I used to have the job title of Information Architect and I loved it. Trouble was, no one knew what it was or what it meant or what I did.

I now work for a different company, doing similar work but my title is Content Editor. I’m simply a web person who knows all about content, usability, IA and stuff. I’m not bothered about the job title anymore – I’m more interested in people knowing that my skillset includes information architecture. Or, in their terms, that I can make it easy to find stuff on our website. As long as they know that they should consult me when they need my help (and they know when it’s time to ask for help) then I’m happy.

I never liked the term Web Designer (the, admittedly unambiguous, term that Nick Finck from digital Web Magazine (http://www.digital-web.com/) prefers to use – it throws up images of snowboarding, bleached-blonde-haired cool dudes who say “whoah” all the time. But I still design sites.

When people ask what I do, I tell them “I work on my company’s website, making it easy to use and interesting”. They understand that as it’s not too techy and it’s not too designery.

So, in my opinion, the biggest problem associated with our attempts to define and redefine our profession is that we risk alienating the people who should really be understanding what we are capable of doing. Our employers, our clients, our bosses and our colleagues must know what our job titles mean and what our skills can produce. If that doesn’t happen, we will all be sitting at home with cool job titles but no work.

What I find most valuable when I get together with a group of peers is focusing on the common struggle. Focusing on differences, definitions and labels only seems to confuse folks, or worse, alienate them.

“I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.”
- Dudley Field Malone

Lyle
Croc O’ Lyle

I think it is for something like this that I am striving for in my need for title. I want in one word to be able to convey to the largest layperson audience what it is I do.

Then within our little group we have specializations.

For the lay people I’m a user experience designer. For all you I’m an interaction designer.

Maybe this is how we should start thinking of ourselves. It’s like going back to school and saying I am an anthropology major with a concentration in culture & personality. (that’s what I was, btw). So I would say I’m a user experience designer who specializes in interaction design.

Another reason this title thing is important is b/c as Lou said one of the great duties ahead of us is branding. Never met a brand that didn’t have a name associated with it at some level. Yes the name might not be the primary focus of a brand, but since brand is so much influenced by person to person x-communication, that communication has to be in some language that can convey a lot of meaning in a short spurt of syllables. There are so few “Artists formerly known as Princes” out there who can make their symbol into a name (of course I still had to say AFKAP to let you know who I was talking about).

Well, no matter how annoying everyone else thinks it is, I do think that until we nail this thing that we do down somehow, even if it is a moving target we are going to have a hard time in the following areas:
selling ourselves
educating ourselves
organizing ourselves
And just doing our jobs day to day b/c of the lack of understanding that our peers have w/ what we do.

– dave

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“There have always been a lot of concern about the title for user experience professionals. I heartedly agree with your saying: who cares about the title? It’s important, however, that they CARE about what we can do and that they are certain that we can help them. If someone asks “what do you do”, “what is your job”, we’re dead if we answer with a generic description of our title. “I’m an usability professional”, “I’m an information architect” or whatever.”

“We should take a marketing approach when explaining what we do. We must explain the benefit we provide, so our listener really cares about what we do.”

“For example, instead of saying: “I’m an information architect” we could say “I help my company to save tons of resources in support calls” “I generate new leads and revenues for my customers via their websites”, etc.

“Their answer could be “how do you do that”, and then you could explain in more detail. They CARE now, do you see? I’ve tried this dozens of times and, believe me, it works, not only for promoting my business but when evangelizing within a organization I’m already working with.”

My question is this: Are these discussions *really* drawing off incredible amounts of energy that would actually be utilized more effectively if the discussions weren’t held? Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that participating in discussions via lists and weblogs *don’t* require lots of energy…especially compared to big ticket items like organizing conferences and setting up local network groups.

Given this, I think it’s more appropriate to view these discussions as more of a symptom than a cause. The state of UX/ED/IA/ID has some scary similarities to the California run-off election…every time you turn around, there’s a new candidate. And unfortunately, we don’t have a deadline by which one of them will emerge the winner!

Thanks for pointing out (as others have already done) and encouraging all to move on to focusing on issues more important than our titles!

I sympathise but disagree with both views.

When people start drawing their wagons together in this way they’ll have difficulty moving onwards.

The vexing thing is that we are too young as a profession to start defining ourselves so precisely. Should we yet dare to assume that this discipline is fully formed? Do a few conferences, some great discussion boards and one or two inspiring books make a vocation?

We’re still using big fat crayons to mark the blueprints others will follow in years to come. The explorations and discoveries we hopefully make, are the crayola of our working day.

Think about the auto industry when that was starting out, they must have had very similar dialogue…

“I build cars”
“No, you design motor vehicles”
“Actually you both create elegant transport solutions for horseless carriage manufacturers”

“OK, so what do the engineers do?”

I am another Information Architect who speaks my title with chagrin and wouldn’t miss it.

Louis, you are lacking a self-question that IMHO could be useful. It might be formulated like this:
“When you are seeking a job, what words do you look for?”
This might define the profession in terms of the other people, those willing to pay for the services.

Dave Heller lists some unambiguous jobs like for example “lawyer”.
Those profession names are unambiguous because their definitions settled after so many years.
Settled in the society, not in the professional associations or the ACM forums.
Anyway, “lawyer” is still ambiguous. It may be applied to a judge or a senator or a crow or so many other different flavours of the profession.

IMHO the professions Louis wrote about are specializations of a more general “systems design” profession. Hold on: I’ll try to explain.

Usability is not an option, period. You can’t build anything without usability at all.
Every development (web site, computer program, interactive device, you name it) has “usability”. High or low, it has one.

The same as some lawyers have started to consider human rights into their work, some systems developers are considering usability or IA or (you name it) into their designs.
It’s not that humans didn’t have rights before Carter, it’s that they didn’t have a name or were regarded as a given you shouldn’t care for.
The same for usability & co.
As I see it, it must be an integral part of the profession.
Then, we who care can specialize ad nauseam into our preferred facet.

JML

PD: I think that every user has an udeniable and natural right to operate programs in a humanly shape.
Really.