

Don’t stop calling yourself a UX designer – it’s working - primigenus
http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/08/dont-stop-calling-yourself-a-ux-designer-its-working/

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timr
_"If it’s becoming cool, then sure, you’ve got the hipster crowd who like to
go about saying they were designing UX before anyone had heard of it. That’s
great for those people. You know what? It’s even better for the rest of the
world because now people know there is such a thing as user experience
design."_

Uh huh. It also means that every no-talent, former "business guy" with a
strong opinion has latched on to the title, because they've realized that
declaring themselves a "UX designer" allows them to get hired into plum, boss-
everyone-around positions without having to go through the pain of learning
how to write code or actually do graphic design.

There are genuinely talented designers out there, but the many of the "cool"
kids who have glommed on to the movement in recent months have done little
more than read _The Design of Everyday Things_ , written opinionated blog
posts (on blogs designed by someone else) and gone to trendy parties. But
hey...it's great when there's a profession with vague/undefinable job
responsibilities and lots of authority over the product features -- you get to
take a disproportionate share of the credit, which makes that next UX Design
gig easier to get! Maybe you can even become a product manager!

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yuhong
Personally, I think the right position for this kind of people is Product
Manager in the first place anyway.

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timr
Heh. Personally, I think the right position for the kind of people I'm talking
about involves asking "do you want fries with that?" That's "product
management" too.

~~~
yuhong
I am particularly thinking of Steve Jobs. Of course, not all of them are as
good as Steve Jobs, but it proves the concept is not flawed.

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dmix
The day I stopped calling myself a UX Designer was when I attended a "UX"
meetup in Toronto. The extent of skill of every person there, who called
themselves UX Designers, was creating wireframes for corporate gigs.

They were the guys who handed off wireframes and stories to the photoshop
designers who handed it to the HTML/CSS coders.

I was hoping UX Designer would encapsulate someone who knew the full spectrum
of ux research/design/photoshop/html/css/marketing for building software.

But thats not the way it turned out.

~~~
OzzyB
^ this.

That is 100% my experience too, and it's complete bs imo.

Between the co-opting of "interactive designer", "web designer" and "ux
designer" I am just happy to call myself a developer now.

A developer who also knows a thing or too about design, and yes, user
experience too (duh! isn't that a given?)

I will do this until people realize that developers, in this web/app/tech
industry, are really the designers -- and it will happen one day :)

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nathanbarry
3-4 years ago I started to call myself a UX Designer because I wanted to
distinguish myself from the other designers I knew who did brochure websites,
or had just started a transition from print to web design.

I work almost exclusively on software design and UX design is the best term I
know of to sum up what I do.

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jordank
Interaction designer was previously the preferred title for many
designers...until it became completely co-opted.

I wouldn't get too attached to the title UX Designer either, since that term
will no doubt get diluted as well — but as the article states it does give
people something to grasp immediately.

