As I followed the discussion about jobs, titles and tasks for the last few weeks I found myself changing the way I think about my role. And at the risk of a lot of eye rolling, I am going to throw out what I hope will provide some further insight and perspective.
The official corporate job description for folks on our teams is something along the lines of a UI designer. Its original intent was specific to interfaces… but interaction is probably more accurate in the strict HR and recruiting sense. For quite a while I have claimed that we are user-experience designers. But we are not. We are product designers… and here is why. Adding new parts to one of our portals is a small study in semantics. Product managers like to say we add features, and biz-dev likes to talk about revenue opportunities, the dev guys call it functionality, and user experience folks like to talk about tools and capabilities. It is all a matter of perspective. From a completely neutral perspective we are adding attributes to our offerings. When this process begins, we (the UI team) gets a brief (we use a problem focused brief), as well as constraints, some metric and launch goals, and some combination of data, a feed or content provider. Sometimes we get an example of what other folks have done (sort of a hap hazard or shallow competitive analysis). Here is what I think is a very important observation... in our group, the UI stage is the first time where user needs/wants, biz goals, tech capabilities, data structures, and context are all brought together for consideration. This is significant and is worth exploiting in efforts to raise the perceived importance of what we as designers do. So, while we generate taxonomies, use-cases, process flows, wireframes and eventually mocks and prototypes… those deliverables to not constitute the most outcome of our process. That outcome is the syntheses of all the constraints into a cohesive product design… essentially the recipe for building the product. In the future, when asked what I do, I think I will respond with, ‘I am a product designer (building online experiences)’. People I meet seem to respond much better to it than anything interaction or user experience-ish. Mark Mark ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
