One of the most confusing things about the field of User Experience is that there are no industry-defined roles / titles. For example, I’ve been doing a lot of the same kind of work for the last 20 years and my titles have included:
- Content Strategist
- UX Researcher
- Information Architect
- UX Architect
- UX Engineer
- UX Designer
Among the reasons that the naming conventions in UX have been slow in coming is because of the diversity of the field as well as the diversity of the people who are drawn to it.
As I mentioned last month, user experience professionals come from a number of different fields such as information science, computer science, education, art and design, psychology, anthropology, business and liberal arts. This is particularly true of the folks who entered the field at the dawn of the graphical user interface (GUI) and the graphical Internet. The popularity of the Web was triggered by the release of NCSA Mosaic in 1993. In the last ten years, we’ve seen a number of new programs targeted to those interested in the UX field—some as a part of existing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information Science or Psychology programs. Others are popping up as certificate programs.
By the late 1990s, a number of Internet consulting companies opened their doors, and many of them hired a variety of folks to staff positions like:
- Information architect—tasked with figuring out the information model and determining what kind of navigation would support the users’ ability to find what they were looking for. They were primarily responsible for what we know of as site maps.
- User Interface (UI) Designer—responsible for designing the interactions on the page (in the early days, there were not that many interactions, since the Web did not hold “state”). This position has morphed into that of Interaction Designer—the person responsible for making sure that the type of interaction designed suits the task at hand.
- Content Strategists—these were not only the journalists of the early web, they were the folks determining what kind of content needed to exist on a site and what the content should be called. The content strategists often worked with the Information Architects to create a site taxonomy and to make sure that the navigation labels made sense to the users.
- UX Research—sometimes called a Usability Engineer or Specialist, this person or team is responsible for conducting and facilitating all kinds of research involving users. In my role as a UX Researcher, I’ve conducted Voice of the Customer sessions, Usability tests, Site studies (where we go to company’s office and observe how the users use the products), Card Sorts, and many, many other quantitative and qualitative studies. The output from this research is best used when it enables the product teams to identify user problems or challenges and create innovative solutions to those problems.
- Visual Designers—are the artists of the digital world. These are the folks who create design patterns and visual grammar so that the users can recognize where they are on a site or in a program. They are responsible for creating a pleasing color palette along with icons, fonts, and any other visual element.
- Front-end Developers—are the programmers of the web. They take the work created by the rest of the team and render the pages so that the content presented can be linked to back-end databases and other technologies.
In the last few years, I’ve seen many positions open for UX Designers or UX Architects—the major umbrella terms. Even with the more generic names, the specific skill sets still exist. In the UX community we have always talked about companies that seek the Unicorn or Purple Squirrel—the elusive UXer who can do everything. And like the mythical unicorn, they rarely exist in practice. There may be some UX pros who have some talent in each of the skill sets, but rarely are they proficient at all of them.
As an example, I’ve been called a UX Architect, UX Engineer and UX Designer in the last few years, even though my areas of specialization include information architecture and UX Research.
There is value in having a team of UX professionals working on a product. UX practitioners are not ‘plug and play.’ To create great software, a product team needs a mix of UX practitioners on a project, to:
- Conduct research to better understand customer needs and pain points.
- Design and test the information space to make sure that they software presents the right information in the right place to accomplish the tasks at hand.
- Apply the optimal interaction types and options so as not to frustrate the user.
- Provide consistent patterns / designs / colors so that all of the software from CA looks like it comes from the same company and works the same way, much in the way that all of the programs in Microsoft Office use the same schema.
Including all of these practitioners in product development yields better products that our customers would be happy using.
The goal of any great UX team is to create effective, efficient, easy-to-use software that is flexible / configurable by the different users and that insure a great experience.
Previous UX Matters Posts:
UX Matters #3: What do we mean when we say UX?
UX Matters #2: Where did all of this user experience stuff come from?
UX Matters #1: Introducing WHY user experience matters at CA
Elisa Kaplan Miller is a Principal, UX Design and UX advocate at CA Technologies on the Central UX team. She is an enterprise UX thought-leader with focus on agile integration and other issues in the enterprise arena. A long time user advocate, she is passionate user-experience architect / user research specialist with broad experience in user experience research, content strategy, information architecture, and technical training. Her professional toolbox contains many techniques for conducting quantitative and qualitative research for better understanding users. For last 20 years, she has provided the strategic link between business, marketing and technology.