[IxDA Discuss] How to hire a good IxD (RE: Eye tracking, how valuable is it?)

[David (Heller) Malouf]

> Care to outline exactly how one goes about hiring a *good* UI
> designer? ;-)

First some thoughts on eye-tracking of my own.
I have found the case studies I have read on eye-tracking to be quite
outstanding. What is gleaned from them in my mind is applicable across many
a domain. Understanding what part of layouts and text people are ignoring
tells a designer a lot about their design and I can see how this information
CAN be useful.

<caveats>
1. you have the time and budget to do the analysis of the results. I know
for myself I don't even bother with video analysis b/c I don't even have
time for that. My usability tests are very qualitative and anything more
statistical is out of my reach. That isn't to say that statistical
quantitative analysis isn't appropriate when the resources are available,
but resourcing is important.

2. eye-tracking seems to be most useful when the pool is deep. You need to
have more users to get to the greatest level of fine tuning to derive
conclusions.

3. conclusions seem to only come at the extremes when I read eye-tracking
case studies. It always seems to be a little "too perfect".
</caveats>

My conclusion though is that for most people with limited resources and
budgets is that a good seasoned designer with qualitative skills goes
further than adding in eye-tracking and doing proper analysis on it.

Now, that leads to Jared's question ... How do you hire the right designers?

I have had VERY mixed results in my hiring over the last few years. There is
so much to hiring a good designer and often HR departments are of very
little help because they have little to no experience working with designers
and thus don't understand that they are not like the rest of the
development/production team. (I'm an insider, but have experience hiring as
a consultant as well.) While on the consulting/agency side of things, I
found that internal recruiters are a lot more helpful.

What does it mean for a recruiter in your HR dept to be helpful:
1. They understand that design is not making pretty things
2. They understand the cultural environment for designers in the
organization and the repercussions that has on hiring designers as a
different cultural career path than developers and other business
professionals
3. They create pay-scale and bonus plans that speak to the creative class
4. They understand the career paths for designers are very different than
for other professionals. I.e. very few organizations have non-management
career paths in their organizations. Yes I know there are some that do, but
they are the exception that get it. What is funny is often there have this
career path in engineering--i.e. the principal engineer--but don't know how
to engage that path within the design organization. Even agencies have this
problem.

After you deal w/ the HR issues, finding a GOOD designer is probably one of
the hardest things to do. How do you judge that? How many of the 100's of
resumes you get are just a waste of time?

So without getting into the whole, what should a portfolio look like debate,
I want to just concentrate on something that seems to be the make or break
to me, but even that is not 100% ... Can you present your work? Can you
present your work in front of your supervisor and other non-peer exec-staff
who are going to give you no room for mistakes? Can you present confidently
without arrogance? Can you support your designs with statements that speak
to a wide range of stakeholders? Can you support your design based on design
theory?

To me, presentation skills are the ones that most hiring managers don't tell
you they are looking for and few up and coming designers are trained to deal
with.

Now, here is one that might spark some volleys:
A good designer understands "the studio". Design is non-linear. If you do
not understand that to go forward you have to go sideways and backwards and
circle in place before moving towards conclusion I don't think you will be a
good designer. You will not do anything different from what a standard Bus.
Analyst (they are good people, just not designers) could do on their own and
thus you will put the design dept. in a defensive position. Please see
presentation skills again, b/c if you don't present your designs over time
w/o fear, you risk being perceived as a "black box" where stuff goes in and
other stuff goes out and people end up only looking for "pretty" in those
scenarios.

Studio, also means being able to take criticism and work with it. Design is
arguably a team sport. That doesn't in my mind contradict the model of a
strong "visionary" that leads design, but a strong visionary knows how to
take critiques and changes in requirements and re-articulate their vision
with that new criteria.


Now, the real question is how do you find all this out during an evaluation
(interview) process? To me this is where the portfolio comes in. I ask
people to present their portfolios to me as if they were presenting them to
the business, tech, and design leads for the project. I look for all the
criteria of the above during that presentation and try to give the person 3
tries to do it, especially if the first or second tries aren't panning out
as I would want them.


Here's the tough part. Out of an application pool that make it through the
door, here is what I think the statistics are in my experience for finding a
GOOD designer:

100 resumes
	80%-90% don't make cut - stereotypes on purpose (asbestos is on, so
flame away)
		visual designer - too aesthetic
		usability expert - don't know how to speak in terms of
design, or create
		HCI person - too cognitive, and don't understand aesthetics
		Information architect - don't understand how to interact
over time
		multimedia designer - great for games and animation, but not
for software
		web designer - developer in designer's clothing

	20-10% get to interview
		19-9% not good
			IA in designer's clothing
			Never learned how to present designs
				They can talk a good talk, but can't really
walk the walk
	1% get the job
		get it! 1 out of 100 resumes really are a GOOD IxD. Harsh
but true.

So, it is indeed REALLY hard to find a good IxD, so maybe it is so hard that
you might as well just get that eye-tracking done. ;)

-- dave