The IA institute published their 2009 salary survey. What I found interesting is the task statistics they present.  I meet many people who ask me about the task list of a UX designer. Some of them are junior designers some are managers that are considering a UX practitioner on board. I usually hesitate with the answer. UX is a wide variety of tasks; the exact combination depends on the person fulfilling the position, the specific product and, of course, the company including its culture and other professionals available.

That is a very general answer, a genuine one but not so helpful… The statistics from the IA survey may give a good example of the variety I’m talking about. Here is my summary of it.

The survey asked about the time dedicated for a task, interestingly enough, none of the tasks received a score of “this is all what I do”, meaning no UX practitioner is devoting her time to one primary task, it is always a list of tasks. Frequent answer for most tasks was “occasionally (not every day)”.

So what do we do most of our time?

*Score is a weighted combination of number of responders and time they spend on a task (this is my score you can see original numbers in the Survey report)

Although the survey provided quite a long list of tasks, many people felt it is not exhaustive and added more tasks under the “other” category:

• Building and documenting the internal design research practice
• Business requirements, functional specification creation
• Business semantic and metadata management
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Contextual inquiry, survey analysis, search data analysis
• Evangelizing user experience research findings and recommendations
• Meeting with clients to review current work and understand business requirements.
• Presenting (ideas, lectures, etc)
• Prototypes development, product roadmaps
• Prototyping
• Qualitative data analysis
• Report generation
• Requirements gathering, requirements management, use cases
• Research
• Review the work of development teams for compliance with corporate design standards
• Specification writing, design reviews
• UI implementation
• Writing use cases and stories for agile product development
• Business analysis, requirements development, QA, testing
• Content and/or competitive assessments
• Domain modeling, evangelism, workshops, meetings
• Evangelism - communication - selling IA
• Evangelizing strategy
• Front-end development, production, document creation - style guide, spec creation, gathering and defining requirements
• Internal education
• Managing internal (customer) relationships
• Presentation creation
• Problem solving
• Product management
• Product strategy and management
• Project-specific problem-solving; internal consults
• Social media: strategy and monitoring
• Writing reports

55 of the 431 responders added more tasks - it is a large number suggesting the need for more task options was significant.

It is important to note that this is probably a good picture of the current situation (mainly in the US – about 70% of responders), but not necessarily the desired one…