Lately I’ve been doing research for my thesis. The thing is, planning card sorting and heuristic evaluation alone without a lot of experience isn’t much fun. I’d extrapolate this to any kind of reasonable difficult pursuit. It’s always easier with a team or partner even if every one is inexperienced.
Of course this is parallel to all the stuff I’ve been doing for my thesis. In usability testing, card sorting and heuristic evaluation you do find usability problems with just one test subject, but with more patterns start to emerge and the data you get is more meaningful. Similarly I naturally believe that the research portion of my thesis would be better if I did as a part of a team or with a partner.
I definitely prefer working in teams even though I’ve worked mostly independently. It’s a general win-win, in a working team you generally improve every member in the two most important aspects: skill and motivation. Can’t for the life of me remember whether it was Rands or Scott Berkun who wrote about the skill and will as the aspects manager must massage.