In Part 1 of this "UX How To" article I explained the families of roles within the user experience discipline; UX Specialists, UX Generalists and Hybrids. The Specialists, from research, strategy, design and front-end development, were covered in detail. Generalists and Hybrids float above and in-between. If UX is a discipline of science and art, Generalists are those who harness the talent within a business context. Hybrids are those who create possibility by successfully merging two thought patterns into one.
Floating Above - UX Generalists
Many of my close colleagues (with whom I studied and practiced) have dramatically influenced me as we navigated together into a view of humanizing business. I would hope that the influence was mutual in this journey towards the business strategy and model of applying the humanities to enterprises..
UX Generalists are typically referred to as producers or directors and their duties, like their titles, vary widely from shop to shop. Project managers sometimes take the place of the generalist, but can quickly lose their footing if a project veers outside of interactive design and development. Very few project managers understand the nuances of the UX roles and how the activities performed and deliverables created by each role weave together to ultimately deliver a high-quality, business-grounded experience.
The best generalists are like conductors of the symphony. This unique ability is highlighted both in Dan Pink's A Whole New Mind and in the 10 Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley. One of the most overlooked capabilities of generalists is that their ability to abstract does not end at the boundary of their discipline. The very same skill that helps them weave different UX roles, activities and deliverables also helps to make projects profitable and beneficial for both the client and the team alike.
The Inbetweeners - Hybrids
A close colleagues once said to me that he did not want his UX architects doing development work for solutions. Even if they had the skills to do so, he did not want to start a process where their design work would be biased by what was easier to implement rather than what was the most efficacious for the intended users. I understood his concern then, and I still do today, but I have a different perspective. While it is true that some practitioners can be tainted by what they know of the possible, it is also true that they can be uplifted and inspired by it as well.
Students of popular music already know a basic fact: genius emerges from practitioners who figure out a way to fuse multiple genres together. A beautiful illustration of this, pictured below, was created by Reebee Garofalo and is included in Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations. The Computational Media program at Georgia Tech is one of a new breed of university programs where students who want to fuse art and technology together can get their creative-geek on. Daniel Chase Hooper, a recent graduate of the program, has shown the promise of the Hybrid that I am referring to.
Using skills from several disciplines including (interaction designer, software engineer, marketing and video production), Daniel created a completely new way to edit text on the iPad and then posted a clever video on YouTube that ultimately helped him land a post-graduation job working as a developer at Apple.
Continue reading this article:
Source : cmswire[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment