📌 What are 5 better career paths for designers (Meta, Airbnb, Amazon and startups)

Working in UX design is both innovative & lucrative, given the average income of $103,704 for UX designers across the US. Find how to navigate the UX design career ladder like a pro.

Hello 👋, and welcome to this week’s ✨ ADPList’s Weekly Pulse ✨ - a community-only newsletter delivered every Tuesday. We tackle your questions about design, product, working with humans, and anything else that’s stressing you out at the office.

🔥 This Week’s Hot Sessions

1. ✨ Survival Metrics - Creating Change - Nov 02, 9:00 am PT (RSVP)

2. ✨The Confident Portfolio - Nov 02, 1:00 pm PT (RSVP)

3. ✨New role? Practical tips on listening tours - Nov 03, 5:00 am PT (RSVP)

4. ✨Design Systems – Ask me anything - Nov 04, 9:00 am PT (RSVP)

5. ✨Ask Anything About UX (Weekly) - Nov 04, 5:00 pm PT (RSVP)

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🔥 Top 5 Thriving Career Paths You Can Take As a UX Designer 

UX Management

As you progress in your UX career, try taking on tasks that will give you more experience, better opportunities, and of course new responsibilities. You’ll also need to develop powerful interpersonal and leadership skills to retain a managerial position. This can eventually land you roles like UX manager, UX director, creative director, and, further down the road, executive positions like chief experience officer, or vice president of UX.

Here are the average salaries of related managerial roles:

• UX manager: $178,063

• UX director: $132,379

• Chief experience officer: $138,877

• Creative director: $125,921

UX Specialist

If you find you’re drawn to certain aspects of UX design, making a lateral switch to a related position can be an option worth considering.  You can switch by polishing the skills in the field you want to move into. 

Here are average salaries for various roles in UX:

• UX researcher: $132,922

• UX writer: $118,725

• UX engineer: $124,511

UX Consulting

A UX consultant is someone who enables an organization to build better design and business strategy based on user experience principles. This may involve training clients in best UX practices, researching a client’s customers, or prototyping websites and other products.  

UX consultants make an average salary of $101,735.

Though not an exhaustive list, there are certain skills all designers (senior ICs and managers) should have: a deep and nuanced understanding of the design process, a strong ability to frame problems, a sharp product sense, strength in both strategy and execution, a stellar communication style and the power of persuasion, to name a few. On top of those, specific skills to the following archetypes:

Illustration: Diana Thai

It’s important to recognize that not every designer will have the desire or ability to savor the successes of others, distribute growth opportunities and plum projects to other designers or recognize other ICs for their wins. — Siva Sabaretnam, Meta

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📌 Design Inspo Hub

Design Principles Behind World’s Greatest Products: Apple, Google, Airbnb, & More

Airbnb

• Unified: Each piece is part of a greater whole and should contribute positively to the system at scale. There should be no isolated features or outliers.

• Universal: Airbnb is used around the world by a wide global community. Our products and visual language should be welcoming and accessible.

• Iconic: We’re focused when it comes to both design and functionality. Our work should speak boldly and clearly to this focus.

• Conversational: Our use of motion breathes life into our products, and allows us to communicate with users in easily understood ways.

Apple

• Aesthetic Integrity: Aesthetic integrity represents how well an app’s appearance and behavior integrate with its function. For example, an app that helps people perform a serious task can keep them focused by using subtle, unobtrusive graphics, standard controls, and predictable behaviors. 

• Consistency: Use familiar standards and paradigms via system-provided interface elements, well-known icons, standard text styles, and uniform terminology. Ultimately, incorporate features and behaviors in ways people expect….

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📈 Expert Career Tip of The Week

If you're about to receive a job offer, be ready for the salary negotiation conversation and make sure to be informed of what else might be on the table, such as benefits or flexible hours. The secret to successful pay negotiations is to hold off until the employer makes an offer.

Hastily bringing up money in a conversation implies that you don't value cultural fit at all and are only interested in making the most profit working. Similarly, if a recruiter brings up money right away, here’s what you can do:

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With ❤️ ADPList Team