The recent events gave some thoughts to digest. For example, who is a designer, actually? Some of the UX people tend to call themselves (including me) UX Consultants, UX architects or UX managers. It happened in the end that we all do similar tasks, struggle similar battles and face similar challenges. If you are not sure if you should call yourself a designer, ask yourself the following questions.
Are you working on a certain product or process development?
It could be a mobile app, a web portal or a checkout process. These are the things that should be properly designed and I can’t imagine questioning some assumptions during the talks from all the interested parties. All of the people in the room discussing the problem are actually taking part in a design process.
Have you ever tried to improve your product?
If not, then you are probably from Finance department ;) but seriously, you are supposedly working on it constantly. And it doesn’t need to be about visual appearance or task completion diagrams. If you made the app performance better you took part in getting user experience smoother and more friendly. This is product design in the purest form.
Do you question the current reality?
Are you 100% happy bout your work? Is there anything that could be done better? If you answered No then Yes, you think like a proper designer. There is always a room for improvements and they pursue it.
Do you draw or doodle?
And we came to the hard part. “I am not a designer, I can’t draw a single straight line with a pencil.” Don’t worry, me neither. But designing is not only about providing elegant solutions. It’s more about ideation, making things useful and last but not least, making things simple.
So let’s make this simple and just call ourselves UX Designers.
