The User Experience (UX) Team.

At Appian and on the UX team, we take professional and personal growth very seriously. Our DesignOps team is always on the lookout to adapt our practices to the individual and cohesive needs of the team. We have the following resources handy to assist team members with their growth needs:

• Competency Model: In the interest of transparency and as a tool to help managers and team members alike, we have a published competency model that showcases differing areas of growth ranging from individual contribution to execution excellence to culture contributions.
• Multiple Growth Trajectories: We help team members choose a career path that suits their personal objectives. Team members can choose to hone in on specific UX skills by taking the expert track or can choose to mentor junior designers as they settle into our management track. In addition, we also grow team members in the direction of responsibility by assigning them to lead strategic missions or goals.
• Ownership: While our team members deliver impact on development teams, we also encourage growth by contributing to UX team or engineering departmental initiatives. Our DesignOps team is always on the lookout for volunteers to hone design practices to benefit the overall team, represent us at conferences (we sponsor you to attend them!) or take charge on projects based on your personal interest (for instance, several of us are part of the graphic design guild that builds beautiful illustrations for the product and marketing teams).

The best answer is - it depends. Our team runs the entire gamut of the design and development lifecycle. Depending on what the mission and priority is, our team could be pursuing a mix of the following activities:

• Conducting research and analysis activities to articulate user needs using methods such as stakeholder or user interviews, focus groups and surveys.
• Collaborating and brainstorming with other UX Designers or Product Managers on how to best achieve user centric outcomes in an incremental manner using techniques such as affinity mapping, storyboarding and roadmapping.
• Developing high level visions and UI detail designed that outline the level of effort and design priorities using wireframing, low-fidelity designs and detailed design specifications
• Continuously validating and refining our hypothesis and designs based on user interactions using techniques such as usability studies.

We encourage our UX team members to uniquely scale to the growing needs of our engineering department and the company as a whole. We believe in ensuring our team members are involved holistically in the UX journey of delivering usable and intuitive features to our users.

Check out the latest "Day in the Life of a UX Designer" carousel on our social media!

The UX team at Appian is growing, so our UXDs are mostly generalists and own multiple stages of the design life-cycle. We look for UXDs that are well-rounded and prepared to facilitate everything from UX research, to designing and iterating prototypes, to usability testing.

We ask ourselves questions like:

• How does our product help our users with their day to day lives?
• What assumptions are we making along the way?
• How do we validate those assumptions?
• Is this something we can effectively release to users?
• Will our users be able to use this?

• Our interview follows the standard structure for Appian interviews outlined here. The stages are a recruiter screen, video interview with either a hiring manager or senior UXD to discuss your portfolio and previous projects, and a final round interview with multiple members of the Appian team including peers, UX leadership, and general Appian leadership. 
• As for the design evaluation in our interviews, we do not include white-boarding exercises and instead will send a take-home design challenge to present during your final round interview.

• We’re dedicated to setting you up for success. After standard HR onboarding you’ll dive straight into Appian product training before joining Engineering. Once you’ve joined Engineering, you’ll rotate shadowing other UXDs and complete an app building project to design and build an application on the Appian platform yourself! 
• In addition to frequent check-ins with your manager, we will also assign a UX mentor. The UX mentor will be a peer whose goal is to ensure your smooth transition into Appian and the UX team. They will be available to answer any administrative, product or design practice questions you might have.

• Although individual UXD's get embedded on separate cross-functional squads, the culture of the team remains tight-knit and collaborative. Design reviews are regularly conducted with UXDs from other teams and team lunches are held every month. 
• Learning & growth is supported by participation in Engineering department Learning + “Indie” time: learning time features monthly UX team chapter meetings held for internal knowledge sharing, while indie time features dedicated time to work on personal UX passion projects.