How Not knowing UX Roles Makes You A Rookie
User Experience is a very broad term which permeates the confusion not only to its job titles but the entire profession itself. There are many dimensions to a career in the user experience industry and all of them are deeply rooted in the user empathy which helps the designer to shape up those experiences. The Design and Experience are two very misunderstood terms within this closed circle due to the astounding number of job titles which are ambiguous, unclear and overlapping and are sometimes meaningless. If you are a user experience design enthusiast and have done a quick job search the odds are you have come across a variety of jobs titles, a description that is as simple as “User Experience Designer”.
How not knowing different UX Role makes you a rookie while seeking for a job in UX. In this article, I will steer you through different job titles that are available in the market that will help you decide which specialization of UX fits for your interest and skill set.
UX Designer: The most general or widely accepted job title in the industry is UX Designer, It usually means these people are involved in researching, prototypes, user testing, strategy. UX Designer thinks from business requirements either coming from the marketing teams or business teams and product owner. They need to care about the users they test their prototype with and obviously, they are the ones creating prototypes. They will be working on desktop software, web application, and various other cloud solutions and so their skill set is very broad and differs from company to company and teams to teams.
UI Designer: UI designers are the ones who will be working particularly on screens, screen interactions across various devices viz-a-viz desktop, tablet, and mobile of different sizes and shapes. The UI design is a combination of visual design with user interfaces. They will also be working with color palette, Typography and layout everything that relates to visual designs. Many UI Designers also have UX Skills, sometimes they will be working on UX architecture and usability testing. Few of the job roles offered in the market are UI/UX Designer which means they are typically involved in both UI and UX design but most times it means visual design so as not to isolate UX design.
Interaction Designer: A slightly less common job title in the Industry is an Interaction Designer or IXD. Often people like this have a traditional background of human-computer interaction. They know a lot about ergonomics, usability or all about the user interactions with a program or website on different devices. They will be optimizing the interface to be as much as usable on desktop as on mobile devices. They would do a lot of usability testing to find issues or see which tasks take a lot of time to optimize the interaction. They focus on all of the small interaction on the whole flow of user using the application so that experience is consistent and usability remains across all of the devices. For Example, when you open a youtube in the desktop application, the functionality and the way you interact with it remain the same as on a tablet.
User Researcher: Research is an important process of any design project, The people who do the process of user research are termed as User Researcher or UX Researcher or Design Research depending on the focus of their work. They usually focus on being an advocate for the user in any company. They conduct user interviews, write surveys, work with analytical data and conduct workshops to report all the insights they have uncovered as a part of the research process. Many design-centric companies have these roles to share the load between UX Designers and UX Researchers so that each one of them can focus on their domains viz-a-viz design and research respectively. User research would spend typically the first couple of weeks in a project on research by visiting the field, understanding actual clients problem and then create reports to be handed over to UX designer to solve a design problem.
For Example, A user researcher working on a banking project would goto bank and interview bank employees, customers and try to understand their problem and relate to the main design problem which the team is tackling.
Information Architect: There are a lot of companies that have nested structures of information on their website and they need somebody to help them design the ways of this information to be searched for and browsed. The information architect is the people who are specialized in designing aspects to organize the content on the website in a structured manner for users to easily browse through and search for. For Example in an eCommerce company like Amazon, Information Architect work on categories like how the products are organized into categories, sub-categories, how can a user search for this information easily and what information is crucial to find. Sometimes they have a traditional background and few people who work as a UX designer transition to Information Architect role due to their self-interest.
Content Designer: the content designer is the role who is responsible for designing the content structure. They are not only responsible for organizing different pieces of content together but also work on a particular piece of information which might have text, image, and video to make them intuitive, organized and readable. These people share similar competencies to that of traditional UX designer but these folks focus mostly on making the content understandable for the common users. For Example in a diverse society like the USA, UK, and India where citizens are not proficient in English, The government service website should have content very much intuitive, clear and in simple plain English. Content designers help to take care of such actions whenever new content is added, modified to test all over again.
In general, all UX designers work in two kinds of environments i.e Agency side and In house UX teams.
What might work for some people might work for other people and it’s up to each such individual to choose the role that best suit their mindset and skill set. We hope this article has given you some interesting insights into different kind of UX roles which are currently popular in the UX design industry.
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