<aside> 🤩 What kinds of career paths you can pursue with the skills you gain in your HCI courses? You may have heard of a lot of job titles relating to UX that sound very similar to each other, and it might be hard to know what each role entails and how each is different from the rest. In this week’s Editor’s Pick, we look closer at the different UX career paths you may be interested in and what makes each one unique!
</aside>
UX designer may be the role you hear about often. But what do you do as a UX designer?
<aside> 🎨 UX designer: “make a product or service usable, enjoyable, and accessible…As a [UX] designer, you’re responsible for users' overall satisfaction with a product.”
</aside>
Interested in learning more about user behavior? UX researcher could be the role for you!
<aside> 🔬 UX researcher: “running UX workshops, creating UX strategies or various aspects of UX design such as conversational design, interaction design or motion design.”
</aside>
If information architecture is interesting to you, you might be interested in being a UX architect.
<aside> 🏠 [UX architect](https://adamfard.com/blog/ux-architect-ux-analyst#:~:text=User experience architects (aka information,and wireframes for the product.): “focus on creating an intuitive flow for products…compared to designers, they have a more holistic view of the user’s path.”
</aside>
For those of you that are technically-inclined, roles such as UX developer and UX engineer may be where your skills fit best.
<aside> 🤖 UX developer: ”a person who has the skills to learn the journey that a user takes when they are on the front end of a website and then design the best possible journey that a front-end user can take.”
</aside>
<aside> 🛠️ UX engineer: “a front-end engineer who focuses on the technical aspects of the entire design system.”
</aside>
But what comes after your first, second, or third role after graduating? What kind of UX career ladders exist? Senior roles exist for the careers mentioned above as well as UX management.
<aside> 👵 Lead or principal UX designers: in addition to typical UX designer responsibilities, senior roles may lead a small team or guide the UX design process
</aside>
<aside> 👥 UX management: “Creative directors and UX managers are also tasked with delegating tasks, establishing deadlines and prioritizing work, budgeting, approving designs and consulting with stakeholders, developers, software engineers and the marketing department.”
</aside>