Ditch your designer label and make people happy

Some time ago I posted quite a scathing view of my perception of the job title “user experience designer”. As life moves forward, one learns lessons and so it’s ironic that I now write a post as, believe it or not, a “user experience consultant”.

Let me first start with this, I still very strongly believe that “A project guide to Ux Design for user experience designers in the field or in the making” by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler contains a completely inaccurate definition of “user experience designer” and “visual designer”. If you can take anything out of that previous post, take that. Those authors have tried to define a Ux niche and have done so poorly. With that out of the way, I move on to something a little more important.

Having recently been a piece of meat on the job market, hounded by real-estate agents who sell people instead of property (they call themselves ‘talent brokers’, others call them ‘recruiters’), I learned within the first few weeks that my skill set had been (and is) very difficult to find. I could code (both front-end and back-end), I was very strongly skilled in branding/identity and ‘visual design’, and I could consult, discuss and strategise with clients at the very early stages of the project. But before this turns in to a paragraph about how great I am, I don’t mean to boast. I don’t pretend to be awesome, I don’t think I am. I just love to solve problems and it seems that over the 4 years that I’ve been living on my small agency island in Melbourne, the landscape of the outer digital continent has shifted a lot. To have one person capable of taking a client from conception to delivery just doesn’t exist anymore – or at least perhaps the perception is that it shouldn’t.

Maybe I’m the last of a generation of web designers who are capable of doing  “web design” in its entirety. Students that have approached our studio for internships and work placement come with a very clear idea of where they think they would fit; “I’m a front-end developer specialising in Javascript frameworks like jQuery and Scriptaculous,” or “I’m a visual designer and my specialty is designing interfaces for iOS”. These are super specific areas and for grads to be ‘specialists’ without having worked in a professional environment seems a little daft to me. How do they know that’s what they love or even what they’re good at? Many of them have made their decisions based on whether they had more fun doing 1 semester of HTML/CSS as opposed to 1 semester of Photoshop tutorials and which one they got higher marks for. It’s just not possible and dare I say does not bode well for the quality of our future junior design graduates (but that’s a discussion for another post).

The specialist and generalist debate has raged forever and this post certainly won’t answer it. I won’t even aim to discuss the benefits of each because that’s been done on countless websites the world over. 12 months ago I argued that Ux was a just a spin-off of the role that I had at the time, a visual designer (‘interaction designer’ was the official title). I considered myself one of those cool hipster designers who loved type, colour and communicating to people using my graphic design skills. I took umbrage at the implication that I didn’t think about the end-user when I was designing. That I was just applying brand guidelines and making things look pretty and that a Ux designer is the only one in a project who had the interests of end users at heart made me mad. What’s different now? Well, rather than continue to insult the authors about their crappy book, I decided to be proactive and research.

Over 12 months I’ve immersed myself in “Ux” – which, for reasons I’ll explain soon, wasn’t a big stretch for me. I’ve bought hundreds of dollars worth of books, spent countless hours on forums, read and watched podcasts and attended local events; pretty much anything I could get my hands on or my head in. What’s my conclusion after all of this invested time? Well, I’ve decided to throw out the notion of ‘specialist’ and ‘generalist’ and job titles all together to embrace one fact – I am a designer.

Wow, it feels good typing it. It’s taken me 7 years of professional design experience (and 27 years of life) to come to this realisation and it feels equal parts prophetic and obvious. It’s easy to get caught up with job titles when you muse about your career. In my own recent experience it’s been a real consideration for me, “What will my next employer think if I’ve got “User Experience Consultant” on my job record instead of “Cool Hipster Graphic Designer from an Ad Agency Guy”. Of course, it’s still a professional consideration but in the long run, how much does it mean? Job titles in the online industry will be split, merged and renamed as long as technology keeps shifting the goal posts, case in point: “New Media Designer”. Does anyone even remember that one? One goal post that technology will never shift however is the one to improve the quality of life of people. If I get to do this on a day-to-day basis by making digital or physical products in the future then what difference does it make what the fashionable term in business is for it when it’s time to change jobs?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “User Experience Designer” is a fashionable term. It’s just an evolution. Some have already dropped the “User” part to “Experience Designer” to imply less of a digital focus. “Service Designer” has been around for years and if that doesn’t include any elements of ‘experience’ design, then I’m not sure what does. I’ve been an “Interaction Designer” for 7 years. What does that even mean? It doesn’t imply technology but 95% of my work has been in the digital realm. What differentiates an “Interaction Designer” from an “Industrial Designer”? An industrial designer designs physical products that are supposed to be ‘interacted’ with right? I think you probably get my point.

It’s not really a surprise that Ux seems to draw people from all backgrounds. Many Ux designers I’ve met have graphic and/or industrial design backgrounds and many of them come from scientific backgrounds like cognitive science and psychology. These 2 types of people no doubt have the same overwhelming need to want to help people. The fact that designers and scientists are now working together in digital content delivery is really an inevitable natural progression and also really exciting.

The tertiary education system tells us that we can’t be generalists. Specialists get jobs; so pick a stream and go with it, whether it’s in the realm of science or design. We end up following the subjects that are more fun or we choose the ones that we excel at. We then approach agencies or health services who tell us we’d be the right fit and begin a ‘career’. I was once told by one of my design professors that although designers have the skills needed to solve any problem, the first job you get out of university will essentially define the stream of design (i.e the type of problems) you’ll follow and solve throughout the rest of your career, you just get quicker at solving them.

What I seem to have found with Ux is an emerging industry where like-minded people, people who want to help other people, are joining forces and putting people first. We’ve all tried the ‘traditional’ jobs that are out there; companies stuck in old ways where tried and tested branding and design from offline media should take precedence over usability and accessibility when it comes to digital. It works in the offline world so it should equally apply to the online one and the business isn’t setup to adapt to any change so stop trying to change the system! I imagine it’s the same in the health industry but can’t speak for it implicitly.

The phenomenal uptake of digital technology and the rise of ‘casual computing’ is like nothing our global society has ever had to deal with – we’ve never been able to transfer information so fast across such great distance. The problem is, we also don’t yet have an in-depth historical record of mistakes and failures for digital content delivery from which we can learn like we do with drug/health administration or graphic design and branding – services that have evolved over decades. Of course, we have learned some important facts about what does and doesn’t work online, like our beloved ‘splash-pages’, may they rest in peace. The fact is we learn to improve by failure and if digital content delivery is going to be the way we live our lives, the stakes will only continue to get higher as it affects everything we do; health, advertising and professional services all the way through to mining, forestry and agriculture.

User Experience design is the next logical step in our evolution to use the universal principles of design alongside whatever the current state of technology is to make things that fulfill our need to engage with digital content and, more importantly, each other in a useful and usable way. Call it what you like.