A couple of years ago, I was asked to speak about “design thinking” at a web conference. The conference-speaking part was nothing new, but the topic certainly was. With the “design thinking” wave having just recently peaked, I had yet to even come up with a clear definition of the term. So I accepted the challenge and went about the business of putting a wrapper around the idea so I could map it to our work as strategists and designers.

What I found was a bit of a joke. The few snake-like definitions I was able to charm out of the depths of the interweb with magical flute-playing were no better, no worse, and no different than definitions of “interaction design,” which were in turn no different than definitions of “problem solving,” which we as a species have been doing since the dawn of humanity. So what was the big deal about design thinking? Well, the big deal was that some designer douchebag decided one day to rebrand “user experience,” presumably to bring his agency a few new dollars. Leader of IDEO or not (I’m talking to you, Tim), rebranding a profession for no good reason is not a noble nod to semantic precision, but an exercise in self-importance.

Besides this, it bothered me that those among us who spend our time fighting the good design fights were acting like we had nothing better to do, as if the world would solve its own problems while we were over in the corner deciding what to call our particular brand of ice cream. And it was at this point that I decided I no longer gave a fuck.

It doesn’t matter one bit what you name the band, it matters how good the music is. The reputation you build around the name will outlive even the stupidest, most drunkenly attempts at a moniker cool enough to guarantee future rock god glory.

And most importantly, while we were all busy debating syllables and word pairs, the world at large caught onto the moniker we’ve been using all along. On a near-constant basis these days, the term “user experience” is used by people whose expertise is in raising kids, or selling insurance, or milling sugar. It’s used by people who have no business even knowing what “user experience” means. It appears in dinner table conversations. It appears in write-ups about apps, devices, and gadgets galore. It’s in magazines, on television, and online.

“User experience,” as a term, is weak, ineffective, and inaccurate. But although I am among the many in our profession who believe this sad title we’ve assigned ourselves becomes less potent with each utterance, I happen to also believe we should guard it with our proverbial lives. “User experience,” like it or not, has become a household name. And the best chance any of us has at legitimizing a profession that invariably begs further explanation and qualification is to make it as easily recognized and banal as “carpenter” and “motorcycle mechanic.”

“User experience” either is or isn’t the best term to serve as the concrete beneath our careers. And we either give a fuck or we don’t. It’s our choice.

Let’s stop talking about what it’s called and start solidifying the world’s understanding of it. Some people build cabinets. Some fix motorcycles. We design sites and apps. It doesn’t matter how we do it. It matters how easy it is to accept that it’s real, it matters, and is a sound career path to describe when you meet your girlfriend’s parents over Thanksgiving dinner.

Fuck title debates. “User experience” has momentum. Let it roll, and get back to work.

The wireframe people are designers who don’t design. They don’t make mental models, or do card sorts, or task analysis. They don’t write specs, and they certainly don’t do graphic design! They carefully do a collection of wireframes they then hand to “the designer” who hands it to the engineer. And the engineer, if he’s lucky, has a product manager who did all the interaction design work in the specs. And if he’s less lucky, he does it himself. No wonder many engineers view everyone except the graphic designer as essentially useless. Too often, they are. The wireframes people often call themselves user experience designers.

And forget stealing syllabi! Everywhere I looked classes taught Omnigraffle and touted the wonders of wireframes. No wonder the world was filling up with wireframe people.

So, to paraphrase the Grinch–who I was feeling like–“If I can’t find a user experience designer, I’ll make one instead!” I had a template in my mind of what I thought a user experience designer should look like. I had seen a new generation of designer I liked and hired every time I could.

They were medium-agnostic, code-fluent, and user-centered. They didn’t draw hard boundaries between information architecture and interaction design, and they flowed easily from task analysis into interface. When they did make wireframes, it was on whiteboards in conversations with engineers or as sketches in notebooks to clear their heads. I think of them as Mythic Designers because they would have been called unicorns by the specialists.

But even if these designers are rare, they do exist, just as family practice doctors still do in a world of cardiovascular surgeons and neurologists. These generalists do everything pretty darn well. They make good sites. They might not be the best people to call on if you had to build a Photoshop or a New York Times; complex interaction or massive content stores deserve the special skills of interaction design and information architecture. But if you are a startup, and you can hire one person, you want a real user experience designer. Just as when you don’t feel very good, you just want a doctor who can help.

But I was naive. You can’t make someone capable of designing a user’s experience in twelve weeks. I almost killed my poor students as I pressed five hours of lecture on interaction design into two, pounding them with conceptual models and use cases, activity-object models and task analysis. I knew I was teaching a foundations class and I would do nothing justice, but I kept trying. They wanted to learn Omnigraffle, I said no. They wanted to do wireframes, I told them wait. A student said, “I have never gone this long without designing anything,” and I despaired. They had designed task flows, use cases, site maps, conceptual models, and the basic social structure of their projects; and they thought they had designed nothing?

And then she said, “I’m so glad. We never get time to get our heads around our projects.”

And I got hope. I relented. My TA is going to run a workshop on Omni. I’ll teach them the fundamentals of interface design next week, in the guise of wireframes. Perhaps I’ll even start teaching them one way of doing something instead of three.

It has made me think that maybe the wireframe people wanted to do good design. And maybe they were given so little time to work, it was all they could do to choose between a multiple select list and radio buttons. And maybe they just needed to be taught some thinking tools and classic techniques. Perhaps what they really needed to be taught was to have faith in themselves, so they would demand the time it takes to make something worth making.

Ten years ago, they’d have been called web designers. In a sane world, we would have called them product designers. They chose their own name, user experience designers. And we old farts who have been designing forever need to help them, so they all can be called Mythic.