Experiencing Rejection

By Avangelist | Published: October 12, 2010

Recently, I saw a post for quite literally my dream job with Brighton based Clearleft a company which for several years now I have watched like a hawk, I love virtually everything that comes out of their office, the quality of their web design and development is astounding, so much so they’ve won awards and released some great books and articles.

They were, and still are looking for a Senior User Experience Designer. The title says it all – ‘Get your dream job at Clearleft‘.

For me, that is true on several levels. Over the last 12 months I have attended several courses from Clearleft in a few different areas of web design, read a lot of magazine articles by various members of staff and sat looking at the teams blogs waiting for this sort of position to open. It took me a few weeks to get together my CV, spending several days on it cross checking it with friends for different areas of input before finally putting it forward. My cover letter was equally considered.

I had a whole plan put together to show I was different to the hundreds of applicants they must have had. I obtained a letter of recommendation from my former Technical Director who produced testimonial on how after several years of me hounding him to let me try some ideas based on user centred design he had let me go with it and produced incredible results, so much so he is now using my consultative ears with his new startup company Clearsavvy. I had a strong cover letter and was going to hand deliver it knowing that my cheeky wit, manboy charm and charisma would bowl over whoever took the envelope from my hand….

But things went wrong. First off, when I went to the office but nobody was in. I decided to wait an hour heading off to Pompoko for some lunch, but nobody returned later in the afternoon. Ultimately my whole plan backfired meaning I was unable to provide the experience of my introduction as I had intended. Not completely lost, I returned to my computer, attached the document trail and submitted my application by email, with a note to say, I tried to say hello but nobody was home.

The following day, I received a lovely email from Clearleft saying sorry they weren’t in and that my application had been received. Fabulous! Positive thanks and confirmation. The first half of the job was done.

To say that I was gutted when I received another email a few days later saying that after looking at my CV I did not have the years in me they were after would be kind. This is something I have been blighted my whole career the ‘experience’ in ‘user experience’.

Experience for me falls into two categories.

  1. role specific experience
  2. life experience

Unfortunately for me I have an over abundance of 2′s but very few 1′s. This is because like a lot of people, I have been doing user experience my whole life in every job I have ever had.  When I was at College I was more concerned about whether people would like my record if it had an imploding sun on the front, a black and white photo or some blood spattered broken glass than if the artwork or even recording was in on time. When I was running a chain of Athena high street stores, or a Thresher off licence I was more interested in whether my employees enjoyed coming in every day, whether framing a print made somebody smile when I handed it over or if the drunk disabled lady could get her walking frame around the Beer stacks than profit margins, personal happiness or fatigue. With the years rolling on I learnt how to balance the desire for creativity and effect with the more commercial aspects to become a rounded web designer, project manager and html/css developer.

Currently, I am a lead front-end developer. Prior to this role I ran the design department for the same company and before that worked in the marketing department doing all the online work and a lot of the time running the department because I knew what I was doing. In the nearly 3 years I have been here, I have pushed and pulled a lot for the user and not just the end user client, but my team members and colleagues too who often get overlooked in companies when it comes to improving and developing tools. I’ve produced new product lines that were formed because I saw them as being vital to our end users – they’re also some of the highest selling items, provided html training to staff members who wanted to learn more, written several training guides, user guides and changes to processes for efficiency gains and ease of use. I’ve introduced a creative consultancy service for our clients, brought in wireframing with paper sketches, created user profiles and use cases for our application development cycles and got the KJ Technique working on project objective meetings. I’ve also removed a hell of a lot of icons that meant nothing replacing them with text descriptions that make sense.

When I received my very well written and genuinely kind rejection email it instantly reminded me of a recent post by Andy Budd of Clearleft. In his post he made a few points about how every web designer these days think they’re a user experience designer by default and that they’re wrong. In some ways I agree with Andy, there are a lot of web designers out there who will currently be spamming their keywords with UX and user experience like it is about to go out of fashion to increase their worth to prospective clients who are also naive and fail to really understand that it is not a buzz word or new buzz phrase but in fact a methodology that should in fact be the norm.

For every black hat web designer now claiming to be a UXpert when last year they were an SEO expert there are just as many web designers/developers who genuinely are proficient in the area because it is something they have always considered in everything they have ever done.

I fall into the latter category. Although I understand SEO (it really is common sense and writing well constructed content!) I never professed to being an ‘expert’ because I didn’t believe it to be a selling point, in the same way that I don’t believe User Centred Design should be a selling point – it’s something that you should be doing and care about by default. And if there is one area which I excel in beyond so many others – it’s caring about why you are doing something and being passionate with it, my determination to promote the UK music scene or my love of photography are testament to that.

