This content originally appeared on NN/g latest articles and announcements and was authored by NN/g latest articles and announcements
Job Openings: UX Specialist (Entry-level or Experienced), Fully Remote
Application deadline: Monday, August 30, 2021.
Nielsen Norman Group is hiring user experience specialists. We currently have job openings for two types of candidates:
- Entry-level: 0-2 years’ experience, including fresh out of university, with a relevant education
- Experienced: 2-9 years’ experience working professionally as full-time user experience staff in a professionally managed team (degrees irrelevant)
The 3 main requirements are:
- Super smart: able to figure anything out quickly, in the smartest 1-2% of the population.
- Compelling public speaking, charismatic on-stage performance, fearless in front of any size audience. An audience favorite whether by video or in person.
- Excellent and persuasive writer of anything from short articles to full client reports: can explain complicated topics so that average readers can easily understand them and will find the exposition captivating.
We are less concerned with educational background or specific degrees, because if you meet the above 3 criteria, then anything you need to know we can teach you quickly. One of the greatest benefits of this job is that you will be closely mentored by the best experts in the business. You learn more in less time than you would in any other company, because of the diversity of assignments, the excellence of the team, and the power of using sound behavioral user research methods. However, the following describes the background of many candidates we’ve hired in the past:
- Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in human-computer interaction (HCI), user experience, usability, visual design, information science, human factors, information architecture, interaction design, digital art or interactive media, technical writing, communications, instructional design or educational technology, digital marketing, psychology, or computer science with a user interface focus. At rare occasions we have also hired Ph.D.s, with skills in applied research, not academic research. (For entry-level candidates, we do require a relevant education. If you don’t have a UX-related degree, first get a few years’ hands-on UX experience in your current company and then apply in our next hiring round, about two years from now.)
- Experience working as full-time user experience staff in a professionally managed software development organization, professionally managed digital marketing group, or a large Internet property. If you’re applying based on actual real-world work experience, education or degrees don’t matter, but this experience does have to be a full-time, hands-on UX job as an actual staff member with full-time user experience work duties in a professional environment with skilled management and a well-defined interaction-design process.
NN/g is a bureaucracy-free organization: your focus is on excellence in the UX profession, not on paperwork or office politics. Also, in our company the UX people are the most important part of the organization, not an oppressed minority.
These are full-time positions (with benefits).
Location = Remote
We hire people based anywhere in the continental United States. These jobs are equally-suited for people who live in big cities and remote locations because we all work from home. (However, we prefer people who live — or are moving — outside the “usual suspects” of California, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington: we already have many group members in these areas and we want to diversify the places where we do research. If you currently live in one of these states, please mention in your cover letter when and where you are planning to move.)
One of the greatest benefits of this job is that it allows you a Silicon Valley-style career at the top level of the discipline without having to live in California. Live in the place you love and still have the job you love.
While you work from home most days, these jobs require some travel, both within the U.S. and internationally, often on the order of 4-5 domestic trips (lasting anything from a day to a week) and 1-2 overseas trips (typically lasting a week) per year.
This estimated travel amount is only a conjecture, because we don’t know how the world will operate after the Covid pandemic. However, we expect most of our conferences to be virtual (i.e., you present from home, through video), while a few will be in-person. The same is expected for client engagements.
What we can say for sure is that we are fully committed to remote work, since we have operated as a fully-remote company ever since we were founded 23 years ago. (See article from before the pandemic about how we all work from home.) We have never had an office, and never will. (We have an official address because obsolete government regulations require this, but nobody works there.) In contrast, while other companies might currently say that they support remote work, you will be at the mercy of any new boss who feels like getting his or her staff back in the office.
At NN/g, since we’re 100% remote, there is no risk that in-office employees get preferential treatment, such as plum assignments or advancement, while remote employees fall behind. When everybody is remote, everybody gets treated the same. Also next year and next decade.
Skills
- Extremely smart, ability to quickly grasp new situations, ability to synthesize large amounts of information
- High productivity, strong work ethics, commitment to meeting deadlines and to make steady progress on long-term projects without the need for “fire drills” or last-minute panic
- Highly self-motivating and able to work without supervision, since this is a work-from-home position
- Keen analytical ability, particularly for conceptualizing and abstracting insights into observed human behavior
- Excellent presentation skills in spoken English
- Excellent writer, superb written-English communications skills
- Fluency in other languages a plus, but not required. We’re particularly interested in candidates with fluency in Chinese (Mandarin/simplified characters), Japanese, Korean, French, German, or Spanish, but any language will be beneficial since we conduct substantial international research and have clients world-wide.
- Articulate UX findings and principles in compelling ways that make the user’s voice heard
- Knowledge of the principles of interaction design, design thinking, the user-centered design process, ideation, user research, IA, customer journeys, visual design, and human-computer interaction as well as other user experience issues such as writing for the web, content strategy, omnichannel customer experience, analytics, and SEO
- (If there is some specific process or method you don’t currently master, let’s say how to create personas for enterprise software projects, then don’t worry since we’ll teach you. We have a strong commitment to continuing staff development and a hefty training budget, and for many topics we already have the world’s best courses in-house at our own conference.)
