How Much Do Design Job Titles Really Matter?
We recently changed our titles from Visual Web Designers to UI Designers — here’s the back story.
This posting expresses the views and opinions of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yext and its affiliates, employees, officers, directors or representatives.
Yes, a job title matters — but it’s not everything.
First, let’s get one thing clear. While your job title as a designer holds meaning to you personally and maybe to the company you work for, it is not the only thing that should define your career goals and professional self-worth. With a lot of murkiness in how the design industry defines UX/UI responsibilities, there’s bound to be inconsistencies in how others perceive your title. Art Director at one company can be the equivalent of a Senior Designer at another. And UX Designer at one company can have a heavy skew towards UX Research while at another it can be a very visual role. I’m a firm believer that the activities someone actually does in their line of work matters more than the title they’re given — and that’s what good managers and recruiters will keep in mind when it comes to looking at candidates for promotion or hiring.
So what is a job title good for, anyway?
A job title can and should be unique to the skill set and level of expertise you have. Job titles are also important when benchmarking your team’s roles and responsibilities among those within similar roles at the company or within your industry. Job titles can also be helpful in conversations around benefits, compensation, perks, and so on (amirite, HR friends?). Like most companies, Yext uses an industry compensation benchmarking report whereby managers and HR teams work together to align a team’s roles to the nearest matching duties and responsibilities to roles specified in the report. It is important that managers frequently (as in annually) re-assess the match to ensure their roles are in alignment to the market compensation band.
How have the Yext Consulting Design team’s titles changed over the years?
The history of our team’s job titles started in 2014 when we called our individual contributors Visual Designers who were benchmarked under the role of Graphic Designers in the Radford report. After struggling to hire and retain designers at the compensation band we were offering, I met with our HR Comp team and reassessed our alignment to a better Radford role.
While not a perfect match, we identified more with the duties and responsibilities of UX Designers by their definition (and my experience working in the industry). From 2016 to late 2019, we called our team members Visual Web Designers to better account for the Web medium of our work and to signal to candidates looking to join us that we’re not looking for print-based designers (we were rejecting a lot of unqualified Web applicants at the time). During this period, we also took the opportunity to introduce some leveling into our job titles to reflect the budding career path on the team. Here is where we landed:
- Associate Visual Web Designer
- Visual Web Designer
- Senior Web Designer
- Design Lead
As our work changed from basic responsive Web designs and our team expanded, so did the nature of our jobs. In 2019 it was time for another shift. With a legit design system in place and a deepening overlap with our engineering co-workers, our roles had gotten increasingly technical. We were pulling in more duties requiring knowledge and practice of common UI patterns/UX Laws, expertise in WCAG accessibility, in-depth knowledge of Front-end development, and interaction design techniques. We needed titles that reflected our increasing value and responsibilities — both internally and externally.
How feedback from the team led us to the title of “UI Designer”
A job title can embody a sense of identity, pride, and even motivation for achievement in our careers. Let’s be real — who doesn’t want “Senior” or “Director” or “VP” in their title one day? It’s human nature to want to grow and progress.
While our roles and responsibilities aligned with the UX umbrella, the truth is, our current staff members self-identify as UI Designers given the work they are producing. Read more about what “UI” means to us in a post by our very own Kevin Schoenblum.
The role of UI Designer is also a respected role in the industry they feel proud to call themselves. And let’s face it, Visual Web Designer was quite a mouthful and rarely turned up in Google or job board searches. Our recent grad hires politely informed us that our ideal design candidates are likely searching for UI or UX designer titles on job boards and are missing our posting with “Visual Web Designer” in their searches, a definite red flag from a talent attraction standpoint!
When it came to retention, it was beneficial to adjust the titles to match the work and address possible attrition to roles titled UX/UI Designer (which admittedly tempted several team members prior to the title change). Luckily, I was able to show them how what they are doing is User Interface (UI) work within the UX umbrella to make them re-engage, but I wanted to make this title thing a non-issue.
Just as we did in 2016, we seized the opportunity to introduce title modifiers that reflected a more robust career journey for the current and projected team growth. These are our titles today:
Early Career:
- Associate UI Designer
- UI Designer
- Senior UI Designer
Mid-to Late Career:
- Staff UI Designer
- UI Design Manager
- Senior Staff Designer
- Senior Design Manager
- Principal Designer
- Design Director
- Senior Design Director
Notice the “Staff” and “Principal” titles in there? More on our unconventional split-track approach in a future post.
In Conclusion
Job titles are not to be taken lightly and require periodic reevaluation and adjustment to better align with the duties and responsibilities of your team. While you shouldn’t let your job title define your professional worth — your skills and responsibilities should do that — it can be meaningful to have a sense of pride and appreciation for the title you hold (or aspire to hold) at your company.
I’d love to hear more about what titles your company has and whether you feel they capture your duties and responsibilities accurately.
