Europe and around the world, in cities such as London, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Shanghai, Beijing, New York and San Francisco to name just a few.

IC Creative would be pleased to hear from you at any time. For an informal and confidential chat about any recruitment issue you wish to discuss, please contact one of their experienced recruitment consultants now.