User Experience Design - Not Firecats, but Unicorns?

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.

 

It's A Great Time to be A Designer from Jared Spool

 

If you're not fond of Apple Computer analogies, you may need to skip past the loving paean to that company (especially if you don't enjoy the Genius Bar experience).

Jared makes the point that, unlike Orthopedic Surgeons, for example - while we UX designers can specialize in certain disciplines, it's career limiting to specialize too much - what he describes as a compartmentalist.

This reminds me strongly of why we at Firecat Studio are SO keen to sponsor and attend coworking sessions. We require the breezes and cross-pollination robustness that new people and their new ideas, methods and perspectives bring. It's why we love TED and sponsor TEDxSanAntonio. It's why we think Geekdom is so cool. And it's one reason why we prefer clients who want to collaborate with us in our work.

Spool suggests that UX designers need to be generalists. He and web design educator Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman embarked last year on a web design/UX education effort - the Unicorn Institute. Here's Jared's description of a UX 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.

Read more about all this on the Unicorn Institute blog.