4 - aspiring to be a t-shaped researcher & designer

My drive is to be a T-shaped generalist with just enough capabilities in the UX sub-disciplines but to specialise in one (UX Research).

It is not uncommon in UX to pit specialists against generalists. Many have splattered the industry with debates on which comes first. When I started learning UX, I began by learning the holistic fundamentals. I learnt from some visual design heavy programs but balanced them with UX and psychology courses and books. Specialising didn't cross my mind until a year later when I found that my interests camped in UX Research.

UX is broad. In its homestead, Research, Information Architecture, Prototyping, User Interface Design, Business, and Creativity mingle. I thought, "If UX is this broad, what's the point of generalising? You'd only spread yourself too thin". If you consider fields like medicine and engineering, they are vast enough to prevent you from generalising. 

Specialists are criticised for their inflexibility while generalists are criticised for drifting. You know the saying: “a jack of all trades is a master of none.” However, when people use this quote to condemn generalists, they forget the second part: “...but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

I've watched my aspirations morph, shift, converge and diverge. Merely being a specialist isn't enough to thrive in the design industry and doesn't accommodate my ever-changing fixations. My drive is to be a T-shaped generalist with just enough capabilities in the UX sub-disciplines but to specialise in one (UX Research). I want to be flexible, stretch out when necessary and drill down appropriately. The T-shaped model rests in the middle: narrow enough to specialise and malleable enough to adopt new skills without overstretching yourself.

In this issue, I will share five resources that have influenced me to think this way. 

The Industry Needs “Resourceful Makers”, Not “Specialised Thinkers”

🧭 Resource: The State of UX in 2023 (uxdesign.cc)

“On the senior side of the spectrum, the ongoing trend of managers shifting back to hands-on positions shows no sign of slowing down. Companies cannot afford leaders who are only good at talking and not as good at delivering. The last thing they want is territorialism, silos, and the “this is not part of my job description” mentality. Since next year’s economic landscape isn’t clear and teams continue to be spread thin, watch for burnout within your team and keep track of your own resignation tendencies.”

There is an ever-growing need for designers to be resourceful. In the last issue, I  wrote about how UX roles were disproportionately affected by the layoffs: 

"“We might then expect similar ratios in our data if layoffs were proportional across the three functions,” says Pybus. “Instead, we found that 1 designer for every 6 engineers was laid off, about 1.7 times more than expected. Worse, three times as many researchers were laid off than expected — about 3 for every 5 designers.”"

Companies prefer employees with multiple but related skill sets (they take it too far sometimes). Generalists are cost-effective and therefore attractive. But the term, Resourceful maker indicates that being resourceful surpasses generalising. It's about knowing when to reach out, knowing how to relate and fit into certain situations. It's about knowing a bit of everything to connect the dots and make an impact. 

Generalists Are Slower While Specialists Are Faster

🧭 Resource: When Generalists Are Better Than Specialists, and Vice Versa (hbr.org)

“What’s the best way to boost creativity on your team? One view is that the key to creative breakthroughs is being able to combine or leverage different areas of expertise. This suggests you should encourage employees to explore new fields or hire more generalists — they can connect dots where others don’t see a link. Another view is that there are costs to generalizing and that you’re better off hiring specialists — employees who have very deep expertise in an important area — or encouraging your employees to become specialists in whatever they do. There’s considerable evidence supporting both sides, so researchers set out to study whether generalists and specialists shine in different circumstances. They theorized that the benefits of being a generalist are strongest in fields with a slower pace of change, as they can find inspiration from other areas, and that the benefits of being a specialist are strongest in fields with a faster pace of change, as they can more easily make sense of new technical developments and opportunities. A study of theoretical mathematicians before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union supported their theory.”

I find this interesting. Yet, like everything else, context matters. 

Theoretical mathematics differs from UX, but there are some lessons we can draw from it. Specialists are faster when it comes to utilising technical knowledge from their domain while generalists are slower and good at using analogous experiences to generate ideas. 

