In all of the design teams I’ve worked with, we always had specialists and generalists working together on the same product. So a common question junior designers may ask to Seniors is: Should I be a UX generalist or a specialist?

Well, you may be familiar with the phrase, Jack of all trades, master of none. It is generally used to describe a person who might have many skills but doesn’t have expertise in any of them. But, when we talk about modern challenges and complex work a generalist person has a very important role.

Who is a UX specialist designer?

UX (User Experience) specialists are professionals who focus their expertise specifically on aspects related to user experience design. They delve deeply into understanding user behaviors, preferences, and needs, employing specialized research methods, usability testing techniques, and UX design principles to create intuitive and user-friendly products or interfaces. UX specialists possess a profound understanding of interaction design, information architecture, and usability principles, allowing them to optimize user journeys and enhance overall user satisfaction.

Who is a UX generalist designer?

UX generalists have a broader skill set that spans various aspects of design, as well as related fields such as user interface (UI) design, usability testing, marketing design and product management. They excel at synthesizing insights from diverse disciplines, adapting to different project requirements, and collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams. UX generalists bring versatility and adaptability to the table, enabling them to tackle a wide range of UX challenges and contribute to the entire product development lifecycle.

Which one you should consider hiring for your team?

When considering which type of professional is better suited for your team, first you need to wonder which type of position you need to fill and how big is your design team. If you are looking for an individual contributor with a deep knowledge of UX research, testing techniques, or a motion designer, I would say a specialist might be a good fit, since the daily tasks would be very specific.

Also, the size of your team can allow you to go deep in specialization. For example, specialist designers are more common in larger companies that have a large team and can afford a deep understanding of each small piece of the product.

For a manager position, a UX specialist manager would bring deep expertise and guidance in UX design methodologies, ensuring that projects meet high standards of usability and user satisfaction. They would be particularly valuable for teams working on complex projects that require specialized UX knowledge and attention to detail.

On the other hand, a UX generalist designer can be your team’s superpower. Generalists are known to be problem solvers. And the more problems you can solve, the more value you can bring to the company. The power of a generalist mindset helps to connect the dots to form a complete picture from the otherwise independent sources of data you may have.

For a manager position, a UX generalist manager would bring a broader perspective to the role, leveraging their diverse skill set to oversee and coordinate various aspects of the UX design process. They would excel in roles that require managing multidisciplinary teams, fostering collaboration, and aligning UX efforts with broader business goals and strategies.

Ultimately, the choice between a UX specialist and a UX generalist depends on factors such as the scope of the role, the composition of the team, and the strategic objectives of your company. Both types of professionals can bring valuable leadership qualities to the table, contributing to the success of UX initiatives within their respective domains.

One last thing, let’s hear from Don Norman, what’s the role of design:

Good luck on your search!

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1. Not define the objective of the testing

This might sound silly, but I’ve seen so many times Product Designers and Managers preparing user testing without defining the test objective first. A clear objective makes it much easier to create a proper list of questions.

2. Focus on completing tasks rather than the journey

People feel good after completing a task, and they tend to provide nothing but positive feedback. Basically, users might forget all the frictions during the test—frictions that are so important to you — they used to tell you the journey was perfect because they’ve achieved their goal.

One way to avoid this scenario is to ask participants to think out loud and vocalize every single thought that comes to their minds while they use the product.

3. Ask participants designer’s questions

Another item that I’ve seen sometimes and it’s very common is to see designers adding to their usability testing questions related to design decisions. During the design process, we find ourselves in a position where we want to collect the most feedback we can and this helps us to make more accurate decisions. But sometimes, testing very small differences in visuals, that only another designer can identify, won’t bring you clarity and accurate data. Remember: you are not the user, and the user isn’t a designer.

4- Not document your findings

After spending time on research, designers might feel tempted to rush through the analysis of the results and jump into making the necessary changes to move on to the next step in the project. But you should include a reasonable amount of time to analyze all the findings and document them will ensure that even the people who couldn’t attend the testing will know the results.

5- Conducting biased questions

A leading question encourages the person to give a particular answer. They should be avoided in research as they influence the way participants think and imply what kind of information you expect to confirm. Some examples of biased questions: What do you dislike about this? you’re prompting the users to think negatively about that particular part instead of getting uncovering truthful and honest feedback.

Conclusion

Usability tests can give you key insights that let you improve your design. However, it can take much effort to get better feedback from participants.

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Figma wons market-share offering a free plan to an individual designer. In my point of view, this was an amazing strategy for product relevance and maturity. With millions of users, they could have decisions based on data-driven and also focus on business plans.

Moving to Figma

Seeing these charts above is clear that Figma is a Trend in the design industry and designers love working in Figma. Naming some of my favorite Figam features: Collaboration (many designers working in the same file and also shareholders can comment); web browser-based software (anyone can open a Figma file), shared prototype links (easy to make interactive user-testing research), and a smooth handoff to developers (with the inspector tool and shared libraries);

During the last 5 years, I had an opportunity to lead the migration of the design tool from Sketch / Axure / Adobe XD to Figma twice in different company sizes and cores. The first was e-commerce with internal design, marketing, sales, and development teams. The other was Product oriented startup.

So here is a small tutorial that might help you organize your team and also your files.

Figma plans

One thing that is very important to consider is the company’s maturity in design, the size of the design team, and also the number of products and projects.

Of course, choosing the most expensive Figma plan can give you more features (Organization libraries instead of only team libraries, DS analytics, customized plugins, SSO), but these features aren’t for any company, you need to be big or to have a specific use case to take advantage of these features.
And when we talk about money, it also has two critical points:

• the annual billing contract.
• monthly cost per member ($ 45).

So this article will focus only on the Professional plan (if you have an Organization Plan, this might work too

Figma file & library structures

As you can see in the image above, Figma has a defined structure for Folders and Files. One constraint of the Professional plan is the shared library that works only at a Team level. That means, if you decide to go with Professional Plan, your file structure needs to be below Team.

Examples of the folder organization

For small company

For digital agencies

For companies with one product

For companies with multi products

Project organization

Inside each project, we can have logic behind each file. This logic can also follow the company context based on the folder structures above.

Inside each file, you can have a thumbnail that can have 2 reasons: easy visualization of the file content and keywords for easily be founded by Figma’s search feature.

An example of Cover file is this one:

In this example above, we have:

• Task status: Discovery / Brainstorming / Designing / On Approval / etc.
• Jira number with a link.
• Project Name.
• Task title / feature name / flow name / or ticket name.
• Designer name
• Date of work / Version of the file / etc.

Besides the cover file, another important thing is one single file to show the final and the full product/app/web user flow with screenshots and links.

With this organization, you can have covered PMs, POs and business stakeholders which want quickly access the status quo of a product feature or a flow, designers who want to see the discovery phase and the concepts, and user researchers who want to test your prototypes and also developers who want to inspect an element.

Conclusion

As you could see, there are a lot of different ways to organize your Figma files, teams and projects. However, the most important aspect you need to consider is your company context. Putting all your team members together in a meeting and making a decision in a collaborative way would be always the best path to follow. Was this article useful to you? If you have another way to organize your files in Figma, I would love to hear from you

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