This is the first post of a series of posts that will accompany the V4 release and detail the what we (the Redash team & community) been working on for so long.
I’ve joined Redash last November to improve the design and user experience. I’d like to give you an overview about the redesign we implemented in V4 and what shaped our thinking.
…but first, why was this redesign needed?
When I first got Redash in my hands, my immediate thought was that it could benefit a designer. Redash has plenty of powerful features, but as it was growing organically, user experience was neglected over functionality. …
Research is inevitable in UX design and is a big part of the design process. In this blog post, I’ll be focusing on user interviews and user testing and resolving the challenges involved in these processes.
Knowing how to pick the right research technique from your toolbox to uncover the information you need should be a critical skill for any designer.
But when your toolbox is somewhat empty, it can be hard to know where to begin. …
Me: Hey, it’s nice to meet you! So what do you do for living?
Designer: I am a UX DESIGNER at [company]!
Me: Oh, that’s cool! So I guess you’re interviewing people and talking to users a lot!
Designer: Well, not really, we don’t talk to users…
Me: Oh, I see, then you must be doing a lot of user testing sessions, right?
Designer: Well, unfortunately, no. Not really.
Me: :(
Unfortunately, this happens all the time to me. People tend to be in UX designer roles without actually talking to real users.
Most companies have realised the importance of UX design by now, and have hired designers. Hiring a few UX designers won’t automagically result in better software. …
This Hanno article was originally published on TheNextWeb.
Ever wondered how much other UX designers with similar skills to you are earning elsewhere? As a location-independent designer with a lot of control over my own salary, I was extremely interested in knowing the answer to that question. It seems I’m not alone.
Methodology
Last time I looked into UX design salaries I based my findings on desktop research, digging through reports, articles and blog posts to try and get a feel for how our market looked. But this time I wanted to get some real data to analyse. …
I went to a meet up recently where the presenter proudly claimed that his team (who were building a product for a niche market) weren’t just the builders of their application, but also the users.
“Since we use our own product, we’re valid users to test with.”
Perfect, right?
Perhaps not: it was painfully clear to everyone (even those with just a little UX experience) that the product had many clear usability issues.
The problem was that the team didn’t see any need to carry out proper user-testing sessions with other (external) people. …
Interviewing users can be tricky. But no matter whether you do it in-person or over the interweb, there are a few rules which will help you run far better interviews. I’ve collected together the 7 best practises we’ve found most useful.
Encourage storytelling
Once you succeed in encouraging storytelling, you can get far better insights into the problems your users are facing. Storytelling allows the user to talk about her feelings — which is great for understanding her deeper motivations. …
There are many salary comparisons around which look at the differences between US and EU cities. As a data fan, I love browsing them. Since Hanno is 100% remote, I thought it would be very interesting to gather up some of this data and look at how UX designer salaries compare amongst some of the biggest tech hubs in the world.
Here’s a question: looking solely at salaries, which are the best cities for a UX designer be based in?
I’m focusing only on base employee salaries here. I’m not considering freelancing rates, nor bonuses or equity. I’m using several resources to estimate a roughly accurate salary for each location. The hypothetical UX designer archetype I’m using here has senior level job experience, and good skills. Although I’ve put a lot of effort into coming up with a figure which is as accurate as possible… this is still just guesswork, and these are only ballpark figures.. …
In December Marcel and I attended Stretch conference in Budapest. The conference features great leaders from various fields, with a focus on leadership and management.
How we ended up coming to this conference
Attending the conference for the second time in a row (last year’s visit was also my first encounter with my teammate Jon) I suggested to Marcel that he should come along, too! He was eager to join, and we were finally able to meet in person for the first time, after months of working closely together.
Hanno is a team of only 6 people, so you might wonder why we’re all trying to attend a leadership and management conference? …
That’s great! But you’re also in the unfortunate position of having to cherry pick from an already competitive pool of designers. Here is how to improve your process to help you hire the candidate you need.
When you’re looking to get hired, you can find plenty of resources out there telling you how to write an interesting and engaging CV. But for UX designers the situation is perhaps the opposite: the biggest problem is that recruiters often struggle with writing an engaging job advert, which makes it much harder for them to attract great designers.
I face poor quality job adverts much too frequently. So for the benefit of my fellow UX designers, here’s some advice and tips to help you put out better and more engaging UX designer job adverts.
First, track us down
The job of a UX designer is a pretty cool one. We’re facing and solving interesting problems every day — and since many businesses are starting to see the value of strong UX design, many of us are not short of job offers either. Many UX designers are fairly easy to find and approach, since we already have a portfolio page, Twitter, LinkedIn (and perhaps Dribbble) accounts. …
A story about how kindness, small things and luck can drive to new opportunities.
More than a year ago I was reading Cap Watkins blog post: “Be kind”. It’s a great read, and he talks about how being kind and open will pay for itself, and will lead to new friends, job opportunities and open up the world. I was like “jeez, this is it — this is just what happened to me as well!”.
Here is my version of “Being kind” and how, looking back years later, a tiny thing became so important to my life and professional career.
I’ll start the story a little bit…
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