The UX Spectrum

A neat little interactive visual framework for profiling designers against key UX practice areas

After the popularity of ‘Blob mapping’ I worked with VitaminT to come up with a more up-to-date interactive tool.

How to do it

The UX Spectrum just about works quite neatly on a mobile phone

1. Go to the UX Spectrum site
2. Read through the basic descriptions of the categories
3. Quickly rate yourself against each of the categories, or identify the strengths you desire in a candidate
4. Download a pdf for your records

How it came about

After a break from hiring and a new job, I took some steps away from the UX community towards Product and Service strategy. VitaminT, a recruitment company, got in touch saying they wanted to create a tool based on my old work.

We bashed some things back and forth.

They took the categories and a basic framework for the charts and pulled together a neat little tool.

The UX Spectrum tool — do yours

We tried to represent some of the emerging demands for talent. Content Strategy. Product Strategy. Customer experience. Breaking out research into qual and quant. But I will openly admit that I was unhappy with the reduction of Visual Design to a single category. And the super categories are questionable and much more blurry than I infer. A model always has some form of bias in it. And plenty of flaws.

How the spectrum may be used for different shapes of designer archetypes and emerging titles

Despite this, I thought it would be good to show some different types of shapes based on the emerging titles. Job specs and the shapes of designers I was seeing. Service Designer. Product Designer. UX/UI Designer.

Have a go at the UX Spectrum here.

NB, it’s been taken down so you’ll have to find it on the way back machine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20190213005612/https://vitamintalent.com/extra/ux-spectrum/

The only purely digital tools I use

There is a joy in interacting with this tool digitally where the input is the output, but for me it’s not as reflective as sketching out on paper.

One of the advantages is that it looks a bit neater, and you can overlay the images a little easier.

Overlay of multiple UX Spectrums across a large team

And it can be useful for analysing multiple separate charts.

It’s a pretty easy tool to compare and analyse with

Want to find out more, follow the series

If you want to learn more about the Shaping Workshops I run, and what I have learned over the years, follow me, or read some other articles in the Medium Publication.

Keep your eyes peeled for another post tomorrow.