I love the professional collaborations I have on LinkedIn. There was a healthy debate in the comment section in response to my "UX Researchers are not Designers" post from a few weeks ago. Many of the comments were insightful and thought-provoking and one particularly stood out for me. It was a comment by Noah Ratzan, championing the generalist rather than the specialist. He highly recommended the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein. I immediately bought the book and read it. I totally agree that its an awesome book.
A Case for Research within Design?
Noah was using the lessons in the book to make the case for UX research to be considered to be part of the design discipline. While I agree that designers should have a broader perspective, and that they should learn about other disciplines like UX research, I don’t see anything special about UX research being the only other discipline that designers should learn about. They should probably also learn about product management, development, and so on. And, designers broadening their skills, in my view, isn’t relevant to UX researcher being a member of their own discipline.
Relevance to UX Research
I found it fascinating that the book actually validates the more generalist typical circuitous route people who end up doing UX research go through in education and often in their early career as well. They are therefore more generalists than designers typically are simply due to there being very few dedicated programs in university for UX research.
Relevance to Design
In contrast, visual designers, for example, can and often do take education in a design school or a university design department directly applicable to a job as a visual designer. So, Noah is likely right that designers in particular should venture to broaden their skill and experience base to be more of a generalist.
Broadening the Vertical Stroke of the T
Although I’m not entirely aligned with Noah’s central assertion, I’m hugely thankful to him for recommending David Epstein’s book. What I took away from the book is that every team that wants to be innovative should look to include people who are different from the rest of the team and that every professional should strive for more generalist qualities.
This brings me back to the concept of the T-shaped person where the horizontal stroke of the T represents knowledge and skills like presentation skills, negotiation skills, and something I often add, design thinking skills that everyone should have. The vertical stroke of the T represents specialist knowledge and skills, often what we call superpower skills, like being a designer, being a developer, being a product manager, being a UX researcher, etc.
I think Epstein would advocate for everyone to broaden the width of the vertical stroke of the T. I would suggest that you can still have your superpower as a designer but also know enough about development too in order to know what is possible in code. I think UX researchers in addition to their primary superpower as researchers, may consider adding knowledge of data science to improve their research with broadened quantitative skills or product management to know how to better tailor their research recommendations in the form that a product manager could use in building their outcome-focused roadmap. And in additional to these very specific benefits of broadening the skill base, these professionals will also just bring an entirely new focus or lens to a problem, something that is at the heart of Epstein’s thesis and research.
And everyone would benefit from opening their skills aperture in order to see a problem from entirely different perspectives. The book does an excellent job of providing many examples of the benefits of having people completely different on a team as well as people broadening their own skillset.
Thank You!
I’d like to thank Noah for his engagement on my LinkedIn post and recommending this awesome book. I’d also like to thank all of you who I engage with regularly professionally on LinkedIn. You broaden my perspective and I appreciate you!