T-shaped designers are design professionals that possess both the breadth and the depth of experience (represented by horizontal and the vertical strokes of the letter “T”). The breadth of experience allows T-shaped designers to successfully collaborate with others while the depth of expertise to contribute to particular project.

A UX design team might be composed of a number of T-shaped designers. And while each team member can carry out UX activities such as user research, wireframing, prototyping, or user testing, certain members might have more experience and expertise in user research, while others in prototyping, and thus they spearhead those particular initiatives.

Leading design companies like IDEO prefer to hire predominantly T-shaped designers as opposed to specialists, sometimes called I-shaped professionals. Tim Brown of IDEO explains, “Most companies have lots of people with different skills. The problem is, when you bring people together to work on the same problem, if all they have are those individual skills — if they are I-shaped-it’s very hard for them to collaborate. What tends to happen is that each individual discipline represents its own point of view. It basically becomes a negotiation at the table as to whose point of view wins, and that’s when you get gray compromises where the best you can achieve is the lowest common denominator between all points of view. The results are never spectacular but at best average.”

If you are just starting in UX design, I highly recommend to get the breadth of experience and develop core UX design skills before deciding to specialize in any particular area of UX design.