SLIS graduate Tyler Waite is enjoying his job as an UX (user experience) Researcher for Intel in Redmond, Washington. In an email interview, we asked his about his work (see responses below). Tyler received the SLIS post-master's Specialist in Library and Information Science degree in 2007.

Main Job Duties:
Conducting formative and summative usability tests, creating personas, working with UX Designer on UI wireframes, creating surveys, interviewing users individually and in focus groups, creating use cases, scenarios, and sometimes UML models.

Favorite Aspects of Your Job:
Learning about different jobs people do and trying to come up with ways to use technology to make that job more efficient, effective, and enjoyable.

Tips for Students:
UX jobs often require you to be a jack of all trades. Only large organizations like Microsoft have staff who only do usability testing. There is a lot of demand for people with UI prototyping and design skills. Visio and Photoshop are the most common prototyping tools, but PowerPoint, Balsamic, Axure, and Illustrator are also common. Study Alan Cooper's books. Using personas and scenarios in software design is becoming more common. Learn enough UML to understand how it describes the application architecture.

Posted June 06, 2012