UIEtips: Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills

You may have noticed the last UIEtips article concentrated on UX teams (Who Is on the UX Team?). This week I keep the theme, UX teams, and revisit an article I wrote in 2007, Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills.

In this article, I concentrate on the various skills required for a successful UX team. Through our years of research, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some that are very good at producing great designs, while others regularly struggle to produce anything that makes users happy. As we’ve looked at the differences between the teams, we’ve started to notice some patterns.

One emerging pattern focuses on the skills found in the team. While it’s a no-brainer to say that the more skilled the team, the better the results, it’s more difficult to hone in on the specific skills that make a difference.

Our research has isolated eighteen skills that the best teams all master. We’ve divided these into two groups: Core UX Skills that are unique to the user experience process and Enterprise UX Skills that the team shares with other parts of the organization, such as marketing, IT, and product management.

This article looks at team skills and a simple method for assessing where a team is at. Managers can use this assessment to identify areas of improvements for the team as a whole
and individual members.

Read the article: Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills.

Continuing on the theme of evaluating team skills is Dan Brown’s June 23 UIE
Virtual Seminar, Plays Well With Others: Survival Skills for Design Teams. Dan will show you how to assess talent and skills available to team leaders for more efficient and effective projects. And designers
will understand what they need to best fit in on an effective team. Learn more about this webinar.