I am what I am

Elyse Sanchez, Wednesday, September 6, 2006 @ 8:51 am

In the Cubicle of the Unknown Consultant, there hangs a homily captured from a well-circulated e-mail:

You know you have a job in technology if you need a PowerPoint presentation to explain what you do for a living.

Generally, user experience designers try to maintain a slim but firm boundary between themselves and, well. . . you know. . . technogeeks. After all, we're there for the users, not the elegance of the code.

But the identity crisis--and the inability to describe our role concisely--is an issue we share in common. I used to be a college teacher. Little or no confusion there, and a limited questionnaire: What subject? Which college?

Then I became an Instructional Designer. That provoked a bit more conversation, but when I met other IDs, I felt that I knew, in general, what they did. And, after some preliminary explanations (no need for PowerPoint), so did clients.

Then I entered the world of user experience. My first job title was "Cognitive Engineer" (cue the Devo mix). The title sounded scientific, alluding back to UXD's evolution from physical ergonomics. Still, it gave folks virtually no idea of how I spent my working day, or what I could bring to the table. PowerPoint presentation v1 was born.

During the boom, user experience proliferated, drawing talented people from backgrounds related through tangential. In my experience, few colleagues came equipped with formal training in HCI; however, they did bring relevant skills. Some team members were wireframing virtuosos, some transitioned from a visual design background, and others could code as proficiently as they could design.

Client expectations therefore varied wildly: does a single person architect and provide visual design? Does a usability expert also do HTML? Titles began to proliferate, compounding the confusion: am I an IA? an Interaction Designer? a User Experience Designer? What's the difference? Or are they all the same? How do we define ourselves to each other, to our users, and to the people who may be interested in what we can do for their sites and applications?

We've evolved way beyond PowerPoint narratives--it's crucial for us to delineate roles and their core competencies while retaining the uniqueness and synergy of individual skill sets, or we will invent a (user-unfriendly) geekdom all our own.

user experience design

Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   It seems that your trackback url isn’t working (I couldn’t ping it with haloscan).

   Anyhow, I wrote a post linking to this article at:

   http://stupidapp.blogspot.com/2006/09/what-am-i.html

   Comment by Guy, Monday, September 11, 2006 @ 2:22 pm

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