Rightly so, there's no one-size-fits-all approach. There never is, context is variable. According to HBR, specialists tend to thrive in fast-paced industries, while generalists do so in slow, stagnant environments. The sweet spot, in my view, is the generalised specialist: The one who morphs herself into the shape of a T. The design industry is fast enough to require the specialist's technicality and slow enough to need the generalist's connectivity. If you are as broad as a generalist and focused as a specialist, what more do you need in an industry as all-round as design?

the more you understand ux, the more you'll be better positioned to do user research (& other specialisations)

🧭 Resources: The world of UX, Episode 70: Embracing the Nuances of UX Research 

Start broad then zoom in. 

I've followed Darren Hood for some time on LinkedIn and I recently started listening to his podcast. He teaches a lot about UX and I think you'll benefit from absorbing his content. 

During my morning routine, I listened to Episode 70: Embracing the nuances of UX Research. He talked about UX Research, what made it so and how close it is to UX's core:

“The more you know about UX, folks, the more you understand that, the more you'll be able to optimise the potential quality of the research you do and the better you'll be able to understand what's going on when it comes to UXR.”

Before hopping into any UX specialisation, you need to know the UX fundamentals. Start broad then zoom in. Gather the small but necessary pieces from other disciplines and use them to build your way down a specific path.

You cannot say you are a UX Researcher or a UX writer or a UI designer if you do not understand the core of UX. There are no UX specialisations without UX in its entirety. You need to understand UX and its components: Information Architecture, the principles of Interaction Design and Usability before specialising. It allows you to be more intentional about the application of your specialist knowledge. You'll expand and contract when necessary, like a T-shaped person 😏. 

designers should be t-shaped people

🧭 Resource: Changing Design Education for the 21st Century by Micheal W. Meyer & Don Norman

I read this paper in 2021, it will forever remain evergreen. According to the authors, the design curriculum should allow designers to specialise but have a broad and strong understanding of design as a whole. The premise is that design education currently doesn't account for systemic, contextual and global challenges because it is too focussed on the craft. 

The solution: remodel design education to accommodate the unpredictable and dynamic problems that burden society by allowing all designers to bask in the commonalities of design sub-disciplines while giving room for specialisation:

“Rather than try to define a single best aspirational model for curriculum, faculty composition, degree structure, or relationship between practice and academia, we should instead pursue a model that is evolutionary, diverse, experimental, and iterative. Our goal is to have a common basic framework that is broadly accepted by the design community and that allows for multiple curricula, perhaps emphasizing different kinds of design and training philosophies, perhaps building upon the core strengths of different institutions. This would allow all design schools to emphasize the commonalities in the different fields of design while also allowing for each institution to make its courses appropriate to its students and faculty, allowing differentiation among the various schools. This approach has been very successful in other fields, such as the curricula for computer science, business, and medicine that we have examined.”

The T-shaped model through which design schools will ground future designers will allow them, if they will, to specialise in their preferred sub-discipline (say, for example, UX Research). 

“Just as in most disciplines, modern design departments have many different sub-disciplines: product, interaction, graphic, communication, industrial, textile, fashion, digital, experience, packaging, multimedia, and so on. Indeed, in many cases (especially in larger organizations) these differences are so profound that the sub-disciplines are actually separate departments, although properly housed in the same division or school of design. This is not necessarily bad—all fields are so broad that it would be inappropriate to expect all members of the field to be experts in all the sub-disciplines. Any field where this is not true is likely to be either extremely new, or extremely narrowly focused. Design is neither new nor narrow.”

