Socrates said, "The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms."
I've only been in this industry for a dozen years and have always found it both amusing and frustrating that we cannot agree on how to describe what it is that we do! Not only does it make it challenging when talking to each other, but it is a huge barrier to selling the value of our skills to others and having a universal understanding of that value. I have recently gravitated to User Experience as an umbrella term, but I can't agree that 'User Experience Designer' is a title that we should all use. It is too generic. I'd equate it with calling anyone who writes code a 'Programmer' or 'Engineer'. It's just not specific enough to describe their set of skills. For me, I break down the disciplines beneath User Experience as: - User Research - Usability Testing - Information Architecture - Interaction Design - Content Strategy - Visual Design - Site Development/Front-end Development You may add more or call things by different names, that's fine. Anyone in the UX umbrella likely does many of these things, but very few do all of them, nor do I believe they should be expected to, in most circumstances. I do appreciate the need to have a decent title. 'Information Architect, User Researcher & Tester, with a dollop of Content Strategy and a hint of Visual Design' is awkward to put on a business card, yet titles want nouns. Two startups ago, my title was just User Experience. It was a bit odd. User Experience what? My last startup added 'Architect' to the end as I was leading a team. Equally meaningless, in my opinion. -Jeremy Kriegel www.methodsansmadness.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=40553 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
