Salary Trends for Usability Professionals
The following chart shows the average annual salary for two types of usability professionals in the United States:
- A person with 5 years' experience working as a usability professional.
- An entry-level person with essentially no industry work experience.
Average salaries for usability professionals from 1998 to 2007, adjusted for inflation (all amounts are shown in 2008-equivalent U.S. dollars). Sources: HFI (2003), NN/g (2001), Peak Usability (2002, 2004), SIGCHI (1998), and UPA (2000, 2005, 2007).
These curves don't plot the raw numbers from the individual studies. In each case, I've taken the original findings and run them through mathematical models to clean up some of the methodological uncertainties inherent in salary surveys.
General Trends
Rather than obsess over individual data points, it's better to look at the chart's bigger trends. Several conclusions are clear:
- Entry-level staffers were paid unrealistically high salaries during the bubble, when dot-com companies were desperate to hire any warm body that walked in the door.
- Experienced staffers were also paid more during the bubble, but their salaries have declined less in subsequent years.
- As a result of the different trends for entry-level and experienced staff, the premium on experience has increased in recent years: in 2007 it was about $5,800 per year of experience, compared with about $3,000 in 2001.
The Value of Experience
Experience also dramatically increases a person's ability to infer underlying design flaws from observing user behavior. User behavior is remarkably consistent over the years. The more users you've seen, the more accurate your judgments and predictions of future user behavior. All these factors justify a substantial premium on usability experience.
The $5.8K/year experience premium applies during the early years of a usability professionals' career. Later, the premium drops to $2.7K/year. This is reasonable, as the biggest performance gains come in the early years, when newly minted usability specialists are disabused of bad habits from university and learn how to actually do the job in industry.
Sunday, March 30, 2008 1:30 AM
