Why design job titles change

To design software, you need plans. And you need to know how to deviate from them. Many strategists have expressed this idea in different ways — Eisenhower is surely the most famous to have done so. The details of a plan conceived years before a critical event are often incorrect. But the planning process, the one that led to this plan, requires exploring options and contingencies. The knowledge acquired during this exploration is crucial for choosing the best options as events unfold.

The software project is no exception to this rule. Several methods have succeeded each other to try to master the chaos of software creation. For several years, the agile development method has been the most popular. However, where this methodology is effective for breaking down development work and providing progress indicators to managers, it often struggles to prioritize benefits for the end user. The method produces process rather than results. It’s precisely in this gap, this purely tactical zone, the one located between planning and delivery, that most of the designer’s action takes place.

Yet the designer doesn’t write the user stories for POs. They don’t help decision-makers know when to put money in, and at what moment. They don’t help software architects design the data model.

Or rather yes, but not directly. Because without them always realizing it, project participants see information connecting, problems factoring, developers and POs understanding each other. The data model takes business issues into account. While everyone understands each other better, development times are reduced. Then, users end up having something in their hands that suits them. They don’t always verbalize it, by the way. But if you look in the right places, you notice it: the number of support tickets drops. Task completion time decreases. Other things, harder to measure, improve: users’ cognitive load, caused by poorly designed software, is reduced. When you look more closely, a designer is always present in these processes. They understood the issues, aligned participants, gave form to ideas, documented, explained, improved.

This position, a bit inside, a bit outside, is sometimes misunderstood. It’s perhaps this constant difficulty in positioning a designer in an organization that explains the successive name changes to designate them, in the digital industry: web designer, interaction designer, service designer, user experience designer, customer experience designer, UX/UI designer, visual designer, product designer, growth designer… These titles have had more or less popularity in recent years. They always try to circumscribe the action of the one who gives form to what is in the heads of each project participant. To allow these ideas to become a product, which solves real problems for real users.

So, here are my proposals for the future: resolution enhancer, scout, connection expert, linker-synthesizer, scout-facilitator, sequencer, perspective setter. Designers’ names change with technological and organizational evolutions. With the massive arrival of AI-based tools, this process will probably continue, and the designer’s role will mutate. As it always has.