Frequently Asked Questions
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Leah Buley and Joe Natoli’s book The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide (2nd edition). You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- What is a user experience team of one?
A UX team of one is someone who works in a situation where they’re the key person advocating for a user-centered product design philosophy. If you’re the only person in your company practicing (or aspiring to practice) user-centered design with little to no support, you are most definitely a UX team of one. However, even in organizations with multiple UX professionals, you may find yourself part of a team where you are the only UX person. ..which makes you an honorary member of the UX team of one club. Chapter 3 explains the kinds of challenges that UX teams of one commonly face—and explains what to do about them. - I’m a freelancer. Is this book for me?
The User Experience Team of One, 2nd Edition focuses primarily on people working in or with organizations. But while it’s not explicitly geared toward freelancers, consultants, or contractors, much of this book is still very relevant for independents, because they, too, must often work with the cross-functional teams of their clients. And if you’re considering going out on your own, be sure to check out the section “Going Independent” in Chapter 9.
- What’s different about life as a UX team of one?
Working without the support of colleagues in the same profession, or without a high degree of UX maturity inside your organization, presents several unique challenges:- You feel like a jack of all trades, but master of none. You do a variety of work: probably some design, some research, some writing, some testing, and some evangelism. You care about your work, and you want to do it well. But being a generalist, you likely feel as if you’re being spread increasingly thin. You may also wonder at times if you’re “doing it right,” or why all these techniques you read about every day on social media don’t seem possible in your environment.
- You need to evangelize—or justify. You probably work with or for an organization that doesn’t yet “get it;” they haven’t fully bought into the value and purpose of UX. Or, even if they do value user experience, they may not be in a position to fully fund and build a robust UX practice. Either way, this means that in addition to your daily workload, you’re constantly tasked with fighting for the UX improvements you propose, as well as trying to influence and increase the UX maturity of the organization as a whole. That’s a pretty tall order.
- You’re learning on the job. You don’t have anyone to turn to for advice, so you need to figure out how to do your work on your own. You may have UX or product design professionals on social media or professional communities that you can turn to for peer-to-peer advice, but in your day-to-day work, you’re on your own. Quite often, the best you can do is make an educated guess—and then trust and defend your hunches as to the best next steps.
- You’re working with constrained resources. The biggest challenge for teams of one is time. There’s enough work on any given day to keep an entire team of UX folks busy—but there’s only one of you.
- You’re charting your own course. No one in your organization has done this before. So, you’re figuring out your own career path without a guide or a manual to follow, trying to build the airplane as you fly it.What makes this role interesting is the dramatic tension between needing to inspire through expertise and trying to build your own expertise at the same time. That dynamic means you have a very unique set of challenges that go well beyond simply trying to do good UX or product design work. It makes skills like facilitation, flexibility, assertiveness, and persuasiveness central to the team of one’s toolkit. This tension requires both practical and philosophical considerations—and that simple fact is the inspiration for this book.Chapters 2 and 3 explain the working conditions that a team of one often experiences, while Chapters 4 through 9 provide specific methods that are optimized for those working conditions.
- Is this just an intro to UX book?
Yes and no. While this book is intended to be accessible to people who are just starting out in user experience, we believe the advice and techniques here apply equally to seasoned practitioners. For example, Chapter 1 provides an overview of user experience and can serve as a basic introduction to the field. But the methods in Chapters 4 through 9 aren’t the same typical UX methods you see, read, and hear about every day. We’ve chosen them specifically because of their power to educate and involve others who may not be familiar with or supportive of user-centered design, while requiring less time and fewer resources than their more formal counterparts.
