UX Role(s)
Introducing skills, profiles, and ourselves
We’re Greg Schwartz and Frances Soong — User Experience Designers. Over the course of our careers, we’ve been pushed and pulled in different directions:
That’s because UX is so widely defined, including and overlapping with,
- product design
- service design
- user research
- interaction design
- visual design
- front-end engineering
- product management / strategy
- prototyping
…and much more. For clarity, we’ll call these skills.
With such disagreement, naturally there is also disagreement on how many skills you “should” be an expert in. Specialist, generalist, unicorn; we’ll call these profiles.
When we met in March, we shared our career experiences and wondered if we should adjust our respective directions. Since we knew of successful people in all those profiles, we hypothesized that one wasn’t better than the other. Perhaps different companies prefer different profiles. And perhaps some people are better suited to one over another.
Our mission became interviewing people across the UX spectrum, and analyzing their careers based on the profiles. We asked directly for people’s opinions. But we also approached it indirectly: looking at day-to-day tasks, the experiences that led a person to their profile, and what they’d been successful doing.
The UX field is constantly changing, and varies depending on where you live and work. Know that your experience may be different. But we’re sharing what we learn in hopes that others will benefit from our work.
Check out the initial insights from our journey so far.
