Who, what, when… do we really know?

By Brooke McPherson

In a ‘non-scientific study’ in 2003 Challis Hodge did a simple Google search on known job titles within the User Experience (UE) design field. Not only was this interesting to me because of his exhaustive list of titles and roles, but because ‘Information Architect’ was fifth in the rankings.

This is interesting to me because I have read many articles such as David Heller‘s ‘Why I’m Not Calling Myself an Information Architect Anymore’ (2002), that have approached the topic of role title verses role responsibilities. Although these articles are relatively old for a young field like User Experience, I believe these issues have still not been resolved.

A major hurdle when looking for a job within the UE industry, is interpreting the difference between the role title and the actual responsibilities. Many jobseekers can spend a lot of time clarifying that ‘User Experience Designer’ actually means ‘Usability Consultant’ or that ‘Information Architect’ just means ‘Wireframe Monkey’.

The one thing that I noticed from my past experience, which is much larger than the title verses responsibility issue, was that some companies, agencies or consultancies that encompass these roles were not focussing on the bigger picture… User Centred Design.

User Centred Design should start from the very beginning of a project, regardless of whether an agency, a consultancy or the client is managing the project. The ISO 13407 (1999) states: “Human-centred design is an approach to interactive system development that focuses specifically on making systems usable. It is a multi-disciplinary activity.” As a multi-disciplinary activity, the project needs to have many specialists within these disciplines, this includes usability.

This brings me to my point which is quite simply; roles need to be clearly defined in order to understand where they fit within the multi-disciplinary activity that is User Centred Design.