Q&A: How do I get into user experience?

Let's turn away from Office and Mac matters for a bit, and answer a question that I got via email about how to get into user experience.

I recently found out about usability engineering. It seems to be a spur off the human factors psych field. It looks like a great field. My question would be then, how does one get into a user experience field.

First, I'll say that I don't have a psychology background, although I have many peers who do. My background is computer science.

There's a few things that you can do to start learning more about usability and user experience. I recently saw a blog post from a UX designer, Whitney Hess, titled "so you wanna be a UX designer". It lists many resources for getting into the field. It's a great list. Definitely start with the first two books -- if you like those, then continue with the next three, all of which are absolutely excellent.

Career-wise, without either experience or training in the field, it's going to be difficult (especially in this economy!) to move into a position that gets you where you want to go. Here at Microsoft, we rarely hire UX people who don't have an advanced degree. Whitney's post also lists a couple of the top UX programs in the US; there are others (Georgia Tech, U-Wash, etc), but that will give you a starting point.

I can't speak a lot for other companies, but one position at Microsoft is the Program Manager. This isn't a technical position, per se -- we don't expect people to have CS or engineering degrees. It's the role of the PM to help design features, write specifications, and do the necessary cat-herding to get those features into the product and get the product out the door. Some PMs focus more on back-end stuff, some are more on the front end -- so there's plenty of room there for you to learn more about UX there and have a hand in what that looks like, while working with UX researchers and designers to make it all come together. One of my colleagues here in MacBU wrote a blog post about what it means to be a PM.. His post is from the viewpoint of an MBA, not a hardcore geek degree.

If this looks interesting to you, Microsoft does hire PMs with BS/BA degrees. For information about our current job openings and other perspectives on options here, check out our career website.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 27, 2009
  I saw Celeste Paul speak at Women in Open Source at the SoCal Linux Expo (SCALE) 2007 and became a strong believer in interface design and usability testing. http://www.obso1337.org/hci See the PDF of her presentation of that day, though without the audio the slides themselves are not as useful in describing the importance. But they are still worth seeing.