A 24+ year dance of decoding UX
Provenance, inspiration and possibilities of modelling UX competencies since 2000
Jason Mesut and Elizabeth (Lizz) Bacon wrote this post after recent interactions around our work trying to decode digital/UX designers’ differences.
We’d love to set the scene, give a bit of a backstory to the development of UX competence models from our perspectives, and where we feel they could go next.
Intro from Jason
Following a few interactions around our work over the past 5 years, Lizz and I decided we would take a look at some of the provenance and inspiration of our work. Capturing how it has evolved with our involvement and beyond.
The more poignant trigger was that I missed, forgot and/or hadn’t committed to my consciousness the great work Lizz had done around the UX Sundial even though it was directly referenced in my brief for the UX Spectrum. Lizz called this out at the Interaction 19 conference in Seattle. And again on LinkedIn last year when I was sharing some backstory to the UX Spectrum.
Lizz’ original work on the UX Sundial feels more relevant today than ever. As is the importance to recognise, respect, and acknowledge thoughtful work like hers that helps individuals and communities shape design teams, themselves and better solutions for the world.
We’re keen to provide some historic foundations that can help guide our future work; help others to better understand themselves; help the people they interact with; as well as better understand design, product and solution creation generally.
Key events timeline
It would be hard to define a perfect unbiased narrative of what has happened in this area. These accounts are limited by our own exposure and experience of these models. They are our recollections of what inspired us, informed our work, or we were made aware of while sharing our work wider.
If you feel passionate that we have missed something fundamental, please let us know and we can see if it jogs our memory for what has influenced us. Otherwise, maybe there is something more collective we could collaborate on.
We have separated the timeline out into loose epochs. These are somewhat arbitrary to allow for more viewable images of the larger timeline. Which you can check out on the Miro board here.
The dawn of definition and interactive adaptation
Expanding perspectives
Refined and remixed
Revisiting and developing a broader range of lenses
A leadership perspective, a range of lenses and a new spectrum
Engaging the wider community
NNG develop tools for teams, and Jason recognises Lizz
Revisiting the historical record
The future?
Lizz here! I’m delighted how Jason and I have been able to collaborate, honestly reflecting, re-reviewing, and updating the historical record. We also are inspired to further explore the still-important — and still-oft-debated! — question of what qualities define and unite and differentiate the various disciplines involved in product management. In this section, I’d like to talk about some of the ways we believe the UX Sundial/Spectrum model could be further developed and leveraged.
The UX Sundial model I created only developed a detailed view of the field of Interaction Design.
This detailed view showed the specific activities of interaction designers that operate using the skills of understanding, definition, and communication. I always intended to develop the same level of detail for the activities performed by human factors engineers, information architects, visual designers, and the other “slices of the pie” that comprise the UX disciplines.
Creating this fine-grained view for each of the UX disciplines’ activities could help us better understand the commonalities and differences among our practices. It could help us better teach, disseminate, and even improve our disciplines’ working tools.
Are there any readers out there who identify as expert practitioners of these other disciplines who might like to collaborate and create these detailed views?
Also, I’d always intended that the UX Sundial tool be used as an assessment model to support more effective hiring practices for UX professionals; this intent was also part of the brief for the UX Spectrum model Jason subsequently created.
Unfortunately, today we still see some abysmal recruiting and hiring practices in the UX field, whether from general talent recruiters who don’t understand the differences between various disciplines or inside organizations that seek to either excessively stretch or painfully shrink the scope of various roles.
The latest nomenclature contortion of “UX/UI designer” is a particularly gross affront to the decades of professional definition and activity development that has gone on within each of the UX fields.
As a group, we tend to be a detail-oriented and conscientious bunch, and these sorts of insults are difficult to bear. More importantly, the confusion also results in suboptimal hiring practices and unbalanced team formation.
If we were able to adopt and promote a comprehensive assessment model of the UX disciplines, this could help HR and other business areas better understand and leverage our many competencies. This goal feels ambitious and could be fraught; each business context seems to potentially require different competencies and skills. Jason once led an effort to “boil the ocean” of UX skills, capabilities and knowledge areas, which resulted in a list of nearly 300 elements that could be involved in UX practices.
While such a complex and comprehensive model becomes difficult to propagate and apply, we continue to see value in pursuing this endeavour. What’s likely needed to take this forward would be further collaboration among the different specialties to more succinctly capture the breadth and depth of each field and then identify their true commonalities.
The UX Sundial is also meant to help individual practitioners characterize their expertise in each of the UX disciplines, especially within a shared team context where each practitioner maps their skill levels. Doing this can help product development teams as a whole to understand where they might have UX skill gaps. This clear and relatively objective assessment allows people already on the team to prioritize and pursue opportunities for their further education and professional development. Seeing that one’s whole team is weak in the understanding area, for example — that is, lacking practitioners who can conduct effective generative and evaluative research activities, or perform quantitative data analysis — would also help that team to usefully invest in growing that “understanding” skillset through additional hiring or targeted training.
