[Guest author: Rolf Molich owns and manages DialogDesign, a small Danish usability consultancy that he founded in 1993. Rolf conceived and coordinated the Comparative Usability Evaluation studies CUE-1 through CUE-8 in which almost 100 professional usability teams tested or reviewed the same applications.]
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It’s May! Time for graduations and job hunts, and while B|P isn’t hiring right this minute (we have an awesome team and are busy refining our practices) we will be again, before too long. It seemed like a good time for a post on what I look for when hiring user experience researchers, so here goes, in reverse order of importance:
#4: Education. If you have less than 3 or 4 years of experience, I’m looking for a degree in a related field, and that really can be anything from cognitive science to anthropology to HCI to…well, surprise me, I can be convinced. If it’s from a top school in our field, that’s cool, but it’s no big deal if it’s not. A Master’s is nice for showing a commitment to the field, but doesn’t tell me much about you as a practicing researcher. And whether you do or don’t have a related degree, you’ll definitely grab my attention with interesting people-oriented research projects during your education. (If you have more than 3 or 4 years of experience, I don’t much care where you went to school or what you studied—I’ll be evaluating your professional record exclusively.)
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Okay, this photo has nothing to do with Bill Buxton’s keynote, except for that it’s a photo planet I made at CHI this year in Florence. The closing plenary talk was the most inspiring talk I heard at CHI. I wasn’t planning on taking notes, but as soon as he said he’d thrown out the talk that he originally planned to give, i got out my laptop and started typing. If I’ve missed any key points, please let me know! Here goes:
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Last week, Nate and I had the honor to speak with a bunch of Cognitive Science students down at our alma mater, UCSD. Almost every year we send Nate and others down to talk to a Cognitive Engineering class about how much our HCI degrees mean to us in our professional lives (shocker: it’s a lot). It’s always a lot of fun and we get to meet a bunch of great people and chat it up with our mentors Dr. Jim Hollan and Dr. Ed Hutchins of the Distributed Cognition and Human Computer Interaction lab. We were joined this year by Kathy Seyama from Qualcomm‘s Usability Group, Ed Langstroth from the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory, and Rod Ebrahimi from Do The Right Thing. Stay classy, San Diego.
