Compartmentalists, Specialists, and Generalists
Jared Spool just posted an interesting article on the ideal makeup of a UX team . He makes a useful distinction between a specialist and a compartmentalist:
While the former is about having the majority of your experience in a single discipline, the latter is about only having experience in that discipline… . A compartmentalist isolates themselves from the other disciplines around them, not really learning what they do or how they do it. Compartmentalism is bad for teams, because it means you have to have enough work to keep that individual busy within that discipline, and if needs shift or emergencies crop up, their value is dramatically diminished.
I would also add that a compartmentalist tends to make decisions that cause problems for other team members—the compartmentalized user researcher makes design recommendations that don’t meet the needs the business analyst identified previously; the designer designs something that will take $5 million to implement; the HTML coder who transforms those ultra-accessible semantic forms into screen-reader nightmares for the blind.
So I agree with Spool that compartmentalism is bad. But he also says that the main reason to choose a specialist over a generalist is economic; if a specialist is available and affordable, you would hire a specialist, according to the article. But aren’t there times when specialization is a negative for the project? Even if I could afford a specialist HTML coder, business analyst, interaction designer, and user researcher… isn’t there some inherent value in having the same person play one or more of those roles, depending on project size, complexity, or a host of other factors?
I don’t think economics is the only factor.
7 comments
Does anyone ever want to be known as a compartmentalist?
I agree with you on this point, economics are not the only reason to hire a specialist. I think that the time to hire a specialists, is when you can clearly define the problem you need them to tackle. If you are hiring them for a full time position, you’d best be sure that you have enough of their specialty work to keep them busy.
I like to believe that you are always better off if you can hire a generalist. A generalist isn’t a specialist at everything, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be very good (maybe even specialists) at several things.
comment by John Dilworth 8 hours later
Nobody wants to be known as a compartmentalist, but you’ve seen the “not my job” or “that’s your problem” mentality before.
comment by Ted Boren about a day later
Hi Ted,
I didn’t mean to imply that if your economics said you COULD afford a specialist, that you HAD TO hire one.
What I meant was that if you wanted one, the economic support has to be there.
Generalists aren’t always the optimal choice. There are some problems that can benefit from someone with deep experience and finely honed skills in a specific area or discipline.
Jared
comment by Jared Spool about a day later
Thanks for the comment Jared—I agree there are some problems that a specialist can be useful for, assuming money is there. I have frequently leaned on the visual design skills of my peers to help fill my own deficiencies on a project.
But your article seemed to suggest that a generalist was something you had to “put up with” if you couldn’t afford a specialist. To John’s point above, I believe there are actually benefits to having the same person fill multiple roles, as long as they are sufficiently capable, the size of the project allows it, etc. There are fewer transitions of knowledge, deeper opportunities to build domain expertise, and fewer conflicts of opinion.
This last is of course also a potential problem—that you don’t think critically about your own ideas and always drink your own Kool-Aid. That’s got to be mitigated with peer reviews, user & team feedback, and a heavy does of humility.
Thanks again for chiming in!
comment by Ted Boren about a day later
Oh, didn’t mean to imply that generalists are some sort of compromise at all. I think there’s real value to having them on the team and that most teams will benefit from their presence.
Sorry for the confusion!
comment by Jared M. Spool 2 days later
As John and I talked about this some more offline, a couple of things have gotten more clear to me.
First, and Jared makes this point in the article, almost everybody short of Leonardo da Vinci is some kind of specialist. It’s just a matter of degree. Even the “general practitioner” in Jared’s article has specialized medical knowledge that most of us don’t share. The surgeon is just even MORE specialized.
Second, in the UX field we usually start as “shallow specialists”. Our first job is as a “usability engineer,” a “visual designer”, or a “front-end coder”, or whatever. And usually the role we are ready to fill is really just that narrow.
As our career progresses, we can choose to deepen our specialization and become really, really good at that initial role (at the risk of becoming a compartmentalist, in Jared’s lingo), or we can choose to broaden into adjacent roles. I began as a technical writer; moved into usability engineering; thence into business analysis, design, and a little coding. I am probably weakest in visual design, but am working on that as well with a lot of help from my peers.
So what difference does that make? It means that rather than starting as a generalist (as you think of when you have a “general practitioner” in mind), in our field you usually have a strong specialty already, and that you become a generalist by ADDING specialties to greater and lesser depth according to your interest and project need. So a generalist in UX is not one who knows a little bit about everything. It’s someone who knows a lot about at least one thing, and who is building both breadth and depth as time goes on. In some ways related to the “T-model” that Peter Boersma describes for Information Architecture.
I think this is qualitatively different from most healthcare professions, where (as an outsider), it seems to me that the primary growth over time is deeper and deeper specialization.
Wow. Instead of a comment I’ve written a new post.
comment by Ted Boren 2 days later
I like your clarification Ted. I’ve been thinking about this idea of the Generalist and the “Rennaissance Man”, maybe it will come together in a future article…
To add just a few interesting points;
Even Leonardo was better at some things than he was at others (I don’t think any of his designs for flying machines even came close to working). He began his training as a painter under Veraccio and built his “Renaissance Man” status over the course of his whole life.
Michaelangelo also started his career as a specialist. As a sculptor, he created the “David” at the age of 24. However, it is his last work that exhibits his true achievement in multiple disciplines. His design of the dome for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome was completed just before his death at the age of 70. This last achievement combines his “generalist” knowledge of architecture, sculpture, painting and engineering.
comment by John Dilworth 2 days later
Comment preview
comment by you less than a minute ago