Are you an advanced UX consultant? Are you a genius and you have not realized? Do you know what an advanced UX consultant does? Maybe you have a special talent for developing web experiences and you are not exploiting it.
If you are a UX consultant, you can work as such, or business consultant, at some point in your career. Once you have developed this skill, you can quickly get into an agency as a freelancer or even start your own company.
Being an advanced user experience consultant is a great opportunity, but you must develop skills for it. Joining a team as a consultant is very different from joining a full-time employee. Not everyone is suitable for this role, but those who fit in will find that they excel in consulting roles. Being a consultant also offers you great flexibility. Are you an advanced UX consultant? Learn the role that a UX consultant performs and whether you fit into this classification.
What does a UX consultant do?
A specialist in this field is expert at recognizing the most appropriate solution to the client’s needs, even if it is beyond its core skills. This is extremely difficult as consultancy projects changes from one client to another, with different requirements.
For example, for some clients, your role may involve simply upgrading existing documentation or running an already built platform. For others, you can provide thought leadership and help define the product, including conducting research and overcoming what is commonly thought of as a user experience to encourage the digital birth of a website.
Whatever role you play in creating, for example, a website, you must act accordingly. When you are an advanced UX consultant, you fit into a team with no complications because you are a leader.
And what about an advanced UX consultant? When you have enough experience, you work with usability tests. You ask some questions and let the client talk to know their needs and build the best product for them. The client will tell you everything: how they want the project to work, what is the policy within the company, usability, whether they are selling a product or service and so on. They will also tell you their client´s profile, whether they are teenagers, adults, seniors, women, men, children. Everything. And that’s good, because as an advanced consultant you will know what to do with the data and how to use it to design a good interface.
Importantly, by listening, you will not only gain insight into how they want their project to work, but you will also learn how to navigate the company culture. This is the time when you need to make perfect decisions, because it leads to better results. Of course, this does not mean that you have to do everything the client says, because you are the expert after all.
If you think the customer is going the wrong way in product development, you must demonstrate this by researching and supporting change. Your job is to offer that experience that sets you apart from other consultants. When things go well, your name will be known to clients´ colleagues, friends and acquaintances, giving you visibility in the industry.
When you are not an advanced user experience consultant and you are joining a project, usually the first thing you do is face the client. A pseudo-consultant speaks under the rest of the team and that’s not good: it’s the wrong way to impress a client, as there are thousands of decisions that have been made before getting there. This means that you do not understand the context of the decisions.
However, it is important to present your work as a team product. The secondary plan is to build a relationship with the person who brought you in, as there is a good chance you will be re-engaged if your job is attractive. What you want is for them to support you with other people in the company and other organizations.
Once you are hired as an advanced UX consultant for a project, you need to document everything, as you may be asked to support any decision later on. There is nothing worse than arguing over a project that you not have mastered well. Customers will reconsider everything and if you cannot give them answers, then you are out.
