Tuesday, February 9, 2016

What Skills do an Expert Evaluator Require?

The evaluator certainly benefits from having a broad academic and employment background, as any skill/job would benefit from knowledge. In most cases, the evaluator probably also has some form of expert knowledge. Malcolm Gladwell describes a rule and extensive case study of what it takes to be considered an expert in any field as the 10,000 hour rule. In Outliers, he writes about a foundation and multiple examples of people who might be considered his personas for defining the 10,000 hour rule. Basically he says it takes 10,000 hours of practice in a field to become world class or expert in that field.

I'm sure everyone in our class has 'expert' knowledge in one field or another, but really this pertains to work and what you might give recommendations to or get paid for advice on. So, I may give expert advice on UI/UX, while another one of our classmates may give legal advice.

That being said, I am not restricted to evaluating UX processes and related topics. I've done evaluations on many, many fields ranging from video games, fashion, liquor businesses, to health care. Along the way, I gained knowledge of these fields through research while doing my work. The work I did for these companies was specifically related to technology, but to be able to give them good advice specific to their industry I also had to do research before and during doing my evaluations. Sometimes this research involved asking questions to get a better feel for the client's knowledge of technology, goals for the business, or where they believe they set competitively in their market.

The next steps involved a mult-step level of process planning (PMBOK/Project management) and research related to marketing, social media, and SEO. The documents that come from this research include but are not limited to: vision documents, planning, time-line, scope/requirements, a contract, keyword analysis, market analysis, competitor analysis, editorial, content plan, UI/UX system design document, Information Architecture plan, case studies, and analytics research.