Last week, Jesse James Garrett gave the closing plenary speech at the Information Architecture Summit. At one point in the speech, he refers to the ongoing struggle in the UX community about definitions, boundaries and in-fighting between the many groups that form the UX community (mainly IAI and IxDA). This struggle has been evident on the message boards of these communities. One consistent point of contention in these discussions seems to be the disagreement on what our job titles should be.

Some say “you cannot design an experience”, therefore the title “User Experience Designer” is invalid and should not be used. Job titles such as “Information Architect” and “Interaction Designer” define two different yet related sets of activities, all under a single umbrella typically known as “User Experience”. Garrett contends that “There are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers,” and hints that the community should quit fighting about what we call ourselves and move on with designing and creating great products.

I, for one, am less concerned with the accurate semantics of what we call ourselves. “Industrial Design” isn’t concerned with designing “industries”, yet you don’t hear the industrial design community complaining about the semantic meaning of their title. Yet, the craft of industrial design has been around for around 100 years and is a well established discipline in the design of products. The title “User Experience Design” has been around less than 15 years, and her young age is showing in the contentious dialog we maintain among ourselves. Continuing the discussion, despite its often heated tone, is a good thing as it helps the community to define what we do.

Still, the marketing of our profession to businesses is suffering because of our lack of unified terms to label what we do. Because of the nature of our work, we DO get caught up in semantics and meaning of words. Yet, this can be detrimental in the long runs as it clouds the message we send to other about what exactly we do in the process creating products and services.

I am more concerned with how our profession is perceived by others. I believe we should decide upon a unified title for our profession and stick with it. “User Experience Designer” seems to be the term that most people outside of our profession recognize. Even if we cannot “design an experience”, we certainly are in the “user experience” business, and our designs do have an influence on what that experience will be.

I think it is more important that we have a recognizable title that represents the broad set of skills and specialties that encompass our profession. While we may do interaction design, information architecture, usability assessment, etc., “User Experience Designer” should be our branding. It is the name in which others recognize what we do. We should probably embrace it. The activities we perform under that title will obviously grow and change over time, and we should focus our efforts on continually creating and refining our craft. Yet, we should probably cease continually creating and refining our title.

Please read the transcript of Jesse’s plenary:   http://jjg.net/ia/memphis/