Embracing new superpowers
It’s time we stopped drawing lines around who is a designer and who is not. UX is a fast-growing discipline, and we need to enlist everyone’s superpowers in order to deliver the experiences people really need.
The plurality of skills listed on the latest design census from AIGA hints at the future of the design industry, as building digital products become a more complex science.
Every couple of months we see articles submitted to the UX Collective about new specializations — from “UX Writing” to “Video editing in UX”. Every time this happens, we see the design community reacting in one of two ways:
- By becoming defensive:
“You can’t do video editing and call yourself a UX designer!” - By feeling overwhelmed:
“Wait, as a designer, do I also now need to learn how to edit videos?!”
Both come from a place of anxiety, something we all experience in our ever-evolving careers. Maybe because we think someone with a broader set of skills will steal our job, or because it’s overwhelming to think about keeping up to date with every new specialization that comes up.
You can be a great designer with a wide skill set, but not everyone needs to share the exact same skill set to be a great designer.
Dividing is excluding
There is no new magic formula for the design process or universal standards as to what should be included in the job description of a designer. While creating the right nomenclatures can be important for recruiting purposes, we cannot let labels become territorial boundaries. The rush for coining new terms such as “UX Writing” in the last year can end up excluding professionals who have been thoughtfully working and studying that field for decades under a different title. We could be learning from them instead. Our industry should not be about dividing, but connecting.
Expanding is including
Rachel McConnell, UX content strategist and author of Why you need a content team, knows a thing or two about pursuing a specialized career: “A lot of our career is spent ‘finding our space.’ This means you’ll have to spend a lot of time doing things you don’t necessarily feel comfortable with — but that’s OK if you use that time to learn as much as you can from those around you. I’ve found the most collaborative teams to be those where I’ve learned from other disciplines. There’s space for many different shapes of designers as we all bring different talents to experience design and each perspective enriches the final outcome.”
In 2020, rather than dwelling on questions such as whether designers should code, we should be welcoming new and much-needed skills to our fast-growing field.
This article is part of our State of UX report: a holistic analysis of digital design as a discipline, and what to expect for the future.
