Roles in UX Design Jobs
Generalist, Specialist and T-Shaped. Let’s see which one suits you!
Whenever, we start a journey on achieving something, we always find ourselves on a pool of multiple directions, thinking where to go and what to do. We often mix and match, try and fail to find out which pathway would be useful for us. Either we end up finding one that matches our passion or we dive into creating a new one. As we know, there are different types of jobs in the field of user experience like, interaction designer, visual designer, motion designer, UX researcher, etc. We often find individuals who specializes in any one of them or have diverse knowledge in multiple type of jobs. These roles are divided into 3 types. These are, Generalists, Specialists and T-Shaped roles.
As I have mentioned earlier, we dive into a pool of multiple directions to decide what to do or how to do, UX designers at the early stages of their career fall into this exact scenario on a Generalist role. They try to explore different jobs like motion design, interaction design, UX research, etc. This is how they try out different roles and sort out their specialty in one field. On the other hand, small companies or startups usually have individuals with multiple UX design roles as there might not be many employees. Generalists usually start their journey with the knowledge of two or three roles and gradually explore from their peers. If there are responsibilities named A,B,C,D , E and F, a generalist usually have more than one or all of these responsibilities.
Specialists are usually experienced in one specific UX design responsibility. They dive deeper into one type of UX design like interaction design, motion design, etc. and turns into an expert with the course of time. If anyone is passionate about UX design role A, they try to expand their knowledge and become an expert in this role. Usually, big companies have individuals as Specialists working in different projects as they can afford experts for a wide variety of involvements.
T-Shaped designers usually specializes in one specific area with a breadth of knowledge in other complimentary areas. The vertical line in the image above represents the area one individual specializes (UX design job C) in and the horizontal section represents the complimentary skills (other skills such as A, B, D and E). These subordinate skills may come from other fields or any specific soft skills that boosts up your efficiency.
I started my journey as product researcher and eventually starting exploring other areas to complement my whole journey associated with UI/UX design and product development. Therefore, my association in my team is more of a managerial responsibility driven towards Generalist role. As I am fully focused on my startups, I need to manage multiple tasks with the involvement of less amount of individuals and within a limited budget. Therefore, I have preferred more on recruiting individuals who either play a Generalists or T-Shaped roles under my supervision.
So far, I have discussed how different job responsibilities fall under the 3 types of UX design roles. Let me know which role better represents you.
