How to Hire a Designer
By designer, I don’t merely mean a graphic designer, but a UX Designer, UI Designer, Web Designer, Interaction Designer, IA, Usability Specialist; they’re all very much one and the same thing. If you’re a web shop, how to hire one? What to look for? Is a resume and portfolio sufficient? Ultimately, we’re just trying to get the right guy (or gal) for the job.
Blue Flavor, a design shop up in Seattle, talks about designers as problem solvers. 37signals succinctly articulated some of the things I’ve been thinking about on a recent post of theirs:
After evaluating people’s basic taste and skill level, we turn to other things. How do they think? What do they think about? How do they approach problems? Can they write? Do they enjoy writing? Can they express themselves concisely? How do they work when they aren’t given direction? Stuff like that.
That’s pretty much how I think too, and here’s why. Scanning resumes from applicants, everyone’s been a Senior Designer or Creative Director at one point or another. Not something to be denigrated, but I find myself still having a lot of questions:
What kind of company is it? How design-oriented (as opposed to engineering-driven) is the company culture? What stage of usability maturity is the company (thx, Alertbox)?
It’s like finding out someone played Varsity basketball in high school. How good a player he actually is depends on what school he played at, the competitive tier the school played in, the coach, and a whole number of circumstantial factors. The CV, unfortunately, leaves out some of these things.
Portfolios are very cool too. But they often fail for lack of specificity and clarity. Yes, there’s something to be said about seeing a person’s style and tastes. But it’s hard to conclude from the sample projects and sites what the applicant actually worked on: did they do usability research and offer recommendations which were then incorporated? Did they design the entire IA or just the submission form for registration? Did they code a couple pages, or did they set up the CSS framework and order all the class IDs, and the questions keep going.
For me, the most important quality in finding a Designer is to figure out how they think. I’m not that interested in how pretty they can make things, how cleanly they code CSS or HTML, how “creative” they are, although those are important. Actually, they’re really important. But I’m also interested in how well they can understand (and articulate) the problems they encounter, and the solutions they propose. The skills they employ to solve the problems put in front of them give me a good picture of whether or not this person’s the right fit.
My method of hiring, then, has to do with giving applicants a problem or two to work on: figure out how they think, what they think about, if they can get to the core of the problem, and then the way they go about solving that problem. I don’t give pop quizzes. That freaks people out, and as a bad test taker, my sympathies lie with those who find their IQs dropping when they’re put on the spot to produce something in what’s already a very stressful environment. I prefer giving people a problem they can take care of on their own time, and I ask them not to spend more than 2-3 hours. I want to see how they organize information and page elements. I want to see how people envision and think through user flows, the user’s experience from point A to point B, and the different elements of the UI that will get them there.
It seems that’s a greater predictor of success and fit. And I’m often appalled at companies that hire based only on CV and Portfolio, or only ask for a presentation of past work. Don’t you want to see a presentation of work within the familiar context of problems you know they’re going to encounter?
Tagged as hiring + Categorized as Design