The best part of this paper is the design curriculum they recommended:

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DESIGN METHODS

- Human Centered Design principles
- Co-design, community-driven design, co-creation and their variants
- The role of designers in developing strategy and as managers, mentors, and facilitators

CREATIVITY - INDIVIDUAL AND TEAM


LEADERSHIP - TEAM COMPOSITION AND MANAGEMENT

- Project experience (essential to hone the skills and to train both followership (years 1 and 2) and leadership (years 2 and 3)


DESIGN RESEARCH (APPLIED AND ETHNOGRAPHY)

- Quantitative methods
- Qualitative methods


CORE PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS

- Finance—income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow
- Data-driven decision making and justification
- Sales and marketing
- Operations, distribution, supply chain management
- Patents and intellectual property
- Business models—their relation to profits, losses, margins and one-time and continuing costs and incomes over an n-year period
- How to present to executives


BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ACADEMIC RESEARCH, AND HOW TO APPLY THE FINDINGS OF OTHERS

- Rigorous thinking and debate based upon evidence
- Skills to develop rapid prototyping
- Computational methods: big data, basic programming, and computational thinking


THINKING BY SKETCHING AND BY MAKING


EXPERIMNTAL METHODS AND STATISTICS

- probability theory and an understanding of variability, measurement methods, and statistical significance
- Obtaining large effects, using smaller sample sizes and simpler tests
- Biases, and methods to counteract or mitigate experimenter bias, human sampling biases, order effects of presentation, etc.
- The pros and cons of A/B testing
- Ethical concerns in running experiments


ETHICS

- The designer’s responsibilities toward societal good, the world’s major societal issues, the environment, local communities
- The ethics of what we are designing: impact upon people, the environment, health, and safety
- Respectful treatment of individual and group identity (gender, race, country of origin, religious beliefs, etc.)
- Balancing the designer’s ethical considerations with systems of policy, profit, law


THE REAL WORLD
- World history
- Culture
- Human psychology, sociology, and anthropology
- Basic human factors and ergonomics

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Notice how broad the curriculum is? Notice how it cuts across many disciplines. You don't need to be an expert in all areas, but it is important to understand them to a certain degree. Larger problems require designers to generalise but equally focus on the field of their expertise. It's the sweet spot, the T-shape. 

the sweet spot: the t-shaped generalist

🧭 Resource: Why T-shaped people? | by Jason Yip | Medium

Why T-shaped people? | by Jason Yip | Medium

In an organisation, specialists are faster and good at clearing bottlenecks, generalists are slower and good at connecting ideas. T-shaped people adapt and will allow you to do the same work in your team with the same number of people or less. 

Pointers to note: 

• "A T-shaped person is capable in many things and expert in, at least, one."

• "T-shaped people means we can do more with the same number of people (or do the same with less people)."

• "T-shaped people help us communicate more effectively."

• "T-shaped people is about embracing human adaptability."

This is my goal: to be skilled in plenty of things but adept in, at least, one. It will take some time, but in the next five to ten years I hope I'd have accomplished this feat. 

conclusion

Becoming a T-shaped designer won't be easy. It'll take time, grit, due diligence and dedication. But I prefer it to the two extremes. It's more flexible, makes you more adaptable and gives you the advantage of flexibility. Being T-shaped is designed in a way that doesn't overstretch you and doesn't restrict you too much.  It is, for the umpteenth time, the sweet spot. And in an industry like design — dynamic — you need to equip yourself to adapt. 

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recommended resources

• The State of UX in 2023 (uxdesign.cc)

• When Generalists Are Better Than Specialists, and Vice Versa (hbr.org)

• The world of UX, Episode 70: Embracing the Nuances of UX Research 

• Changing Design Education for the 21st Century by Micheal W. Meyer & Don Norman

• Why T-shaped people? A T-shaped person is capable in many… | by Jason Yip | Medium

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we shall meet again…

That's it. Thank you for reading!

I hope you’ll learn a few things from my recommendations. 

Let’s connect!

• All you need to know about me

• LinkedIn 

More to come next month. Tell me what you think by commenting on this post. 

Till then, 

Funmilayo…