- Passion for user experience and making things easy to use: technology should adapt to the way humans actually are, not the other way around
Job Duties
- Public speaking: presenting full-day courses at conferences and at client sites
- Presentations will be both virtual through Internet video and in-person on stage
- Identifying, analyzing, and describing best-practice processes and methods to improve the interaction design process and embed design thinking within an organization
- Identifying, analyzing, and describing design patterns
- Analyzing user interfaces
- Writing articles and reports
- Recording video presentations for our website and YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/NNgroup/videos) and potentially other video channels and television appearances
- Conducting independent research to discover new usability guidelines
- User testing, mainly qualitative, but also some benchmark and measurement studies
- Conducting design reviews for consulting clients
- Designing wireframes, mockups, workflows, and page concepts
- Presenting findings to clients
- Running workshops for clients
- Working with clients in small and large teams to guide their UX direction
- Travel (domestic and international) to research sites, client locations, conference venues, etc.
- Some work and travel on weekends required.
- Mentoring entry-level and junior staff as you grow into the role of senior UX Specialist
Personality Profile
Based on the “OCEAN” model of the five big personality traits, the following characterizes most of the people who do well at NN/g:
- Openness to new experiences: high, but not extremely high. There is always something new to explore: new clients in new industries with new problems, new methods, new technologies or platforms, continuous improvements to our courses with updates with new research or new screenshots or better examples. But you must also have tolerance for repetitiveness: when teaching the same course every month, even when it is updated, much will remain the same, because the basic findings don’t change that often. And different clients often make somewhat the same design mistakes, so you will find yourself explaining the same UX principles again and again.
- Conscientiousness: very high. Assignments must be completed on deadline, with high quality, without having a supervisor breathe down your neck. Projects without a deadline must still be completed expeditiously without that extrinsic constraint. Extreme autonomy even for junior staff means that your own intrinsic motivation must drive success.
- Extraversion: low, but not extremely low. (Corresponding to high introversion, but not extremely high.) If you need constant stimulation from other people you will be lonely. You must be able to work on your own. However, you can’t be a total recluse because of frequent meetings with clients and colleagues, as well as interaction with a live audience at in-person conferences.
- Agreeableness: very high. All members of NN/g share two characteristics: they are high-IQ and they are nice. If you are smart but nasty, you won’t last. Other companies overcome disagreeable staff by having strict rulebooks and rigid procedures. We have neither, so we rely on people getting along and helping out wherever needed.
- Neuroticism: Low. Sometimes there are tight deadlines. Sometimes clients are unreasonable. A few conference attendees will write something nasty on your feedback form (though most will be very complimentary). Usually there are multiple projects that need to be juggled. If you stress out easily, you will be depressed here. If you need a regimented environment, you will be confused here. At the same time, our work environment is not nearly as stressful as most startups and Silicon Valley companies, so you don’t need to be super-tough; just recilient.
Nice Job
- The best learning opportunity in UX anywhere in the world: mentoring from the best senior UX pros, interact with a hugely diverse worldwide audience of fans (instead of a narrow set of problems inside a single project), do independent research.
- You’ll achieve much more here than in normal companies: we give you all the tools you need for max productivity and don’t slow you down with meetings or office politics. Spend time producing, not stuck on the freeway commuting to a nasty cubicle.
- No micro-management: get your assignments done the way you want to do them. Manage your own time during projects that often last half a year before deliverables are due. Even our youngest members are given huge individual responsibility almost immediately.
- Massive reach: your articles get millions of page views, you present to thousands of business professionals every year.
- Become a role model for young people who admire your achievements and polish when presenting.
- Flexibility: set your own working schedule and hours, work from home (most days), see the world (a few days). Of course, there are some fixed obligations: Some presentations are on weekends and if you’re on the program to speak in Singapore on a specific date, you have to travel out a few days before to ensure that you will perform well for your paid-up audience despite potential airline delays.
- A final huge advantage of this job is that you get to work in an office: your own home office. Never take a job without a private office. Open-plan workspaces reduce productivity immensely and thus damage both your long-term career prospects and your immediate job satisfaction, if you’re the kind of person who takes satisfaction and pride in actual accomplishments and not just in going to meetings. (And those are the only people we want.)
About the Company
Nielsen Norman Group, founded in 1998 by Jakob Nielsen and Donald A. Norman, is the world’s most prestigious user experience firm. NN/g provides evidence-based UX research, training, and consulting world-wide.
Covid Vaccination Required
All hires are required to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Even though this is mostly a work-from-home job, we will have some in-person conferences, client engagements, and internal group offsite meetings where all participants need to be vaccinated for everybody’s safety and peace of mind.
How to Apply
Are you ready to join the elite? If so, please complete our application form and attach your resume with a writing sample (a document or article you have written yourself; a UX report or design critique if possible) and links to your LinkedIn and Twitter presence as well as any personal (but professional) website/portfolio/blog or other professional online presence.
Deadline: Monday, August 30, 2021 (but the sooner we get your application, the better).
Application form: www.nngroup.com/jobs
Don’t bother with techniques like keyword stuffing that are recommended when applying for jobs at bloated companies that use software to screen applications. We do you the curtesy of having a live human read your application (even better, these humans are UX specialists, not HR generalists).
If you’ve ever wanted to belong to the world’s leading UX group, now is your only chance for a long time to come, because we only recruit every two years. (We can’t hire more often because we invest so much in training and growing each new team member.) Our next intake will be in approximately 2023.
This content originally appeared on NN/g latest articles and announcements and was authored by NN/g latest articles and announcements
NN/g latest articles and announcements | Sciencx (2021-08-09T22:30:00+00:00) Job Openings: UX Specialists (entry-level or experienced, remote). Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2021/08/09/job-openings-ux-specialists-entry-level-or-experienced-remote/
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