Don’t stop calling yourself a UX designer – it’s working

http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/08/dont-stop-calling-yourself-a-ux-designer-its-working/

by primigenus • 15 years ago

15 9 15 years ago

blog.handcraft.com

3-4 years ago I started to call myself a UX Designer because I wanted to distinguish myself from the other designers I knew who did brochure websites, or had just started a transition from print to web design.

I work almost exclusively on software design and UX design is the best term I know of to sum up what I do.

jordank• 15 years ago

Interaction designer was previously the preferred title for many designers...until it became completely co-opted.

I wouldn't get too attached to the title UX Designer either, since that term will no doubt get diluted as well — but as the article states it does give people something to grasp immediately.

dmix• 15 years ago

The day I stopped calling myself a UX Designer was when I attended a "UX" meetup in Toronto. The extent of skill of every person there, who called themselves UX Designers, was creating wireframes for corporate gigs.

They were the guys who handed off wireframes and stories to the photoshop designers who handed it to the HTML/CSS coders.

I was hoping UX Designer would encapsulate someone who knew the full spectrum of ux research/design/photoshop/html/css/marketing for building software.

But thats not the way it turned out.

aaronblohowiak• 15 years ago

If you weren't founder of carelogger (which looks awesome, btw) how would someone effectively recruit someone that knew the full spectrum of ux research/design/photoshop/html/css/marketing ?

OzzyB• 15 years ago

^ this.

That is 100% my experience too, and it's complete bs imo.

Between the co-opting of "interactive designer", "web designer" and "ux designer" I am just happy to call myself a developer now.

A developer who also knows a thing or too about design, and yes, user experience too (duh! isn't that a given?)

I will do this until people realize that developers, in this web/app/tech industry, are really the designers -- and it will happen one day :)

timr2• 15 years ago

"If it’s becoming cool, then sure, you’ve got the hipster crowd who like to go about saying they were designing UX before anyone had heard of it. That’s great for those people. You know what? It’s even better for the rest of the world because now people know there is such a thing as user experience design."

Uh huh. It also means that every no-talent, former "business guy" with a strong opinion has latched on to the title, because they've realized that declaring themselves a "UX designer" allows them to get hired into plum, boss-everyone-around positions without having to go through the pain of learning how to write code or actually do graphic design.

There are genuinely talented designers out there, but the many of the "cool" kids who have glommed on to the movement in recent months have done little more than read The Design of Everyday Things, written opinionated blog posts (on blogs designed by someone else) and gone to trendy parties. But hey...it's great when there's a profession with vague/undefinable job responsibilities and lots of authority over the product features -- you get to take a disproportionate share of the credit, which makes that next UX Design gig easier to get! Maybe you can even become a product manager!

yuhong2• 15 years ago

Personally, I think the right position for this kind of people is Product Manager in the first place anyway.

timr2• 15 years ago

Heh. Personally, I think the right position for the kind of people I'm talking about involves asking "do you want fries with that?" That's "product management" too.

Don’t stop calling yourself a UX designer – it’s working

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