Wolf’s Little Store

We sometimes have this debate over what our job titles really are, because we don’t have any. We’re a team of nine, ten, sometimes eleven persons and we build web sites. To sum the team roles up: a general manager, a project manager, a secretary, an information architect, two designers, four developers and the odd internship/summer job person.

Am I a graphic designer? A web designer? I don’t know. My boss prefers to call me an interaction designer; but I feel that kind of overspecifies a part of what I do. I spend more time doing the code part than the graphic design part; I like building interfaces for applications a lot more than brochure websites. I love writing and wording and making the interface invisible. But does that make me an interaction designer?

In the best days my work consists of building our CMS, digging through the Ruby of a trading application we’re building for a client to play the game of inches, or mocking up the design of an exciting project. Think newspaper design, a concert hall, something that you can relate to.

And in the worst periods my days consist of building those dreaded e-mail templates for companies that sell things I don’t care about, or for the wrong reasons. Building brochure-type websites with a strict deadline, only to notice six months later that the site still hasn’t gone live due to a lack of content.

So what is my job title? The A List Apart survey asks us the very same question I’m rattling about in question number 14. It then mentions 17 different possible job titles: everything from project management to development to art direction or design. One thing to note is that job title discussion is not about the job title alone, because, after all, you can call yourself anything: it’s mainly about defining what we do.

Jeffrey Zeldman says a lack of standardisation of job titles leads to a lack of respect for our profession.

Web designers get no respect. Imagine you’re on a plane and you start chatting with the person in the seat next to you. If you ask someone what they do and they say they’re an architect then you make some assumptions about them; that they’re educated and respected. You don’t get that when you tell someone you’re a web designer. Part of the problem is that there is no standardisation of job titles. We call ourselves lots of different things. If you’re working with Fortune 500 companies that use lots of baloney titles, you feel you need to make up baloney titles for your company too. If you’re at a university, someone might be called a Webmaster. If you’re at a startup, someone might be called a User Experience Director. But they’re probably doing the same thing. (Source)

This evening I came across this interesting interview with Ryan Singer from 37signals, explaining what a web designer actually does. Now, what he says doesn’t count for everyone: web design has many aspects. What he’s talking about is application design, which encompasses interface design, HCI/usability and interaction design. Like he says, “What should it do, how should it do it, what should the different screens be, how do you get from this screen to there…“.

You don’t have to live in Vi(m), nor do you have to be a Photoshop guru to be a great webdesigner. The tools are irrelevant, but the designer/developer relationship is important enough that to make the leap from good to great, a webdesigner has to have an interest in “developer” things. One shouldn’t be scared to try writing a bit of Javascript, diving into the view part of an MVC framework like Ruby on Rails or working with version control systems. I like to learn this kind of stuff as not to bother the developers with “easy” questions. After all, I wouldn’t want to kill their zone.

I guess there are many different kinds of web designers, just like there are many kinds of designers.

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