Comments on: Thoughts about IA’s role vs. title and the future of the UX group

By: p auL

p auL — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:02:53 +0000

Well, that was a typo. It should have read “skillet”, for certain.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:57:22 +0000

Hahaha – awesome!

By: Minoru

Minoru — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:37:49 +0000

Respond to my users’ needs — that’s what I do. Kathy, here you go:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3-Qpy7xpD0Y

By: Kathy

Kathy — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:26:07 +0000

Wow, I have absolutely no idea what you’re taking about. I was hoping for a post about your cats or another video of you playing Guitar Hero. Oh well.

By: Minoru

Minoru — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 21:36:08 +0000

We would all be able to better focus on our tasks at hand, if the titles truly didn’t matter. I wish that was the case, too. But the truth is, for a company of a certain size or bigger, titles need to clearly communicate what you do and where you are in the hierarchy. It may still not matter to the person who the title is attached to, but it matters to the outsiders, and the bigger a company gets, the more outsiders you’re dealing with.

And I’m trying to grapple with how to structure a team to meet the demands as well as to reflect the different things the folks who report to me are interested in. If and when there’s a delineation, I think it’s important to use titles to reflect that.

Finally, Paul — when I first read your comment, I thought you said that a company needs to put the same amount of value that goes with each “skillet.” Then I was disappointed to correctly read it as “skillset.” I think it’s a lot more fun to think of each of us as little eggs being fried in a nice skillet. Maybe there is some bacon, too. Hmmm, bacon. Now we’re talking value.

By: p auL

p auL — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:47:19 +0000

Titles always seemed a bit pointless to me in the first place. I know of plenty of designers, each with a very wide array of skillsets and desires where their careers should take them. There are designers that are plenty happy designing behind the scenes with little to no client contact, there are designers that want to be as client facing as possible, there are designers that want to manage teams, designers doing motion work, designers doing static work, even designers that program, (I’d consider myself a designer, but I’m pretty fluent in HTML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, etc – and I think many other ‘designers’ are as well).

I think we’re coming to find titles don’t really mean as much anymore – seems like they are only used to help a client get their head around ‘what is this person going to be doing on my project’.

It also starts to get murky, as you mention, with pay scale. I think the natural tendency is to assign higher pay to anything that is more client facing; it definitely needs to be a balancing act at any company to put the same amount of value that goes with each skillset.