User experience, product design, service design, information architecture, human computer interaction, interaction design, information design, interface design, etc. etc. is suffering from a taxonomy problem. There is not only internal disagreement about job titles, specializations, responsibilities, and levels, but it’s spilled out to the point that the people we work with, including sometimes our non-design managers, struggle to understand our focus — and as a consequence our value. I’ve had people I work with ask me what UX stands for more than once (it’s User eXperience for any nondesigners reading this), and I can only agree that the X is confusing (I usually quip that Xes are cooler than Es).
This confusion has spilled over into a lot of other areas beyond job titles and shows no signs of stopping. Take the word “wireframe” for example. Some people use this word to describe a plan for a webpage or feature that lies somewhere between a sketch and a detailed, finished specification, one that generally lacks most or all color and detail but still gives enough information to communicate the basic function. Other people will use it to describe all of the above: a sketch, a highly detailed and finalized drawing, and everything in between. Instead they might distinguishing between a static drawing ( = wireframe) and one with some level of interaction (a prototype). Others use the word “mockup” to describe a highly detailed drawing whether static or interactive. None of these is right or wrong and you could debate all week about the cutoffs for each category, but the fact that it’s all a muddle is a problem — words matter for setting expectations, for explaining, in short for communication. And when we as a profession are inconsistent with our vocabulary it not only makes our own lives difficult, it also makes life harder for the people we work with to understand and speak about our work. In other words we’ve got a mess on our hands.
When it comes to the profession as a whole, it’s understandable that things are a bit unsettled — it’s still a very young profession in the grand scheme of things! But it’s ironic that in a field that includes information architecture we don’t seem to have made any serious efforts towards a shared taxonomy or controlled vocabulary. It’s a worthwhile endeavor! Not because we need to nail down every last detail of what to call everything, but because we need some kind of basic framework to communicate our work and its value. How do we explain our work in a nutshell?
A lot of the confusion has legitimately arisen from these rapid changes we’re constantly navigating. The adoption of term “product design” for example, seems to have been driven by the rapid growth of companies in Silicon Valley looking for people to do something quite different from the brand design-focused websites that had come before. And the way a website was designed in the ‘90s is very different from the way a complex online software product is designed today, so it makes sense that we might want different words to describe them. Even focusing just on current design, the work of designing a splashy landing page for, say, a national brand of peanut butter, requires a different set of skills than designing online accounting software.
But while some of the shifting sands have come from people honestly trying to differentiate the work they’re expecting (like in a job listing), I think far too much comes from consultants trying to make a quick buck with a shiny new method that is really nothing new, just a new name tacked on a slight variation of something that’s already in use. However it came about, how do we change it? How do we tidy up our taxonomy? Is Marke Kondo available?
I think a good first step is to resituate design for computers and the internet into the larger, slightly more settled world of design as a whole. If we could get more broadly educated about how other kinds of designers face similar problems of documentation, collaboration, and fabrication among other things we might get a bit more grounded. As a former architect, of course I think architecture has a lot to teach us, but landscape design, urban design, industrial design, fashion design, package design, book design, and others do as well. I also personally think we may have leaned too heavily on our antecedents in graphic design, particularly advertising. There’s a wide world of design out there ready to inspire.
But then how to move forward and connect that exploration with practical results like clearer, more uniform job titles? The only way I can see is by coming together. Could we have a massive, asynchronous, online conference to develop a taxonomy? An organization with committees and processes to adopt changes? Or what about a controlled guild with regulations or even laws based on fiduciary responsibilities and safety à la architecture and engineering? There are a lot of options, but one way or another we need to make a plan to get together and clean up the mess before it overtakes us entirely.