A few things struck me when I looked through the Information Architecture Institute Salary Survey, 2009 recently: there are a lot of different names (User Experience Planner/Designer/Architect, Information Architect, or Interaction Designer/Architect being the most popular) to describe roughly the same set of tasks/skills (Wireframing/Sitemaps/Process flows, Interaction design, and Audience definitions/Persona development being the most common).

I wish they’d gone a step further and mapped specific tasks/skills to each job title since there’s to be a lot of confusion as to what the difference is between an IA or an ID, or and UXD. The activities outlined in the Wikipedia definition of user experience design – for example – could easily apply to any of the above.

I think it also would have been worth while to have respondents indicate the environment they work in (interactive agency, consulting company or inhouse design team) and their primary focus (micro-sites, web sites, web apps, software or hardware development). The later particularly would have done more to distinguish the respondents than some highfalutin job titles.

The two pieces of data I’m referring to (below) and the survey results:

4. Which of the following job titles best represents your current position?

12. How much your time do you spend on these tasks:

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 1:27 pm and is filed under Design. Both comments and pings are currently closed.