Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

Just finding out what you are worth is hard. salary.com helps a little but…

The advice I’ve given to two freelancing friends is raise your rates until your clients balk. It takes guts, but the market WILL set your rates if you let it.

First, decide on what basis you determine your satisfaction level regarding remuneration: is it as compared to others (where if you are getting less than others for doing the same work would make you unhappy), or is it according to the quantity of money it will take to make you fat and happy?

The way I work is I figured out how much time I want to put into working (actually, I first figured out how much free time I wanted), and how much money I wanted available to spend. So, “underpaid” to me means I’m not making enough according to my goals, and I’d be looking for ways to improve that situation.

When I was an army of one, I calculated my rate as folllows -
1. Amount I want to make each year. Let’s say just to make things easy, it was $100,000
2. How many weeks of vacation I want each year (4). That leaves me with 48 weeks to bill/work.
3. Number of hours I want to work each week (35)
4. Take the amount you want to make, divided by the number of weeks, divided by the hours you want to work.
5. Now add 50% to cover overhead, administrative time, and time for marketing new business

In this example it would be $90 (rounded up). If you aren’t getting enough work, chances are you’re not good enough, the market in your area is stale, or your rate is too high (or maybe a combination). If you’re barely keeping your head above water, raise your rates. It will weed out the clients you really don’t want to work with. It’s a scary thing to do, but it’s better in the end.

Also, it’s easier to negotiate down on a project than up. Once you say $100/hr, and they bulk, if you really want it, you could do it for less. But if you say $80, then you can’t go up.

How about you include the perspective of people who work in large companies, who are not in agencies or working as consultants? We don’t set our rates, per se, but we do set the tone for how well management and business leaders accept IA work.

What I did to get a raise, promotion, better job:
- Stand up for UX methods when the business teams challenge them, question them, and attempt to undercut the validity and relevance of your work
- Tell them what you’re going to deliver, deliver it, be proud of it
- Document how UX methods (or your work) saved or made the business money in the past
- Don’t complain, just work
- Earn respect by being there whether the going is bad or good

My company, which is very conscious about paying its consultants what they are worth, recently asked me to comment on the salary ranges for our UXP consultants. I said they looked a little off and pointed the HR manager to the 2006 IAI IA Salary Survey (http://iainstitute.org/pg/salary_survey_2006.php). He took a look. Meanwhile, I overachieved and downloaded the .XLS file of the data and filtered & sorted it to be relevant to our geographical area. He looked at it this version and quickly saw that our ranges were a little low (based on years of experience).

Giving him that data had a direct effect on the raises we got this year. Data *proves* what you’re worth. Words just don’t carry as much weight.

When I was a consultant my freelance rate rule of thumb was to start with the desired yearly salary, multiply by two, then divide by 2080. An hourly rate of $96 should cover marketing, vacation, other overhead, and FICA match and leave you with a salary of $100,000.

BTW, the only way I’ve managed to get a raise in the past 6 years has been to get a new job. This works quite well, fortunately. The most important part of this strategy is to decide on the salary well in advance. And then to practice saying that number out loud many times while still at home.

I’d be interested in seeing where Victor takes this discussion as an article. There’s one comment above that I want to call out. “I would gladly accept a little less salary if evangelism of UX/IA wasn’t an expected part of my job.” I understand this feeling completely, and there are many days when I think the same thing, but I’m not sure it’s a reasonable attitude to take, certainly not for a senior level (i.e. $100k) designer.

I’ve started to find that evangelism, also known as “sales”, is not only an expected part of my job, but possibly the bulk of it. And I’m an in-house designer at a large company known for being customer-centric. I don’t have enough experience in other fields to say, but I’d bet that *any* process-oriented specialty field like design will require you to do a lot of evangelism. It’s not just about selling yourself to win the job, but convincing a client (or boss or co-worker) to value certain things, possibly teaching them the criteria with which to judge your designs, and then selling them on a solution.

True or not, design is always perceived as mostly a subjective thing: what do you say when your boss replies to your deeply thought-through workflow with a “yeah, but I’d rather do it this other way?” It’s sales time, folks. I find that when I’m feeling frustrated that my design idea is misunderstood, that I have to treat that as an evangelism opportunity (or else my idea sucks, and I have to come up with a better one). Good work is not nearly enough, unfortunately.

Clients pay for good solutions of course, but they also pay for authority, confidence, and the elimination of bad options on the road to success. If you can’t evangelize successfully during *all* phases of the process (sometimes gently of course), you probably aren’t in a position to ask for $100,000 a year.

I’d love to see some more info on this topic. I’m an IA, but having just come off grad-school I’m used to working extra hours outside my full-time job (where I think I get paid enough) but for work on the side I have no idea what to charge. So I guess I have a pretty good idea of my worth in terms of a salary position (maybe) but I don’t know what to ask for my services in terms of consultation or other work.

My experience working in a large organizations tells me Fred’s comment on the importance of data is right on – comparison is critical for hiring managers and HR personnel when it comes to salary.

Other than running a salary survey, how can we gather more info on in order to compile a more comprehensive view of what kinds of salaries are out there?

I would suggest a book called Million Dollar Consulting – http://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-Consulting-Professio…=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-9952995-2943125?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175818411&sr=8-1 – it has very practical advise around this very topic. One thing that particularly struck me was to make a concious decison to loose lower 20% every year, which means loose those projects etc.. and invest that effort to add 10% on the top.

I think needs to treat onself as a company – marketing onself inside and outside your employer company is important.

Stop noodling with things you think you’re good at and focus on your strengths (big or small). Thats how you make more money.

I guess we should study medical billing – the way they deconstruct work processes and used resources to the smallest possible units and charge for each one of them separately. It is a whole separate discipline. It is sort of information architecture exercise to analyse your own work in this radical way – down to the smallest possible work gesture.