Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Carrie Ye

Working in a T-shape form + Keep Challenging yourself

I might have touched a little about ux designer, how we input values and come up with strategic planning and solving challenging problems.

As well-rounded as that sounds, we are, in the end, human after all. We know quite a lot, as the school tailored as in becoming, but we each need to develop a strong skills set. A lot might refer this as a “T-shape” model.

In my case, I was educated on a relatively wide spectrum. I had to take psychology, sociology, philosophy, science and other “not quite relevant” courses to develop our knowledge horizontally. So we understand and develop the sense of other profession besides ours.

However, I might encounter a lot of courses and knowledge, a lot of them are quite surface. Therefore, it is time for us individually, take the ownership to develop. Find an interest or passion and deepen that knowledge lane. And that’s when and how we develop ourselves vertically.

The role works on all of us (ux designers). We know a lot, but not that much. Therefore, this is when there are other areas of expertise that we strengthens ourselves in and market that.

We have interaction designers, visual designers, user research designers and content strategy/ copywriting designers. (These are the few main streams on top of my head)

Supposedly, we each carries a strong skill and with an open and growing mindset, we help and give constructive feedback to one another. 🤔 The downside and struggle that I am encountered with is, that working in a huge corporate, you work in a downward hierarchical format, less of a horizontal platform.

Something I am trying out:

Be really excellent and professional on what you are doing
Do your research before you raise an issue
Connect with the global network since there is a platform provided
When you were asked to give an introduction of yourself, let others know that you are open to critiques and feedbacks on daily basis

We are curious individuals, we like to look for challenges and problems to solve. So those are from the same field, we should be running on the same method. There might be some introverts and extroverts out there, but we all appreciate ideas and engagements. I highly recommend that we all step out and connect with our global community of designers.

The structure I was trained in… was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The structure I was trained in…

Cool stuff, every week

More Articles