No matter which industry segment, a UX designer has to ensure that the customer experience lives up to expectations. This means paying attention to customer psychology, user perception, user response and ergonomics while also taking along engineers who write code and collaborating with business leads who strategize company goals.
Full-Stack Design Skills in Demand
This holistic approach to UX design is called full-stack design and practitioners across the globe command high salaries. After all they combine UX/UI skills with product design and business skills too. They have thorough knowledge of:
- The design process which includes design thinking, user research and analysis and ideation.
- The structure of the product which includes information architecture, prototyping, testing
- Visual design and aesthetics which includes the appearance – balance, color, pattern, shape and weight of the product.
UX designers are also adept at product design. They have expertise in:
- Defining the problem: It includes correct identification, contextualisation and reflects status quo
- Defining a proper solution: It projects a specific solution to solve a specified problem and establishes how it is superior to other solutions
- Validating both with the customers: It involves justifying the need to address the pain of the customer, the market for a solution and customer’s willingness to pay for it.
It is because of these very specific skills together with business design skills and suitable personality traits that UX designers are now in demand. Take a look at the following table for a snapshot view of salary levels of a UX designer in the US, UK and India, based on experience levels:
| User Experience Designer Salaries in the US, UK and India in 2020 |
| Experience (Years) | USA ($) | UK (£) | India (₹) |
| Entry or >1 | 62,558 | 26,068 | 441,375 |
| Early or 1-4 | 71,258 | 30,343 | 601,001 |
| Mid-level or 5-9 | 83,519 | 39,077 | 973,296 |
| Senior-level or 10-19 | 94,893 | 43,028 | 1,285,470 |
| Average | 73,999 | 31,577 | 695,863 |
Source: Payscale
Cities that Pamper UX Designers
In India, the IT city of Bangalore pays UX designers 19.8% more than the national average. It is also where Asia’s first Institute for Product Leadership is located and has launched a full-stack design course.
Gurgaon in Haryana pays 16.6 % more, while Delhi pays 12% more. Pune and Mumbai in Maharashtra offer 7% and 2% more respectively. According to data from Payscale, UX designers are paid the lowest salaries across Chennai, Tamil Nadu (8.1% less) and Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh (4.5% less).
In the US, San Francisco is seen as the Mecca for UX design. The Bay Area which houses the biggest names like Google, Tesla and Twitter pays UX designers an annual average salary of $128,000 per year, and also hosts premier design events like Awwwards, An Event Apart, Apple WWDC and Google I/O. IDEO, which applies design thinking to every product is also located here.
San Diego in California makes a generous payout of $114,424.
According to a listing by Adobe Xd,Seattle in Washington sees an annual average salary of $109,000 paid to UX designers who may be employed by the likes of Microsoft and Amazon.
Redmond in Washington posts an average annual salary of $102,710, according to Indeed.com
Boston in Massachusetts ($105,000), New York ($104,000), Chicago ($105,000) and Austin in Texas ($103,000) are also drawing UX designers with good annual salaries.
In European tech hub Dublin in Ireland, junior UX designers earn a salary between €30,000 – €45,000, mid-level UX designers are paid €45,000 – €60,000 and a senior UX designer commands between €60,000 – €80,000, according to a salary survey by recruitment agency, Morgan McKinley.
In Berlin, Germany, the average UX designer salary is €50,894 as per Payscale findings.
Toronto and Montreal in Canada are also good professional destinations for UX designers, going by the average salary levels on employer review site, Glassdoor.
Based on over 180 salary details submitted to this site, a UX designer in London, England earns £ 41,388 per year on an average.
Countries like Japan, Sweden, Israel and China are also making their presence felt in the design world.
Which Companies are Hiring?
UX designers are being hired by big product companies, small startups as well as agencies which handle multiple projects. Among them, software, Internet, banking and investment and telecom companies like Microsoft, Amazon, SAP, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, Cisco Systems, LinkedIn, Apple,VMWare,ServiceNow, Yahoo, Autodesk, Fidelity Investments, PayPal, JP Morgan, Verizon, Deloitte, IBM and AKQA are listed by Glassdoor as top companies hiring for the role.
In India, Paypal has identified Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, The Walt Disney Company, Accenture, SAP Labs India, TCS Ltd, Infosys, Cognizant Technologies Solution as the leading companies who hire and pay UX designers well.
