Interaction Design Foundation Reviews

Pros

The Interaction Design Foundation has a fantastic culture that is among the best I've seen at the companies I’ve worked for. Everyone really cares about their colleagues and especially the students who have entrusted their education to us. I feel privileged to educate the designers of tomorrow. I work with students from all over the world, and that helps me reinforce my belief that design is truly a cross-cultural and universal matter.

Cons

Language can present a challenge when working with students who aren’t proficient in English.

Pros

I've learned so much as part of the team. When I started working at IxDF, I didn't had much experience in the field of UX Design, which didn't matter as much as I work on a more technical role. However, from day one I was introduced to fantastic content as part of my onboarding process that would teach me the basics and most of the working knowledge I needed. From there on, the support from the team and overall the collaboration environment was fantastic. The team is made up of people from different countries, so you can always expect different point of view and interesting conversations. From the first day, all my teammates were very respectful of my time and asked which hours worked best for me to meet and to overlap when tasks required to. It's been a while since I dragged my feet off bed to jump into a meeting ;) There are lots of flexibility and freedom when it comes to "how" you do your work, from a technical perspective, rules are standardized and conventions are constantly shared and known by the team. The team has a nice atmosphere where everyone can share and discuss their best practices

Cons

Sometimes the productivity focus can feel overwhelming, we have good and bad days and on bad days it feels difficult to reach the expected productivity measure.

Pros

The IxDF is truly one of the best organizations I’ve worked for. They have an amazing company culture, dedicated colleagues, and thoughtful leadership. The organization shares my love of design, passion for education, and user empathy. The environment is flexible, collaborative, and inspiring. It’s fully remote, which provides me with the flexibility to design my schedule around my family, rather than my family around my work. It’s collaborative, with cross discipline teams working towards our mission, of providing high-quality and affordable education to our members. It’s inspiring, to learn about diverse cultures, traditions, and interests of my fellow colleagues from around the world.

Cons

Remote work can be challenging at times with building relationships and managing multiple time zones. However, the organization is very flexible with meetings to accommodate everyone’s schedules and also has some great initiates for employee engagement including non-work video calls and in-person team trips.

Pros

I have been with the IxDF for ~9 months, and feel honored to be part of this team. The pros for me so far have included: * A team I see doing its best every day to democratize top-quality design education. * Colleagues that are incredibly talented, kind and hard-working. * Willingness as an organization to adapt and try new things. * A very international, remote-first organization.

Cons

The cons for me so far have included: * The typical challenges of a small but growing organization. (e.g.,occasional documentation challenges, cross-timezone coordination) * During the pandemic, working remotely across international borders has been a little isolating. This is likely to change as travel resumes.

Pros

- Challenging and productive work environment - Leadership trusts you with important work, and lets you drive it to completion - Organizational values align with my own - Team members are passionate about the work they do - Management is transparent and easily accessible - You get to make the world a slightly better place by teaching UX designers of the future - and lots more

Cons

- The onboarding process should be more accommodating for individuals such as myself, who didn’t previously have experience with remote work - Team Trips have been on pause since Covid hit :-(

Pros

Not a lot of meetings and nice teammates.

