I frequently kill time on Quora, looking at what questions are being asked about UX. There are an annoying amount of ‘What is the absolute least amount of effort I have to put forth to become an expert in UX in one year?’ type of questions, but there are some thought provoking ones. This one seemed like a simple one, don’t know if I answered in the way they wanted, but it gave me a chance to dust off some documents I’d done at Texas Instruments managing UX.
See it here, or read below.
Some background… in 2001 UPA was investigating certifications for usability/UX professionals. Some work was done, notably in the UK with the group that worked on ISO 9241 (Earthy & Bevan, et. al.). It was controversial, to say the least — mostly from experienced professionals who didn’t want to prove that they were qualified (why not, they’re already doing it). So certification was dropped like a hot potato — except for the vendors who are providing it for thousands of dollars… Anyway, long story short you can’t find the reports online anymore (my corporate web filter thinks one is a porn site…), but I did modify the original for our purposes at TI, and here it is for anyone who is interested: UX Core Competencies (PDF)
Now the Quora question was interesting to me in a way, showing that if you did have a team of UX professionals, you could assess their skils accordingly, and visualize them in a spider chart. The visualization could be useful if you’re staffing a project, where you overlay each individuals’ charts to see what kind of coverage you have. Anyway, here’s what I wrote:
Note: had to revisit this to update links after I saw that NNG stole my idea…