Professionally, I moved from User Experience roles to Product Management roles about twelve years ago. This professional shift allowed me to continue developing my skills in understanding, definition, and communication, while also learning new activities unique to product management and gaining a broader lens on all the activities of product development. One of the final thoughts I shared when I published my UX Sundial’s initial expression back in 2009, was this:
“Additionally, it seems useful to create a higher-order model that shows how the fields of UX combine with the other professional fields such as Software Development and Product/Program Management to provide the complete picture of product & service development. The question for me stands whether these latter fields also operate on a spectrum of Understanding –> Definition –> Communication, or whether there’s another set of overarching skills. Perhaps the core skills abstract to: Analysis –> Definition –> Construction?”
This question has continued to nag at me. In the fifteen years since I created the UX Sundial, in my view evidence has piled up that the core set of skills for both Software Development and Product Management also boils down to understanding, definition, and communication. While the specific questions around which these disciplines are seeking understanding, the types of things we’re defining, and the means and targets of our communications are different for each discipline, I believe they overlap significantly. Another major element that’s come into play for me since then is that successful product development involves more than just the application of technical and soft skills. There’s the matter of mindsets and heartsets (like mindsets but emotional states) and the interplay of teamwork and relationships at play. (These elements are mainly what I’m exploring currently in my book-in-progress about how to build great solutions that folks can follow on Substack.)
Philosophically, I remain far more interested in creating and fostering shared grounds for the key disciplines involved in product development than in dwelling on their relatively obvious differences. Frustratingly, it seems to me that today’s discourse around “Defining the Damn Thing” (which frankly is not very different than it was fifteen, ten, and five years ago) is too often driving wedges and creating tension between these deeply interrelated disciplines. Wouldn’t we all be better served by creating an equal, level playing field among them?
Jason’s reflections
It’s Jason again. I love so much of what Lizz has shared here, and how our brains, hearts and skills align. But also differ.
Lizz highlights some interesting challenges that I’m keen to explore with her and others, as well as further extend in my own work.
Together, and with some of your help, we are keen to address some key challenges.
For example, ‘How might we:
- Provide better tools to those hiring and resourcing talent, to do so more respectfully, and effectively?
- Better inform targeted training, mentorship and augmentation for teams?
- Bring different roles, fields and disciplines together through a better understanding of our differences and similarities?
- Remind people of important, forgotten and harder-to-understand, but critical skills, practices and mindsets?
- Help people feel better about their unique selves, and aid them in self development in alignment to who they are and what they might want?
A collective request
We are keen to progress this work. But we think it will be better done with more input from people like you. We have some initial questions and requests:
- How useful do you feel this would be for you and/or the industry?
- If you feel it would be futile, what makes you think that? And what would have to change to make it less so?
- Whom else should we speak to, research, and/or work with?
- Are you interested in helping?
Please feel free to direct any answers, thoughts, comments and support on this post here or directly to Lizz and/or Jason wherever you can find us on the Internet. Usually LinekdIn for Jason.
Key references and links
- A visual timeline on Miro created for this post — open to comments
- Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience Book and Diagram.
- Jason Mesut’s, Creating the Perfect Experience Architect Poster.
- Jason Mesut’s debut talk around Shaping Design at 2018 DesignOps Summit
- Dan Saffer’s Disciplines of User Experience Design diagram adapted version referenced here. Unfortunately original Kicker Studio reference links somewhere else.
- Lizz’ UX Sundial created and published online (first appearing in Apr-2009 on her personal website, refreshed Jan-2014 on Devise website).
- UX Sundial model referenced in UX Mastery’s e-book “How to Get Started in UX”, interactive model made here
- FPS’ UX Amoeba: An interactive version of an adapted quadrant model found in one of Jason’s presentations.
- Jason and Vitamin T / Aquent’s UX Spectrum Original charter brief here referencing the interactive functionality of the UX Sundial. A web archive version of the UX Spectrum tool is available here as it has been taken down.
- David Travis’ Eight competencies of User Experience.
- Jason’ Shaping Design series published on Medium.
- Stew Dean’s UX Spectrum mindsets (referencing Lizz’, Jason’s, and others’ work).
- Rachel Krause’s post on NNG Skill Mapping template.
- Patricia Basuel’s complete UX Team Skill Mapping scorecard building on NNG’s
About Jason
I help people explore positive futures, navigating the uncertainties of their present. For themselves, their organisations, and the societies they serve.
I do this through my coaching practice, my Product-Service Strategy consulting practice, and a range of different community events and gatherings.
I explore deep thoughts and tools in writing here on Medium. The best place to find me on the internet is probably here on LinkedIn and you can find some other online personas and info at his linktree here.
