This posting is prompted by an article that Jared Spool wrote on his UIE site:
Hiring UX Experts Versus Giving Your Team Their Own UX Skills
(You can read the full article here. http://www.uie.com/articles/hiring_ux_experts/)
He starts with the question "Is there a conflict between providing expert services and training for those skills?"
I've always loved how Jared can craft a message that gets to the nub of the matter and he nailed it in one page.
My attempt at putting the same argument forward 6 months ago to upper management could probably have been better prosecuted by Jared, but then I work in a business that needs everything documented and old habits die hard and I like to back up my arguments with research and hard statistics.
The take-out from Jared's post is that 80% of UX work is routine and when learned and understood by everyone on the team, it creates consistently good design outcomes. I've found this to be the case when I build comprehensive UI design guides for large enterprise projects that create a design template that developers can read, understand and then run with, without coming back to me for every design decision. If I can solve these problems for them before they even come up when a front-end dev is building a page then they are happy.
Shifting technicians from system thinking to user-centred design thinking allows them to widen the scope of the design problem, but in turn gives them a better view of the world that the application solution sits in.
That is the first step. The next step is allowing devs to start solving those 80% of problems and leaving the tricky stuff to the UX professional.
The big plus for that is you actually have a higher-skilled team of consultants available who can then be seen above the crowd of coders out in the marketplace. Some people just don't see that though.
Pity.
