On the Presentation of Fluency

Skills

User Experience is a discipline uniquely plagued by the proliferation of jargon. In some cases, this linguistic evolution is rooted in noble intentions, such as a desire to lend clarity to communications by increasing the precision of words used via diversification of available verbiage. In other cases, less than noble intentions may be present, such as attempts to co-opt the cognitive space to bolster pay grades or seek candidates who possess “UX/UI skills” in name only.

For Senior UX practitioners, the jargon conundrum further exacerbates the all-too-common feeling of imposter syndrome, which naturally occurs in context of professional (meta)awareness of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Precise self-diagnosis of professional fluency thereby becomes a damning task and a fool’s errand.

It is for these and other reasons that I have chosen to simply list skills that I can leverage in support of any given task with proficiency somewhere between the Slope of Enlightenment and the Plateau of Sustainability, outside the Valley of Despair and distant from Mount Stupid.

Tools

The key difference between discipline-relevant skills and tool is that while skill cultivation represents ongoing commitment to professional education, tool fluency may be measured based on duration of use and speed of task execution in an often static and finite range of proficiency.

As such, I have expressed my fluency, which I define as an aggregate of speed and quality of task execution, duration of usage over my career, and familiarity with features and functionality, with the tools listed below with a bar intended to help the reader gain contextual understanding of my ability to effectively wield certain tools with greater aptitude than others.

Should a role demand it, I am fully capable of increasing my fluency with any of the options listed below and expanding my toolkit with new utilities.