Over the course of your life you’ve surely used apps or software that were intuitive and made you more productive. You’ve probably also used apps or software that were unintuitive and made you fight for every little thing. The field focusing on how to make user experiences that are delightful and stress-free is UX design (the ‘UX’ stands for ‘User Experience’). It’s an old subject, but with the recent growth of software, platforms, mobile development, and apps for almost everything, the demand for qualified UX designers is sky-high.
If you’re thinking of getting into UX design you’re probably curious about how much a UX designer makes. Wonder no more, Career Karma has your back.
What Does a UX Designer Do?
We can begin to get a handle on UX design by just thinking carefully about its name: User Experience design. Apps are built with the expectation that someone will be using them, and it’s the job of a UX designer to make the experience of interacting with the app as pleasant as possible.
When you use an app and finding the right menus is easy, navigation is uncomplicated, and doing new things is intuitive, you know the app is well designed.
If this is the case, there was probably a UX designer involved. The UX designer had to conduct research to figure out who would be using the app and what they would be trying to do.
Then the designer had to figure out how to make the app so the target users could use it to accomplish their goals. This will usually involve lots of iteration, testing, and improvement. Gradually, the UX designer will converge on a version of the app that makes the user experience as smooth as possible.
This requires a diverse skill set, including technical abilities like prototyping, wireframing, and interpreting user data. It also involves soft skills like talking to focus group participants to discover their reactions to using a product.
What’s a UX Designer Salary?
Given the demand for UX designers and the skills required, it’s no surprise that they do pretty well in monetary terms. Here in Denver, the average base for a UX designer salary is $82,964 annually, and that’s below the national average. UX designers pull in $109,062 in San Francisco, $94,253 in NYC, and $80,444 in Austin.
As always, pay varies considerably based on experience, skill level, project, and company. But UX design is a valuable, in-demand field that rewards those who study it.
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