Results for Most Preferred UX/UI Title Poll
Participants were asked to rank titles (prefixes and suffixes) in order of their preference. This doesn’t reflect current titles – this is preferred titles regardless of current titles.
- Surveys completed: 146 (hundreds of abandons)
- No data on participants (current titles, etc.) – anonymous ranking only without additional questions
- Request to take survey sent to: IxDA, Refresh, Agile-Usability, Facebook, Twitter
Results:
Prefix Rank (most preferred to least):
1. User Experience
2. Interaction
3. User Interface
4. Usability
5. Web
6. Other
Suffix Rank (most preferred to least):
1. Designer
2. Architect
3. Engineer
4. Developer
5. Other
Conclusion?
“User Experience” and “Designer” were the preferred terms, but not necessarily in conjunction. Although this doesn’t surprise me, I continue to question the long-term survival of “user experience” as a title term. To me it is so ambiguous that it is essentially meaningless, an opinion that is supported by its misunderstanding outside (and within) our circles.
These results have the perfect foundation to be the back-end data to a Dynamic, flash based "Title Generator". My preference so far: "Interaction Developer"… (which is a close second to "Other Designer")
I think that the reason UX is so popular is b/c it is an umbrella term and its fuzziness actually can be quite freeing. I do agree that it has become quite the meaningless term.
Hi Russell:
Starting at the point that every proffesion has a social role, I think it's a relevant issue try to define our proffesional title, specially to specify where are we participating in building our society.
We were speaking about this, when a collegue told us that JJ Garret has transcripted on his blog his speak at the ASIS&T IA Summit: http://jjg.net/ia/memphis/ (there are links to the audio and video files as well).
While I was reading the JJ Garret's post, I thought (once again) about the relevance of having an identity as we all work in the user experience field and how important is to discover a structure for a formal body of knowledge.
About your conclusions, in my opinion the term "user experience" implies a discipline but not a professional role or a title and that's the reason for its ambigous appereance.
For speaking about titles I would go deeper in some kind of tree or thesaurus where I see a place to more specific terms grouped in more specialized fields like multimedia design, multiplatform development, or mobile interfaces interactions…. I don't know it's just a start, maybe we would have to use our knowledge to make some information architecture "at home"
Thanks for sharing such a nice subject!
Best regards,
maria jose aguilar
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The UX Title survey results are in -What’s in a title name #UI? – http://bit.ly/19sgru
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
So what is your preferred or recommended title?
hundreds of abandons possibly because people didn't like the options. personally I prefer product designer or software designer. next time it might be good to let people type in an "other" field.
This field needs to make a decision as to whether it is an engineering field, or a visual and human interface design field. As a design practitioner, I really have no interest in being an engineer, coding, or being confused with those who do. They are independent fields of training and when mixed together into one person are done poorly in almost all cases.
Just as I do not seek a doctor who does my accounting, I would not seek an engineer who does design or a designer who engineers.
I think "User Interface" is a good term. Interaction is also good but no one outside of our field gets it (yet). When I was promoted to a VP position I was given the choice to customize my title and I chose "Product Design" because "User Experience" was just too nebulous. Also the other terms just don't seem to fit at higher levels… VP of Usability? VP of Interaction Design?
Nick, does that mean that people in our field should just design and not build? Do we stop at specs but not deliver any HTML/CSS? And if we deliver HTML/CSS (and maybe even Javascript or Flash) aren't we building/engineering at that point?
Preferred UX titles: http://bit.ly/lITgx
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
I dislike the terms 'Interaction' & 'User Experience' because they've been largely co-opted by the web design community to mean essentially anyone who creates the front-end. I see lots of job adverts that call for an experienced 'Interaction Architect' or 'UX designer', but contain a list of technical skills such as 'visio/axure' 'ajax' 'javascript/PHP/etc' but never 'usability testing' 'user research' or even 'product innnovation'! I conclude many people who call themselves by these titles have never actually met an end-user!
Interesting survey Russel – it seems that whatever title I use, I get a bemused look in response and end up qualifying it with something like "Essentially, I help people create products that are easy and enjoyable to use".
It would be interesting to survey people outside the field who have looked, or who may look in the near future, for people who provide user experience/interaction/usability services – what kind of titles do they go looking for when deciding who to approach?
And what do you do? Results for most preferred UX/UI title poll http://ow.ly/gbFx
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
I am looking for a job now, and I throw all of those titles out there to recruiters and hiring managers..typically changing my title depending on the job description between the three…, UX designer, Information architect, user interface designer, and now it seems that in this job market, employers are looking for all of these, plus graphic designer, software engineer, flash developer….I think we really need to make an industry push for a common title. I prefer User Interface Designer because it should encompass experience and IA, because the interface is the thing that provides experience through design and good IA.
Wendy – I completely agree. Very few people (other than us) have any idea what these titles really mean.
RT @russwilson Results for Most Preferred UX/UI Title Poll – Dexo Design – Russell Wilson’s Blog on UI Design and D… http://cli.gs/G7UPD
This comment was originally posted on Twitter