UX Designer Salary: 5 Important Things to Know – Dice Insights

How much can UX designers earn? Thats a crucial question if youre thinking of getting into UX (i.e., user experience design). An excellent UX designer can help elevate a product to best-in-class, but theyll also need to convince executives and managers that their skills are truly invaluable.

First, some additional exposition: Although you sometimes see the terms UI and UX used interchangeably, theyre actually very different. In a software context,UI is what the user sees on a screen: the icons, text, colors, backgrounds, and any moving elements (such as animations). UX, on the other hand, ishowthe user moves through all those UI elements. UX designers spend a lot of their time thinking about how users flow through a product, as well as how much friction they experience while trying to reach a particular goal.

Job-wise, UX designers dont work in a vacuum. They spend a lot of time talking to team members (such as engineers and UI designers), and they often carve out time in their schedule to engage with the products current or future users. As a result of these interactions, they create prototypes that they submit for review and notes. In other words, this is a position that requiressoft skillssuch as empathy and communication.

As fortechnical UX designer skills, heres what pops up most often in job postings for the position, according to Burning Glass, which collects and analyzes millions of job postings from across the country. As you might expect, UI designers use virtually the same tools and programming languages:

(Burning Glass definesdistinguishing skillsas advanced skills that truly differentiate candidates applying for various roles.Defining skillsare the skills needed for day-to-day tasks in many roles, whilenecessary skillsare the lowest barrier to entry.)

With zero to two years of experience, a UX designers salary can range anywhere from $66,000 to $102,000, according to Burning Glass. Thats an exceptionally wide range determined by several factors, including (but certainly not limited to)your portfolio and the projects youve worked on, the company youre working for, and whether you have other skills (such as programming) that can make you a more valuable, cross-disciplinary employee.

The median salary for a UX designer is $98,485.

The most recent Dice Salary Reportpegs the average technology salary at $94,000 in 2019, a 1.3 percent increase from 2018. Software developers at top companies such as Apple and Google can easily earn more than $150,000 per year, once you factor in bonuses, stock options, and other kinds of compensation.

UX designers with lots of experience and a solid portfolio can land a salary competitive with those numbers. For example, Burning Glass suggests that UX designers in the 90th percentile for compensation can make $128,115 per year, on average. Those kind of numbers, though, generally come after a decade or more of working.

According to Burning Glass, the average time to fill an open position is 36 days, roughly similar to many other technology jobs. Its a lengthy-enough timespan to suggest a pretty high level of demand for UX designers; for jobs with lots of open candidates and relatively few open jobs, time-to-fill is often much shorter.

Burning Glass also predicts that UX designer jobs will grow 14.9 percent over the next 10 years, so its not a dying profession by any stretch of the imagination. After all its not like businesses are going to stop designing, building, and releasing productsand as long as that cycle continues, theyll need UX designers to create a seamless experience for users.

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UX Designer Salary: 5 Important Things to Know - Dice Insights