Examining Your Design Practice

As depicted above, in any particular project there are a number of roles/hats that I will typically play, as well as a number of skills, or “superpowers” and tools that are employed. While a number of tools (i.e. Microsoft Office, Teams/Zoom, Google Docs)  and skills (i.e. Problem-Solving) tend to be used in all roles, typically the skills and tools used depend on the role played:

Again, this all depends on the context, situation and role. For instance, when managing a project there are different problems to be solved when compared to design work, though the skill itself is the same. Similarly, guiding a client or playing devil’s advocate doesn’t require any special tools, though it does require more empathy than, say, quality assurance might since quality assurance, being a technical role, does not typically require any client interaction. The client will submit a ticket, which the project manager would assign, and the quality analyst will complete checking. As someone who prefers a wide array of varied tasks, this makes it interesting provided that time can be properly managed.