Newsletter 6: General(ist) magic. What does it mean to be a generalist in 2024

A hiring prediction for 2024: 'this will be a year of design generalists' crossed our network past week. It is based on grim reality of recent lay-offs, markets uncertainty and lots of elections happening worldwide.

We were always kind of focused, deep generalists which means business as usual at Cosmic Velocity. But what does being a deep generalist really means for user experience design now? Olena Bulygina thought about it a bit.

What do we talk about when we (not) talk about generalist UX skills

Discussions about UX professions and the evolution of its requirements frequently focus on specific market expectations with the broadest range. They go from abstract skills like 'learning to code' or 'motion design' to diving directly into particular technologies, such as React, sometimes without fully exploring their application. In the example of coding, I personally found hard to apply 'learn to code' despite having some skin in the game: done a lot of programming since the first basic line at the age of eight, have an engineering degree, and some of my assembler code went to space on a micro-satellite some twenty years ago, true story. All I know is that ability to code my own prototypes has won a couple of clients over often at the cost of my own wellbeing (dear reader, I simply do not enjoy frontend development especially at the cost of mindful research analysis time).

Another factor that makes conversations about generalists harder is existing professional pressure for design professionals. I sometimes wonder how my engineer friends would behave if they had to prove themselves at every meeting, their skills would be always questioned, and recommendations neglected by the squad, team or org. And on top of this, they’d be expected to reinvent themselves and ‘learn to research’.

Applying lateral thinking can help to see a different approach to the generalist topic that starts with dimensions of UX work, not tools or technologies. Afterwards the dimensions can be defined with the desired depth and applied to recent or desired job experience or expectations — hopefully without FOMO and chronic existential doubt!

Practical reframing of UX skills: Thinking Hats to the rescue

Edward de Bono devised the Six Thinking Hats technique, where each hat represents a distinct and independent decision-making style through different perspectives, which we "put on" sequentially to examine the situation. Thinking of hats that are needed for user experience folks, sometimes simultaneously, this is the list of roles and outcomes for a user experience generalist. We definitely use all these hats in solving our clients problems on a daily basis.

1. ?? Facilitator. We often need to lead teams, colleagues, and all stakeholders towards common yet often very different goals or engage with quick decision-making.
2. ???Strategist. We provide teams with tangible opportunities to make sound decisions and clarify current and future work, helping to uncover new directions for the entire business and their parts.
3. ?? Scientist. This role is twofold. It starts with a personal responsibility for conducting ethical and inclusive research and extends to reliable and valid results, strict adherence to methodology, and statistical methods, maintaining a neutral mindset when working with data and presentations, and dealing with cognitive biases. It also ensures that both strategic and tactical research processes, e.g. choosing the right methods and conducting them as flawlessly as possible are upheld to a high standard.
4. ??People's Advocate. It is by duty, we must keep a head full of insights, quickly recall user habits in the midst of a meeting, and tell compelling stories. We also need to remember that iterating on meaningless products and bad user journeys leads nowhere frustrating some business decision-makers plans for the next quarter.
5. ??Diplomat. This is another communicative hat essential for researchers, indispensable for manoeuvring through the minefield of internal politics, while still getting the job done. The range of actions goes from simple mediation of personal frictions to complex peacekeeping operations.
6. ??Designer. Every research project is inevitably also a design project. To give impactful and actionable research recommendations, we must also be designers, solving problems, being able to suggest and do new components to design systems, assemble prototypes on an acceptable level of high fidelity and interactivity.
7. ???Detective. Our process often starts with a burning question and includes collecting evidence through organisation and suspicious questions to users. This is one of the important yet understated hats to have for successful growth.
8. ??Technologist. This hat is everything related to mastering software, scripts, hotkeys, backups, technical and research equipment etc. Plus data formats, internet protocols, programming languages, how computers work — can’t go without technological rigour.
9. ??Organisational Therapist. This role doesn't fit into any job description and isn't performed directly, but researchers help teams and businesses work smoothly, resolve issues, and improve business metrics. And if one wants to progress and mature in their job, then accepting this hat as a part of it is inevitable.
10. ??Teacher. The last on the list, but certainly not the least in importance. We teach other teams and parts of the business the value of our approach (sometimes so tiring), the significance of decision-making, and help colleagues conduct some simple research independently.

How to use this framework

Remember, your goal is not to achieve some fantasy of job-calibrated perfection. This approach allows to look at practical skills through different lenses, and then establish realistic personal criteria for professional growth.

1. Start with evaluating yourself on these dimensions to understand where are you now and how your profile looks.
2. Map the most recent types of work that you have done, look for patterns unusual types of work, project challenges. Sometimes, in a complex mixed methods long-term study doing the research is not the most challenging part, but maintaining visibility on the org level, and then receiving a pendulum of opinions.
3. Map the challenges your team came across most recently. What are they about? Which dimensions do they belong to?
4. Identify potential directions for growth for yourself. What are the sides you are not super-proficient at? Can you find someone to pair up when your tasks are in this category? Is there a level you are fully comfortable with?
5. Lastly, look at job descriptions and LinkedIn bios of people on positions you want to have. What do these signal? What it means for you now? Where can you start today?

Non-design book recommendation: Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. It did empower me with an analogy of jazz musicians able to improvise with other people as generalists, and classical musicians being brilliant in a different way. Interestingly, when jazz musicians improvise while in an MRI scanner, the data suggests their brains can effectively mute the self-critique circuit, allowing for uninhibited creativity. It also helped me to quiet my internal critic.

This newsletter is a work in progress where Cosmic Velocity experiments with content, topics, and formats. Share your thoughts and comments directly or publicly!