In the same week, I was also turned down for a similar role for another well known Brighton agency on the same grounds – not enough experience.

The question now becomes how exactly do I obtain this missing job title experience?

I am spilling out at the edges with knowledge, skills and the passion to back up this elusive title but don’t have the bold print below my name in my email signature?

Answers, suggestions, comments, feedback all welcome.

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  • http://twitter.com/andybudd Andy Budd

    Hi Andy,

    First off I want to thank you for your well articulated and reasoned post. You’ve raised a lot of topics worthy of discussion so I’ll attempt to cover a few of them here. I’m going to try and refrain from giving you explicit feedback on your application as that could be seen as a little unprofessional. However I’m happy to answer any specific questions you have in more detail via phone or email if you’d like.

    As somebody who comes from a front end development background such as yourself, I suspect that we’ve both had a similar career trajectory. I started designing and coding websites but soon realised that wasn’t enough. To create truly great experiences I also needed to understand user motivations and then plan those experiences out in non graphical ways. So I learnt how to run usability tests, how to create site maps and how to wireframe and prototype.

    I spent several years working as a hybrid designer, trying to do everything myself. However as the projects I designed got bigger I found that it became impossible for me to do everything so I started to specialise. I reached an inflection point after a couple of years when I found myself doing more UX work than design or development. I suspect this is the point you and many of your peers are reaching now.

    A few years later and I got to a point where I had stopped doing design and development work altogether and was focused purely on user experience. It was only at this point that I felt comfortable calling myself a user experience designer and even then I didn’t feel that I had the necessary skills and experience.

    I’ve been calling myself a user experience designer for around six years now, although I’ve been doing UX-like activities for closer to ten. Over that time I’ve come to realise what an absolutely massive field User Experience is, encompassing many other fields like User Research, Information Architecture, Interaction Design, Cognitive Psychology and Product Strategy to name just a few. When I look back at the early days of my UX career I’m amazed at how little I knew then and indeed how little I still know now.

    Malcome Gladwell suggests that to become an expert in a particular field you need around 10,000 hours (or 10 years) dedicated experience. You learn the basics of a field very quickly, so how to play an instrument or how to throw a pot. Many people simply stop there and start repeating the same two years over and over again. However it takes continual improvement to internalise these skills and transition from simply understanding how something works to being able to do it to a continuously high standard with predictable results. This is as true of designers and developers as it is true of UX people. It’s relatively easy to learn Photoshop or HTML/CSS but surprisingly difficult to be a design or development master. Similarly it’s easy to learn how to create wireframes but it takes a huge amount of time and experience to create truly great experiences.

    As a practitioner I’m very conscious of my strengths (interaction design, strategy) and my weaknesses (research, IA) so seek to supplement my own abilities and the abilities of my team with domain specialists. People who have those 10,000 hours of experience and can bring something new to the team. So when we advertise jobs at Clearleft we really are looking for exerts. Folks who have been doing this for a long time and would feel at home sharing their knowledge in books, articles and rooms full of their peers.

    So how do you get to this point when you’re transitioning from a design or development role where you have the passion but lack the experience? One way is to carry on the transition you’re in and slowly take on more UX responsibilities until that becomes the mainstay of your job. Another way is to jump ship and re-invent yourself as a UX practitioner, either by taking on a junior UX role or going freelancer. A third option is to take an Interaction Design Masters, although that will also come with issues around experience. None of these options are easy and most require a few steps back in terms of salary and career progression. Whatever you do, make sure that you’re reading all the latest books, keeping up on all the industry blogs, and most importantly attending as many conferences, networking events and training sessions as you can.

    Realising some of these problems, Clearleft have been offering 3-4 intern positions each year for the last 3 years. However we don’t tend to take people straight out of university. Instead we’re looking for folks with 3-4 years of hands experience, be that full time or part. In return for your time you get to work with some pretty amazing people on real world projects over a 10 week period. You also get insight into what it takes to be a senior practitioner in this field. Most of our Interns go on to full time positions in other agencies with the hope that they’ll come back in a few years time with the experience they need to be a full time member of the Clearleft team.

    So for folks wanting to transition into the field of user experience, we do share your pain as many of us have been there ourselves. It’s a hard slog and there are no guarantees that you’ll make the grade. However one thing is for certain. There is a huge need for UX skills at the moment so it’s never been easier to make the jump. Where before you needed 6 years to be considered a middle weight practitioner, people are now being hired with just two or three. So knuckle down, stick with it and do whatever you can to build up that backlog of experience to show to prospective clients. And once you’ve clocked up your 10,000 hours flying time, be sure to give Clearleft a shout.