How long have you been working at Razorfish?
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I’ve been at Razorfish for almost six years now. Razorfish is part of the Publicis network, and I’ve actually been at Publicis for over 10 years, working across Chicago in a handful of agencies. My background and education are in Design and I’ve worked on both the Creative and Experience sides of the business.
I am currently a Group Director at Razorfish, managing the User Experience and Content Strategy disciplines. Hiring great talent is a primary function of the role.
Are there challenges in sourcing for this particular role?
Yes, and I think a couple of things drive the challenges.
User Experience is an evolutionary discipline. Anyone creating experiences for customers today should be creating a good user experience if they hope to be successful. As a practice, the field of User Experience has long surpassed its origins over a decade ago in software development (usability). Today, businesses and agencies alike have very different definitions of User Experience, as well as different skills required by practitioners. There are multiple skills and approaches to problem solving under the umbrella of User Experience, driven mostly by the new challenges for customers and businesses alike in a digitally-driven marketplace.
From a hiring manager’s and candidate’s standpoint, this is a tough position, because every business may have a unique set of skills and needs for practitioners. It’s very challenging to source talent, because it’s almost at the point of being an individual problem that you’re trying to solve for a client, vertical or engagement, as opposed to a singular discipline that has a singular approach or a singular set of things that are done.
The good news is that at it’s core, User-Centered Design is a still the right methodology to create great experiences. Candidates and businesses just need to recognize that this approach needs to be the baseline from which processes, tools and artifacts evolve. The problems that clients are trying to solve are growing exponentially in complexity. To be successful, User Experience experts must adapt their skills to meet the needs of every unique situation. Therefore, a problem-solving approach based in UCD is far more important than a set of deliverables or software skills.
At admci there are two major course outcomes:
- You’ll be trained in the process of performing user-centered design from beginning to end on real-world projects.
- You’ll have a portfolio of artifacts to prove that you know how to do this.
It sounds like both of these things are very important in trying to source this kind of talent.
Yes, they are. And I would say that the former is almost more critical than the latter.
Having a deep understanding of how you approach problem solving from a user-centered design is critical - because it’s adaptable, it’s scalable, and it can be an ongoing methodology that you use repeatedly as the business and customer landscapes evolve. The deliverables, tools and visualizations used to create experience strategies, concepts and solutions - they’re the part that ebbs and flows, client by client, engagement by engagement.
