Jared Spool shared his thoughts on the UX/User Centered Design discipline, in this Slideshare, "It's a Great Time to be an Experience Designer.
The User Experience Designer
Our ideal UX Designer has general skills, compared to many of the folks working in UX jobs today. She has a good sense of the visual, understanding sophisticated use of layout, typography, and color. She can organize content and navigation, increasing the design’s findability. She knows how to craft persuasive microcopy and create publication tools for the organization’s content providers. She knows how to craft design flows and envision the microinteractions that deliver great experiences.
Having inhabited and consulted to many UX/web design teams, I know that these unicorns require:
- An interesting balance of left and right brained thinking - cross-hemispheric brain wiring.
- A visceral craving for novelty and the challenges of problem solving.
- Encouragement to continue to challenge and question.
- Ability to see problems from multiple perspectives.
I'm very proud to say we have several "unicorns" already on the Firecat core team. But I'm in full support of there being more educational opportunities to create more of us.