On 12 Feb 2008, at 01:27, Jeff Hendy wrote:
[snip]
> For IxD, the obvious
> choice is to design websites for your friends and family, but nothing
> is popping into my mind on the research side. I could create personas
> for mythical projects and run usability tests on existing programs,
> but these exercises would be purely for practice and not result in
> anything useful. Is there anything more practical that I should be
> doing with my free time?
[snip]
Surely those web site designs should be the result of that research
work? Showing those sorts of connections would be something I'd be
looking for ("we saw folk with these sorts of needs acting in this
sort of way, so designed this sort of solution" and so on).
[snip]
> For anybody who has recently gotten a job in this area or hires people
> in this area, what's the general structure of a job interview? How do
> you differentiate between people who "know about" ethnography,
> personas, heuristic evaluations, etc and people who are actually good
> at doing these things? When I was interviewing for developer
> positions, it was easy: people would ask me programming questions and
> I would write code to solve them. However, I really have no idea what
> to expect now. Any pointers?
[snip]
If I were hiring for such a position I'd be looking for a track
record of doing user experience work. It wouldn't be a position for
somebody new in the field.
That may be a personal bias on my part - but I'd be looking for
evidence of more general experience of user experience before moving
to a specialist "just research" position. The role needs to be
informed by the field in general (I guess this harks back to the
recent role definition threads :-)
Look for positions you can apply your research skills, and follow
that through to a design and implementation. You can then use that
background to focus down on more pure "research" roles.
Cheers,
Adrian
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