How to interview a UX person without breaching an NDA
It’s really time to give away some of secrets about how to interview UX people without breaching NDA’s and opening recruitment agency staff and clients to litigation.
First an easy one,
if someone offers to show a UX portfolio don’t even interview them!
Why? well if it’s of real work it’s a breach of contract, if it’s not then the projects won’t have a set of reasons behind it. It’s the process and reasons behind a concept that is the UX not the delivery tool of wireframes, models or videos. If you have to see wireframes, models or videos then your bound to make a mistake, because people who rely on pictures to explain interaction will always be mugged by the next con artist who comes along. Pictures can easily be faked and if your not savvy enough to not need them for an interview you open a huge risk to your business and to your clients of utter failure. Clients don’t retain recruitment companies that fail, more they tell their networks.
Ask for a list of clients, project durations and exactly what they did on each project?
They won’t have done exactly the same thing on each project, it’s the nature of UX that we rarely get to do the whole process. But exposing the UX process is the essential activity.
The UX process is:
Requirements Stage
- Business Requirements (often by BA’s)
- User Research (and Business Requirements Testing with target customers)
- User Requirements
- Project Requirements
Conceptual Stage
- Ideation
- Concepting
- Concept Testing
- Refining
Design Stage
- Prototyping
- Designing
- Interaction Style Guide
- Visual Style Guide (Design consultant)
Build Stage
- Building (Development, incremental testing of code drops)
- Product Experience Testing (Not automated, with target users)
- Feedback Loop
Now can you interview against this standard set of skills and understand if the person your interviewing has these skills? No documents are required as part of a UX interview, personas, wireframes, process flows are not needed (and can be faked), just the linkages between the above elements and the projects people have worked on.
If you would like to be trained to interview people for UX roles please contact me.