Towards New Roles on the Design Team. How Fancy Titles Rob Design of its Value.

6 min readMay 27, 2017

Information architect, usability engineer, interaction designer, ui designer, ux designer, motion designer, prototyper… these are just some of the job titles that us designers have taken on in recent years.

Each one was supposed to clarify a particular part of the design process. Each one eventually mashed with other roles, creating more confusion in our industry.

Dozens of titles create blurry lines. Designers need to do a better job at self-architecting our roles.

In the past decade, I’ve been called information architect, usability professional, interaction designer, and UX designer. These days, I feel much more comfortable with design technology and design operations (check out my cycle on design systems). It’s hard to pick one precise title encapsulating all of these, so typically when people ask what I do, I just say that ‘I’m a designer’.

The problem with design-related titles is not only about the communication of what we do though. It’s about building impactful team structures, hiring the right people, planning career growth and elevating our industry to new highs.

The never ending challenge for designers: defining and structuring design itself.

Convergence and Divergence — the Vicious Cycle of Design Roles

The problem of defining design roles is not new. We either converge a whole design practice into one title or diverge it into dozens of roles.

I’m old enough to remember when design and code where all managed by a single person — a web professional, usually called a webmaster (oh sweet youth). Once the web started to grow and professionalize, webmasters split into multiple specializations that later converged into a singular title (typically ‘UX Designer’, which not always corresponded with the way Don Norman defined UX Design back at Apple), only to be split again, converged again, etc.

It’s hard to say where we’re at in the cycle today. We hear more and more about the ‘Full-Stack’ Designers and ‘Design Unicorns’, so perhaps we’re just entering the state of convergence. Time will tell.

Regardless, we should break this vicious cycle. It’s making scaling design hard. It messes with the understanding of the space and career plans of junior designers. It often makes teams structures planned around trends rather than responsibilities.

It makes the design industry look… poorly designed.

Design Is Not One

When we’re in the state of convergence, we’re trying to simplify the entire practice of design with a single role. When we’re in the state of divergence, we’re trying to spread the complexity of design across multiple roles.

And that’s good.

Design is not one. Design is not unified. Design is as rich as human problems, reactions and behaviors are.

To break out of the vicious cycle, we have to get to the foundation of design, which is strongly set in the results of our work. Results shouldn’t be confused with deliverables. Rather than listing journey maps, reports, wireframes and prototypes, we should try to describe the value that us designers deliver.

Think about Responsibilities

By observing the careers of myself, my direct reports, and people I’ve mentored, I’ve concluded we all deliver four areas of value:

Product strategy — the understanding of how a product can answer the problems and needs of people in a target group.
Product interface and behavior- ensuring the product strategy comes to life in the medium and method of interaction.
Design technology — the technological representation of the the interface. The code responsible for rendering user interface and its operationalization that allows for a continuous scaling without losing design consistency.
Understanding of humans — The continuous research, analysis and ethics of design (which are still not being discussed enough!)

In digital product development, these four areas combine into the user experience. Which is why we often call ourselves user experience designers.

Rarely are we able to master all four of these areas equally. Each one covers a vast area of knowledge. Each one requires significant time and passion.

There’s no one combination of these areas that would make you an ideal designer. You have to follow your passions and join a team that needs what you can offer.

The key is to find a team that needs your specific configuration of skills. You have to complement the other designers on the team.

All four areas become individual responsibilities. As a designer you can take responsibility for:

Product strategy
Design execution
Design operations and technology
Control over the human centric aspects of design (research and ethics)

The parts of design and the these responsibilities are not exact matches. While interaction design focuses the execution and turns strategy into a tangible experience, it must include a significant degree of strategic thinking and prioritization of users.

All the responsibilities are connected. But the stress falls at different areas.

Choose who you want to be

Why is this approach is useful? It lets us describe our skills without referring to new, and likely unnecessary, titles.

Using the four design areas we can rank our comfort with each one of them and our passion towards them. The way I like to think about them is through the prism of a question:

‘How many designers do I know are better at this particular part of the design practice than I am?’

Answering this question requires a significant level of self-awareness and intellectual honesty. Finding the true answer isn’t easy, but brings clarity to our career path and role on the team.

You can’t code? So what. If you’re passionate about the product strategy and the human-centric nature of design, you probably won’t need to. You just need to find a team that needs this skillset.

On the other hand, if you want to excel at design operations and design technology, you better start coding.

Trends shouldn’t affect your career path as a designer. Choose who you want to be. Be the best at it. Find a team that benefits from that.

Here’s an example of a profile of a designer experienced in product strategy, knowledgeable about design technology (who can probably can code well), and decently skilled in UI design. Research is probably not her strength.

Judging by the level of expertise, she’s probably a senior practitioner who could be great at a Design Operations team, or leading products or teams. Instead of just calling herself a ‘full stack designer’, she could just say ‘I’m a UX practitioner who can create a product strategy and translate that into the right interface and technology to drive business results.’.

I’d argue that this description tells hiring managers much more about her abilities than a fancy title.

Here’s another example:

This designer doesn’t feel passionate about code, but definitely excels at the human-centric part of the design process. She would like enjoy a design role focused on research and strategy.

Again there’s no need for a new title. She’s a designer who specializes in conducting the right user research to inform product strategy.

Being like programmers

This simple system avoids the ocean of titles by just focusing on the responsibilities and passion of designers.

It reminds me of programmers, who often don’t need multiple titles. They tend to emphasize the languages and technologies they feel passionate about and are comfortable with. This clarity helps them shape the right expectations of their managers and colleagues.

And that’s exactly what design needs in order to scale. Clarity.

And if you’re interested in the problem of scaling design and development, here are my thoughts and experiences: