What's your job title?

Clearly, job titles aren't a lot of use in deciding on the skills needed for a UX team. I expanded on these thoughts in an article titled 'How to design like Leonardo da Vinci'.

Instructions for use: Choose a seniority from the first column (e.g. 'Lead'), add a practice orientation from the second column (e.g. 'User Experience') and finally choose a role orientation from the third column (e.g. 'Designer') to generate 882 different job titles in user experience.

UX Job Title Generator, version 1.
Seniority Practice
Orientation
Role
Orientation
Senior Usability Analyst
Junior User Centred Design Architect
Heavyweight User Experience (UX) Champion
Middleweight User Interface Consultant
Principal Human Factors Designer
Chief Visual Developer
Lead Content Director
Information Expert
Interaction Manager
Practitioner
Professional
Researcher
Specialist
Strategist

About the data

51 people on Twitter took the survey and listed 259 job titles. (If you took the survey for me, many thanks!) Many of the job titles were duplicates or near duplicates. I added some other seniority qualifiers (like 'Heavyweight' and 'Middleweight', though not, curiously, 'Lightweight') that I've seen in job advertisements. I also added some practice orientations that were missing from my list but I know exist in the real world (like 'User centred Design' and 'Human Factors' — the Twitterverse is obviously a biased sample).

Update

The UPA's 2011 annual salary survey (published August 15th, 2011) shows that the most common job titles in the field are "User Experience Practitioner", "Usability Professional", "User Researcher", "Experience Designer", "User Experience Manager", and "Interaction Designer". You can pretty much generate all of these from the table.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to John Knight (UX Architect at Head London and Editor of Usability News) for sharing his UX Competency presentation with me. The column titles are from his similar analysis of UX roles.

About the author

David Travis

Dr. David Travis (@userfocus) has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on user experience including Think Like a UX Researcher. If you like his articles, you might enjoy his free online user experience course.



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David Travis Dr. David Travis (@userfocus) has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on user experience including Think Like a UX Researcher.

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