I'm currently in grad school studying HCI, and I have several questions regarding interaction research. I don't know if this is exactly the right place to be asking, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Research as a career... The big software companies: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc all list positions with job titles such as "interaction researcher" or "user experience researcher." Is this typical at smaller companies and design firms as well, or is the research handled by the same people who do the design? More generally, is IX/UX research really it's own field or is it usually just considered to be a subset of interaction design? Is there any chance of a career in this area other than in huge companies? How to prepare... How can I "practice" UX research on my own? I've done plenty in course projects, but from my experience, that's usually not enough for employers. They want to see somebody who's taken the initiative to apply their skills beyond what's been required. 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? Research resources... What websites and communities deal with UX research? I've found plenty of places dealing with usability, but that's only a small part of UX research. Is there anything dealing with this area as a whole, or do I need to be looking at usability sites and the relevant portions of design sites? Research job interviews... 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? Cheers, Jeff ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
