THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR:
A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in January.
What Projects Did You Create in a Hackathon? How Hard Was It to Create It in a Limited Time?
Working within constraints is an important skill of any good product designer. At a hackathon, your constraints include time, of course, as well as available data, resources and the knowledge and skill of your team members. I try to join diverse groups that include at least one person who understands the underlying subject matter and available data, one strong open source developer and one designer/researcher type (usually that’s me). If you use and understand open source data and tools you likely have access to more resources than other teams, so unless the hackathon is restricted to proprietary tools and data, it gives you an edge.
Hackathon projects I’ve done (I try to do at least one per year):
The Nature Conservancy Stormwater Challenge: I hosted a service design hackathon in October 2018 with the goal to encourage private property owners to implement Stormwater mitigation technology.
Empathy Jam: My team created a prototype job training platform at the 2017 Empathy Jam.
United Nations Unite For Humanity: I co-chaired a weekend hackathon in 2016 with the goal to create anti terrorist projects. The winning project employed machine learning to disrupt terrorist networks. Other submitted projects included a stateless e911 network and a SMS based marketplace for emergency supplies.
NYPL Open Audio Hackathon: In 2016, my team created a tool to add multimedia content to audio podcasts.
NYPL Open Book Hack: I went twice. The first year, my team created a PDF to reflowable ePub converter for Supreme Court opinions. The next year, my team created a poetry recommendation tool. Based on poems and genres a user likes, it created a booklet with twenty poems.
Upcoming Hackathon: Escape from New York
I will be mentoring at MD5’s Escape from New York Mass Evacuation hackathon in NYC the weekend of February 22-24. This Defense Department Hackathon features $45k in awards. Let me know if you’d like to bring a team or participate as a mentor. There are a few student and professional tickets left but you have to have a promotional code to unlock them. Visit https://www.eventbrite.com/e/escape-from-new-york-a-massive-evacuation-hackathon-tickets-51211081724
Where do I find and hire freelance UI/UX designers?
TL;DR: Good UX designers pass on any job description that says “UI/UX”. Don’t use it. Instead use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.
For hiring designers, I’ve had good luck with TopTal, but I prefer to go on Slack groups and get out to meetups to really get to know people I want to work with. I don’t like Dribble or Behance for UX people. It’s typically a lot of eye-candy that shows very little of the designer’s process. If there is a designer I like who has a portfolio there, I’ll look, but I wouldn’t start there from scratch.
A good UX designer will show their process: the methods they use, the choices they made, even the designs they discarded. A good portfolio give you a sense of the problem space and challenges and will have a clear description of the person’s role. You can’t tell any of this from a glossy, finished product photo.
I strongly suggest that you not use the term “UX/UI” in the job description. As others have stated, it is too broad to really be meaningful. Most User Experience people will see that and read “visual design” which may or may not include everything from graphic design, animation, typography and stylesheets. Some good candidates may assume you want a front-end developer, and give the role a pass, because developers typically don’t do UX.
It’s better to use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.
UI people typically are front-end designers and often are expected to know how to code. While UI fits into the UX umbrella, most UX Designers will be focused on user journeys, personas, user advocacy and may or may not do research. UI people use research, but don’t necessarily produce it themselves and may be a step or two removed from the user research process.
There is a rather hot debate going on as to whether UX Designers should know how to code. Most designers and researchers that identify as “UX” people do not code. I’m from the camp that says it helps, but if they are mostly coding (unless it’s to put together prototypes for testing and they don’t have devs to do that for them), they’re probably not a UX “designer”.
Bottom line: You need users to do UX design. You could make a case for researching logs and customer support database, but since it’s after release, that’s really user acceptance testing, not UX. The user experience design process starts with user testing way before you release a product and occurs along with development, launch and beyond. And if you aren’t applying user research and integrating users into your design processes or at least talking to them, its just not UX .