In LinkedIn, I will often see someone ask what is the better UX or UI design. Something like this:
This drives me crazy. In my B2B design world, this is a meaningless detail that doesn’t make any difference. This is B2C mobile design and they don’t do what I do, and I don’t do what they do. We have radically different jobs.
I think there are too many people in the world calling themselves designers and we are confusing the hell out of everyone else. People don’t understand our skills and are blurring the lines between different fields. Just look at this incomplete list:
- Graphic Design
- Design Systems
- Service Design
- B2C Design
- Mobile Design
- Game Design
- E-Commerce Design
- Software Design (Desktop, Mobile, Web)
- Website Design (Marketing)
- Information Architecture
- User Interface Design
- User Experience Design
And this doesn’t even cover engineers who design the system or DBAs who design schemas. It also doesn’t cover any researchers, copy writers, documentation writers, or other people who affect the overall offering of some product/service. No wonder people are confused about what design is.
Doctors have specific fields and people understand them generally. A pediatrician and a podiatrist are understood to work on different things. Unless you specialize in children’s feet; Pediatric Podiatrist maybe?
Words are the hardest thing. They are the source of all of our glory and all of our misery. There is no solution, only a never-ending series of misunderstandings, manipulations, and mis-alignments.
Again, no lesson here. I was just annoyed looking at LinkedIn and had a few minutes to blog.
Whatya think?