Cons

I was honestly shocked at how not put together this company was when I joined. Some key things to know: everyone is a contractor (basically a 1099 contractor for US people, but they don't send you any tax forms). Being a contractor for more than a year is illegal in the US. Their job offer documents you sign are not reviewed by a lawyer and they are not in your favor. Only 15 days off total for the entire year. No holidays (unless you take PTO). The CEO is a total micromanager and a bully. If you don't just do what he says then you are considered not a team player and a bad employee. He lays people off quickly. When I quit, two junior people were hired to replace me, a senior level person. The company is the least collaborative place I have ever worked, which is strange considering it teaches UX education, until I found out that they don't really understand UX Design and Design Thinking. It's all about marketing and SEO and what will get the most impressions. No one at the company actually practices UX Design. I love the mission and was excited to work there, however, there is no actual strategy in place. It's very ad-hoc. No roadmap, quarterly goals, OKRs, or anything like that, except for the growth team. They want to be known as the most popular in teaching UX Design, not the best. They will tell you that high-quality is important, that they want to have the best education, but when you're actually inside you'll see it's not true. The quality of the education is sloppy as there is no one with any actual education knowledge working there. I felt like I did some good work there, but when I left they had non-designers take it apart and now my work was for nothing. Very depressing. The organization doesn't recognize good work. Instead, you're judged on how much output you can do. There is no work life balance because they always want you to do more faster. They are cheap. They don't pay Subject Matter Experts for their expertise. People are expected to create content for them and have it an honor that it is on their site. IxDF is not a non-profit company at all. They are a regular corporation who wants to look good. They really, really focus on their image, more than their members. You can see as an example how many people they had write five star reviews after one negative review. I was surprised how little they foster the community and are not very involved in other UX happenings. Very isolating. IxDF is a siloed company with bad leadership. They have a great mission, but no strategy to make it happen. You'll notice all the positive reviews are all posted at once to try and improve their image on Glassdoor. They'll say the people who left recently were all bad apples. When 6 people leave in the space of a month, you have to ask if they are all bad apples? Make sure you talk to people who have left the company before engaging to work here.

Pros

Having been used to work in the corporate world for the better part of my previous career, this job was different from the very beginning. It took some getting use to from my part since everyone was doing remote work and all the communication with colleagues happened online. It turned out wonderfully and I will never be able to have an office-based job again :-) The team has been doing remote work for decades and have made successful remote work into a hallmark of theirs. I loved the freedom and responsibility, which are two sides of the same coin (management repeats that point often). Another thing I would like to mention is the quality of people working there. I really enjoyed that my colleagues were extremely well educated and that they both had ambitions for their own personal growth and on behalf of the company.

Cons

I wish that there more opportunities for the team to meet in real life. There are usually two or three meetups every year and they give me chance to get to know my colleagues better. I had hoped that there would be more of these physical meetings but they are of course very costly for the company.

Pros

The organisation has a fantastic product and is in the process of making it even better. The team is committed and getting more and more aligned as time goes by. The new leadership team are doing a good job clarifying roadmaps, goald and targets. The culture is continuing to evolve in a positive way. It is a very exciting time to be here working with such fantastic colleagues.

Cons

Anyone joining must be sure that they can be their best self when working remotely. It isn't for everyone.

Pros

- There are very few meetings, and you can work at the time that best fits you. - You manage your workload. You have to be aware the backlog of tasks and then propose what you want to do in the following weeks, which is usually accepted. During my time working there, I was never pushed by a deadline, but of course you need to be responsible and reasonable with time investments. - Whatever you need for making your work better, the company provides. Could be a course, book, or tool. You just need to explain why you need it, and it is not by a complex request form, just speaking with the CEO.

Cons

- There was no strong attachment to an agile methodology to put things in a more logical order. Nevertheless, there was the intention to improve that.

Pros

- A People focused business, Senior Management very approachable and care about employees including their future success - An ever improving culture (driven by new Chief People Officer and Senior Management), recent programs run by the team and encouragement around the teams has been great - Exciting future for the business with recent acquisitions of new Senior Management including a new COO who is delivering an exciting vision (and actually executing on this vision) - A structured but not burdening approach to performance management with business, team and personal goals is great and I like this approach - The business has been an online office for 20 years, currently they’re investing in new tools to improve the current setup and I'm excited for future - Once a year team trip whereby everyone from across the globe meet up in one location (mix of business and fun) - A diverse team, working with friendly team members across the world is a real plus. The business each week encourages a 15 minute non work related call to engage with everyone in the business - People are passionate about their work and it's great to work with the team - Perks include: allowance to purchase your own laptop (Apple/PC is fine), gym/sport allowance and working from home office allowance and being an Interaction Design Unicorn!

Cons

- Coming from working in an office to 100% online it took some time to adjust, I try to get out a few times a week with others from the business and use co-working spaces which is a top fix - Time zones can be challenging at times, but we get around this by comprising within our teams to at times; an example being once a fortnight doing an hour or so early or later. Not a big issue at all, but I do love my sleep! - The founders previously were more visible within the business, it would be great to hear a bit more from them at team meetings and around the channels