Job hunting can sometimes feel about as precarious as dating. Not only is there a great deal of timing involved with the right position being available at the right time, both parties need to be clear about what they’re looking for to make sure they’ll be a good fit.

In the next few posts, I want to discuss some observations I’ve had as a designer looking for a position in today’s market. While I expected to run into difficulties and delays due to rougher economic times, there were other difficulties I have come across that have nothing to do with the economy. Job hunting is difficult no matter what your role, but it can be even worse in a confusing industry that’s still in the process of inventing itself.

The first difficulty I’ve run into is with the terms we use to describe the subtle and nuanced differences in job roles designers can focus on. With all the terms, jargon, and buzzwords in the industry, misconceptions arise that can make it difficult to be sure everyone’s talking about the same thing. The same term can mean different things to almost everyone who hears it, requiring other terms to clarify and narrow which exact definition we mean.

So we end up with buzzword soup. Our resumes are peppered with keywords. We want to make sure we get them all in. Or when searching a job board for the right job, we conduct our search using a multitude of terms. We get way more results than we should, and end up having to scan through job descriptions we know won’t be a good fit.

Web Designer

I’ve always been partial to using web designer. I’m a designer who focuses primarily on designing things for the web. When people outside of the industry ask me what I do, “web designer” is usually satisfactory.

But when talking with people in my field, web designer has connotations that don’t specifically address the kind of position I’m looking for. In my experience, people in the web design industry view the term web designer as someone who is primarily concerned with the creation of Photoshop layouts, and then the slicing and optimization of those layouts for use in HTML and CSS coding, and then, often, the front-end development of those layouts into browser-rendered sites.

While web designer may seem very broad, it seems it has come to mean something very specific, which is only a part of the design process, and not actually the part I want to focus on. While I am capable of doing all those parts of the process, I focus on the area of design leading up to and including the creation of Photoshop mockups, and not so much the production and development work of creating the working site.

Interaction Designer

I’ve never referred to myself as an interaction designer, but do list Interaction Design as a service I offer. In my experience, interaction designers cover those parts of the design process leading up to the Photoshop mockup stage. This includes Information Architecture (site maps, content inventory) creating user flows, use case analysis, developing wireframes, and interaction specifications. I have experience with all these areas, but this is not my sole area of focus.

To call myself an interaction designer would leave out the visual design work that I do, and it would also imply that I focus more on these areas than someone who does work primarily as an interaction designer would do. In other words, someone who focuses primarily on Interaction Design would exhibit much more depth in these areas, where I use these parts of the design process to add breadth, informing and enriching my overall design work.

Interface Designer

I’ve been leaning more towards using interface designer, or UI designer, to describe what I do more and more. To me, the difference between a web designer and an interface designer is the addition of Interaction Design work, with a focus on software or web applications. I don’t think you can successfully design an interface without going through the Interaction Design process, but the term interface designer still speaks to a focus on the visual design.

Unfortunately, it seems there is a fairly common view that Interface Design is just visual design, with a focus on software interfaces, so it doesn’t work for all situations. I end up using Interface/Interaction Design to be perfectly clear, which is a mouthful.

User Experience Designer

Most often, I use the term user experience designer. To me, this term best encompasses the entire design process that I focus on, from Information Architecture, Interaction Design, to Visual Design, with no implications about doing any front-end development work, and a slight emphasis towards design for software and web applications (given by the “user” part of the title.)

I have run into a couple of hiccups with this approach. One stems from the buzz that the term User Experience has gotten over the last few years. Everyone is using the term, it’s the hot element companies are looking for, and as a result, many people throw the term around without really understanding what it means. To show that you’re not just talking the talk, it seems you have to throw in explanations or keywords to describe exactly what it is you mean when you use the term, which starts making the term useless.

The other is a misconception I keep running into that UX Design is Usability Research. I am a designer, I benefit from the results of Usability Research, but I am not a professionally trained scientist. While many UX designers perform usability studies to help inform their design process, they are primarily designers. Yes, we focus on designing usable experiences, I can’t think of a reason anyone would want to design something that was difficult to use. So yes, considering usability is going to make your design work stronger. But that doesn’t make UX Design synonymous with Usability Research.

Designer

My next experiment may well be to just call myself a designer. What I really want to emphasize is my ability to solve problems. Currently, I happen to enjoy using that ability to make complicated web applications easier and more enjoyable to use, because I’m excited about these things and have experience working with them. But whether you’re designing a blog, or a software interface, or a game, your process is the same. That’s design.

Unfortunately, too many people think design is just decoration. We again have one word with many meanings. We’re back to reading the entire job description to figure out exactly what it is we’re expected to do.

So that’s the first difficulty I ran into. What do I call myself, and what are people looking to hire someone with my experience and skills going to want to call me? With all the misconceptions about the various terms, it all comes down to the job description, which is going to be the topic of my next post.