Canadian State of UX Report in 2018, ahead of an all out effort to create a comprehensive report for of the 10th edition of CanUX in 2019. This year’s report also creates a baseline that will allow us to follow the evolution of our community of practice year over year.
Here is the sum up of the report:
#1 Demographics
A total of 447 UX professionals from 11 of Canada’s 13 provinces provided the baseline data for this year’s report. Of those 447 responses, 381 (85.2%) originated from Canada’s most populated provinces, Ontario and Quebec, home to 22.6 million of Canada’s 36.6 million people according to StatsCan’s 2017 Census.
![| Digilite](https://digilite.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/1.png)
Number and Percentage of Responses by Province
Of the respondents who identified their gender, women accounted for 239 (53.0%)responses, followed by men with 200 (44.7%) responses, and non-binary individuals with 2 (0.44%) responses.
Responses by gender
The majority of our respondents were aged 26 to 35 (36.4%) and 36 to 45 (33.1%), accounting for almost 70% of the total responses. This bodes well for our community going forward, as the numbers are balanced very well (47.6% to 51.9%) between respondents aged 18 to 35 and respondents aged 36 to 55+.
Responses by age range
From an education perspective, Bachelor’s Degrees are the most prevalent amounting to 191 (42.7%) responses, following by Master’s Degrees with 130 (29.1%) responses, and College Diplomas with 77 (17.2%) responses.
Responses by Education // grouped by gender
#2 Maturity
Approximately 40% of responders self identify as ‘UX Designers’, while ‘UX Generalist’, ‘UX researcher’, ‘UX Lead’ and ‘Interaction Designer’ each hover around 25%. ‘UX Strategist’, ‘Information architect’ and ‘Visual Designer’ appear in 15–20% of responses, while all UX leadership positions and ‘Content Strategist’ are the least popular titles.
While the chart doesn’t include a gender breakdown, only 5 of the 41 respondents (12.1%) who described their titles as ‘Head of UX’, ‘VP of UX’, or ‘CXO’ self identified as visible minorities, and only 13 of 41 (31.7%) self identified as women, meaning that in terms of diversity in leadership positions we still have a long way to go.
Responses and Percentage of Responses by UX Job Titles
193 (43%) of respondents are employed by a large corporation with 500 or more employees, followed by a medium to large corporations with 100 to 500 employees (16.7%) and small companies with less than 10 employees (15%). Companies with 10 to 100 employees accounted for about 25% of the total responses, and are the least represented segments in our report.
Responses and Percentage of Responses by Company Size
#3 Tools
From an interaction design and prototyping tools perspective, the Adobe Creative Suite (62.8%) is leading the way on the strength of its graphics editing programs (Photoshop and Illustrator). It’s not surprising to find Sketch and InVision following closely behind at 49.2% each. The only other tools currently holding a solid foothold in the market included HTML/CSS (41.6%), Axure RP (32.7%) and Balsamiq (24.6%).
Responses and Percentage of Responses by Interaction Design & Prototyping Tools
The distribution of the top UX research tools is much significantly skewed towards the top 2. The Optimal Workshop Suite (35.3%) and UserTesting (28.4%) appear to be the only research tools with a significant user base in the Canadian market. Hotjar (11.6%) and Morae (10.1%) are the only other tools reaching double digits percentage wise.
Responses and Percentage of Responses by Research Tools
#4 Salaries
Finding reliable salary data relevant to Canadian UX professionals is quite difficult, and the numbers vary significantly from source to source. The average Canadian UX professional salary (Cdn$81,962) is Cdn$37,272 or 31.2% less than the average advertised salary for American UX professionals. These figures were calculated based on the exchange date on Nov 1st, 2018.
Salary comparison between Canada and the US // Indeed.com data as of Nov 1st, 2018.
The average salary for women UX professionals in Canada is $78,095, while the average male salary is $86,364. This means women in Canada make an average of $8,269 or 9.57% less than the men.
Average salaries for women and men in Canada
If we slice the salary and gender data by experience, the numbers paint an interesting picture. Earlier (< 3 years of experience) and later in our careers (>8 years of experience), men tend to have significantly higher salaries than women. In a specific half decade mid-career (3–8 years of experience), women reverse the trend and make slightly more than men.
Salary by Experience // grouped by gender
When slicing the data by company type, those self-identifying as white (the dark bars) report significantly higher salaries than visible minorities (the light bars). The largest discrepancy in salaries occurs in the NGO/Non-profit and Academia/Education sectors, where visible minorities are shown to make significantly less.
Average Salary by Company Type // grouped by ethnicity