> Stop perpetuating the myth of the solo unicorn designer who can do all the end-to-end design work alone and well. I’ve never seen this generalist approach work well in industry because you will never go deep enough to do good work in any of these vastly different areas of UX design and research, let alone front end and mobile design standards (UI design).
If the myth is that a single person can do what a UX team does then I agree. But to imply a single designer can't create a good user experience is complete nonsense. We've propped up modern UX to an absurd degree. Yes it provides value. No it's not the only way.
I never implied they can’t, if you have a green field project with no technical constraints then it’s pretty straightforward to make whatever you dream up. The article is trying to teach every discipline of the field of user centered design and companies past a certain size i.e. F500 companies, have design teams with people that specialize in the different areas like research, interaction design, front-end UI prototyping, etc. go look at google UX positions and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
The lone UX unicorn designer this article is targeting runs counter to UX positions in large companies and the work they do as a member of a design team.
If you want to be a solo jack of all trades type designer then certainly disregard what I’m saying, just giving advice as someone who has knowledge of what hiring managers are looking for on their design teams.
OK right, I agree with that. If you're a manager hoping to run your UX through one person you're going to have a bad time. That said, a lot of true innovation in user interfaces is going to come from a solo person dreaming something up and doing a bang-up job of implementing it. I think even a large company would benefit from encouraging side experimentation from their designers (or even non-designers) as part of their "20% time". (This is one more reason to decouple the logic from the GUI.)
Definitely agree with both of your points. A designer turned developer is also a force to be reckoned with and has "start-up founder" written all over them :)
For simple projects, sure. On complex systems like most big IT companies have, then you need specialization. Same as for coding and administering actually.
If the myth is that a single person can do what a UX team does then I agree. But to imply a single designer can't create a good user experience is complete nonsense. We've propped up modern UX to an absurd degree. Yes it provides value. No it's not the only way.