The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

By Steve Psomas


Throughout my career as a user experience designer, I have continually asked myself three questions:

1. What should my deliverables be?
2. Will my deliverables provide clarity to me and their audience?
3. Where do my deliverables and other efforts fit within the spectrum of UX design?

I have found that, if I do not answer these questions prior to creating a deliverable, my churn rate increases and deadlines slip. When attempting to answer the third question, I use a framework I discovered early in my career: The Five Competencies of User Experience Design. This framework comprises the competencies a UX professional or team requires. The following sections describe these five competencies, outline some questions each competency must answer, and show the groundwork and deliverables for which each competency is responsible.

1. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
When wearing the information architect hat, your job is designing a user interface (UI) structure that satisfies the corporate business strategy, product strategy, and user experience strategy and accommodates all use cases and product requirements.

2. INTERACTION DESIGN
The interaction designer bears the greatest load and is responsible for conceptual design, which requires exposure to the latest UI patterns and components.

3. USABILITY ENGINEERING
The study of discrepancies between expected and actual user behaviour.

4. VISUAL DESIGN
Visual design communicates your brand. That’s why everyone has an opinion about it. But it also communicates interactivity, information structures, workflows, and relationships between the elements and components on a screen.

5. PROTOTYPE ENGINEERING
Prototyping offers a huge opportunity for increasing process efficiency. When done well, it can alleviate uncertainty about design intentions, clarify functionality, and reduce the need for documentation. An interaction designer and prototype engineer work closely together to deliver prototypes of concept models for testing by the usability engineer.

Our industry is at a crossroads, scrambling to adjust to the demand for richness in Web applications. Design principles, processes, tools, and resources are changing, too. So, now we need to clarify the value of UX design and the competencies it offers to the greater product development process.

Associated Link: Full article: The Five Competencies of User Experience Design

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