Remove the term “UX” from “UX Designer” role
Discussion started at https://gitlab.slack.com/archives/C03MSG8B7/p1520854807000113?thread_ts=1520854576.000202&cid=C03MSG8B7. Naming things is hard. Job titles are a part of that.
Problems
- Everyone is responsible and influences the user experience
@pedroms: Like performance, user experience professionals are not alone, and user experience is the responsibility of everyone in the company. From marketing to deployment. — https://overcast.fm/+MG_PT7Auc/2:03
@edjdev: Performance I think is everybody's responsibility--and continuous delivery will create a tight feedback loop here--so I'm not in favor of specific people identified as performance specialists. — https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/3139#note_45659723
A change in the user experience may also change the performance (measured or perceived) and vice-versa.
- UX Designer may communicate only a subset of what we do
Recently, a lot of candidates for the “UX Designer” role perceived it as dealing with diagrammatic user flows opposed to based on pixels, wireframes instead of mockups, and user research. They thought they would focus more on high-level design decisions and wouldn't be very concerned with pixel-level detail.
- UX label
Adding the UX label to an issue/MR makes it look like the UX is contained and owned by some people. We often see people saying “We need UX on this issue” like UX is a coat of paint. Would it make sense for an engineer to say “When I need my code to be performant I call the Performance team”?
Proposal
- Rename the “UX Designer” role to “Product Designer”
- Read this explanation and also this one.
- It places these people closer to “Product Managers” — two sides of the same brain metaphor.
- They would still be the strongest user advocates and evangelize good UX.
- Keep the “UX Researchers” title
- This still holds as they are focused on researching the whole UX.
Questions
- Does the “UX Manager” title still make sense? Or should it be renamed to “Design and Research Manager”?
- It makes some sense to keep it, to communicate that someone oversees everything affecting the UX and makes the final decisions on what affects the UX.
- Why do these roles belong to the “Engineering” function? Shouldn't they belong to the “Product” function?