6 Career Paths to Consider in Enterprise Design
There is a famous scene in the 1999 cult hit Office Space where the lead characters steal the defective printer from their office, take it to an empty field and take turns beating it with a baseball bat. It’s a scene that continues to pop up in our cultural imaginary thanks to the many parodies because it is just so relatable. Even over twenty years later, we all know the pain of having to struggle with technology at work.
The average person will spend one third of their life at work. That’s around 90,000 hours that we can spend doing our jobs well, or waste getting angry at our devices. Luckily there are people out there whose sole occupation is to improve our relationship with the technology we work with. They are called enterprise designers.
Working in the field of enterprise design is multifaceted, but no matter what role they play, enterprise designers strive to make workers’ lives easier, more enjoyable and more efficient. Below, I’m sharing a list of six different paths worth exploring if you are considering a career in this field.
1) User Experience Designer
User experience (UX) refers to anything and everything that a user feels or experiences when interacting with a product or service. UX designers are
responsible for ensuring the end user is delighted to use the product by improving the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of the product. They can be responsible for an entire product, or one aspect such as a UI control, theming, performance, visual design, accessibility, and more.
UX design is a good career choice if you enjoy problem solving, can easily turn abstract concepts into concrete results, feel comfortable juggling the needs of multiple stakeholders, and aren’t phased when your creative ideas are reshaped by technical constraints. With the demand for UX designers currently outstripping the supply, and with many different ways to kickstart your career, enterprise design has never looked better.
2) User Researcher
Companies performing at high UX-maturity levels recognize the importance of user research and invest heavily in this area. User researchers work closely with UX designers to help them define and shape the product based on user needs. They are responsible for generating opportunities for new products and product innovations by conducting qualitative field and market research in the early stages of the product development process.
Afterwards, they continue to ensure the needs of users are translated into tangible outcomes by leveraging research methods. They also evangelize their discipline and provide training within their organization.
3) User Assistance Developers
User assistance encompasses classical disciplines such as technical writing and knowledge management. Whereas the focus used to largely be on providing straightforward technical software documentation, user assistance has since evolved to meet users’ high expectations for their product experience. They now work on getting users familiar with the products they use by providing engaging, friendly and helpful information that is woven into the technology they use. It’s a crucial part of the user experience of a product as it shapes the tone and language used to interact with users.
4) Accessibility Specialist
Accessibility in simplest terms is defined as the ability to access devices, products, or services by everyone, including by people with disabilities. With the World Health Organization estimating that roughly one in seven people have some kind of disability, there is a growing demand to hire accessibility specialists for enterprise design.
These professionals ensure that design and development teams implement accessible product qualities early in the design process. This means ensuring that software is compatible with assistive technologies such as text to speech and screen readers, while also looking at aspects like color contrast and font types. They are experts when it comes to legal requirements and accessibility standards, as fulfilling these will ensure compliance and avoid customer escalations and lawsuits over digital accessibility.
Beyond the product level, their main and most important task is to advocate on behalf of their customers with disabilities, and to evangelize the importance of inclusive design in their organization.
5) Product Management for User Experience
If your organization is mature enough to employ a dedicated product manager, or even an entire product management team, you will come to know them as an essential part of the design organization.
Product managers represent the voice of the customer based on their knowledge of market trends, customer needs, and competitive pressures. They ensure alignment between design, development, legal, customers, and partners, and identify new opportunities for customer engagement and product direction. They use their collective findings to define the product strategy, prioritization, and road map, and build up external communities and networks to roll that information out to potential customers. They are market experts, business case developers, and a bridge between development and marketing. In short, product managers are essential to ensure that a product is designed to meet the needs of users, delivered with perfect timing, and in constant dialogue with customers.
6) Design Operations Manager
The Nielsen Norman Group defines design operations (DesignOps) as the orchestration and optimization of people, processes, and craft with the goal of amplifying the value of design and impact at scale. People working in design operations are design thinkers and problem solvers at heart. DesignOps managers are responsible for growing and evolving design teams and for finding ways to optimize workflows and communication so that designers and researchers can concentrate on their work. Design operations managers also oversee budget allocations and tool licensing, manage strategic initiatives to improve cross-team efficiency, and constantly measure the impact of their strategy.
So there you have it, six career paths in enterprise design to consider. With a 2020 LinkedIn study revealing that creativity is a top-rated soft skill and UX design is a top-10 hard skill for companies, the time for exploring enterprise design has never been better.
Learn more about careers in enterprise design:
· Am I Cut Out to Be a UX Designer for Enterprise?
· What is a UX Designer? — A Series
