Presenting (more than) UX deliverables at German IA Konferenz

I am proud to be part of the third German IA conference as an invited speaker. In line with the conference's theme ("IA in Business and Practice") I will be talking about User Experience deliverables in practice.

The presentation will build partly on my talk at the Adobe User Group meeting last year (see the video in Dutch or slides in English). But instead of focusing on the core UX design deliverables as I did there, I plan to also talk the audience through project management-related artifacts as well as evaluation activities. Because only in theory is the UX practice all about design deliverables...

Other international presenters include Peter van Dijck (author of Information Architecture for Designers) and the keynote speaker Lou Rosenfeld (author of the IA bible Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)!

To stay up to date on the IA Konferenz, which will take place on May 16 and 17 in Hamburg, follow the news. I hope to see some of you there!

UX Matters breaks record for mentioning 'T-shaped people'

UX matters.com, one of the better online magazines on user experience (UX), just published the article Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy? In it, the author (Pabini Gabriel-Petit) mentions the idea of T-shaped people. Quite often. Really often. But it's good!

This article was interesting to me since I often have to refer to my own T-model for user experience professionals T-model: Big IA is now UX (and the addition of business IA). This is another article that explains the idea behind it.

Some quotes from the article:

Organizations should not require designers who have the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience to legitimately call themselves UX designers to specialize so narrowly. The best designers are unique individuals who bring diverse talents to their work—they’re T-shaped people

In my view, deep domain knowledge, while essential in a product manager, is not the primary criterion that should form the basis of a UX hiring decision. It’s usually a valuable asset, but there are also some positives that come from hiring T-shaped people who have experience outside your domain.

My dream team would consist of both specialists and T-shaped individuals with knowledge and skills that are both broad and deep.

and my favourite:

T-shaped people enjoy sharing their knowledge—with their peers in UX, with UX team members in other specialties, with people in other disciplines on multidisciplinary product teams, and with business leaders. They’re effective mentors and evangelists of user experience.

Amen!

Now go and read the article!