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.