I changed my tagline… don’t worry, I’m still a full-stack UX professional..
Working for a company 80% dependent on the price of oil, I should expect cyclical downturns and restructuring. Thanks fracking and OPEC! But anyway, my organization didn’t really get the value of UX and human centered design. I was hired in with a big marketing push for ease-of-use and human centered design, but that didn’t translate into practice as the management treated it as another engineering function–hand off wireframes and specs for developers. The VP of software development actually told me we don’t need to talk to customers–we had experts in house! I think I did get to make an impact through training others; mentoring developers, testers, and product marketing in HCD; and working on projects that did successfully apply HCD (probably since they were under the radar and didn’t get much managerial ‘involvement’…). Anyway, I did have an opportunity to work with some great, smart people, and wish them the best. But I’m not going to feel guilty filling up with $1.95/gal gas!
So then, If you’re reading this because I put the link on my resume since everyone expects a portfolio nowadays, I’m looking for opportunities as a UX Strategy or Researcher, Lead UX Design, and Manager. I am open to consulting, freelance, or contract work; in fact might be leaning that way at the moment. Trying to stay in the Austin-Round Rock area. If you are thinking UX Design has something to do with ‘rockstar CSS/JQuery skillz’ I’m probably not your type. But if you are looking for someone who can innovate products through human centered design methods, who thinks with a systems view, with a broad domain and skillset, who speaks developer, and brews their own beer, I am interested in helping you out.
At the risk of ‘TMI’, I might also be using this blog to journal my experiences on job search. Some initial observations:
- Posting for a UX designer who lives for great experiences, then forcing them through crappy application sites (I’m looking at you Oracle/Taleo…) is kind of ironic
- If you open your resume up on Monster you will get a lot of third party ‘on spec’ recruiters calling about 6 month contracts with immediate need halfway across country with no relo… and for some reason a lot of insurance broker inquiries
- Actually seeing more postings for UX designer that really are for UX design, and not UI front-end development.
- Most helpful tools so far: LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, SimplyHired