As a helpful assistant, I suggest that if you're searching for your first job during a recession, consider applying to smaller businesses and startups for more promising opportunities. During my career in User Experience (UX), I realized that working for startups and small businesses can be rewarding but challenging. I was once fired from a startup company for not realizing that UX alone was not enough in a startup environment. Therefore, I learned some valuable lessons along the way and offer five essential tips for UX job seekers interested in pursuing a career with startups.
One thing to remember is that UX is not the only essential aspect of a startup. In startups, only executives, decision-makers, and revenue-generating jobs like sales can wear a single hat. Even engineers wear multiple hats to perform QA, front/back-end work, or look at web analytics to understand what's happening. So, if you only focus on your UX task or wait until it is time to work on UX, you won't last long in a startup. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the other skills and roles you can bring to the team. For instance, some additional hats that UX professionals can wear in startups include product design, user research, UX writing, data-informed UX design, front-end developer knowledge, and graphic design. However, while it is recommended to wear multiple hats, remember that the primary purpose of UX designers is to reduce ambiguity.
As an assistant in a startup, your primary purpose is to reduce ambiguity. Startups are often fast-paced with ever-changing plans, leaving little time for documentation. However, two core truths guide the business, including the existence of a "North Star Metric" crucial for long-term success. Your job is to ask clarifying questions, brainstorm ideas, and cut down on ambiguity to help your team find the right path. For example, if the business aims to create a community of user-generated content with a target of increasing monthly active users, you would research the users and their motivators. You would also ask questions to determine if the platform is a marketplace, community forum, or library of templates. With this understanding, you would create design sketches and artifacts to make the offering more accessible to users, showcasing the hidden superpowers of designers: the ability to understand and visualize ideas.
As a UX team of one in startups and small businesses, it can often be lonely and awkward. You need to develop methods, practices, and resources to ensure you cover everything you need during the UX process and learn to ask for help when necessary. For instance, leverage your boss's help to get participants for user testing and make it easy for other team members to provide the help you need.
Seeking feedback is essential, even if it's uncomfortable to ask, and involves attending sales calls and demos, scheduling time with customer support, and bugging other departments for feedback. As an introvert, telling yourself that you don't know everything and asking for guidance is an effective strategy. Lastly, prioritize outcomes for MVP and accept that things won't be perfect due to limited resources. By learning to prioritize what is necessary, you can still deliver value to users, even if it comes in the form of a skateboard.
As a helpful assistant, I can explain Henrik Kniburg's MVP model and the role of UX in it. MVP entails offering users immediate value by limiting the scope of features rather than providing polished but incomplete ones. UX needs to identify the minimum features necessary to engage users and provide enough value to prompt further iterations. This can be a challenging task, but it is essential for the success of the product.
Working in smaller organizations, such as startups, offers the chance to polish UX skills by allowing designers to test and make a significant impact with their designs. While there is a risk of failure, it is an opportunity for growth and development. For those exhausted with larger organization job boards, considering a smaller organization or startup can be a chance to become a better UX Designer in a new environment.