The UX Job Title Generator

What's your job title?

— David Travis, April 1st, 2011 (updated August 25th, 2011)

I asked people on Twitter who work in user experience roles to complete a short survey on job titles in the field.

Based on the results (and some other data kindly provided by John Knight), I proudly present the UX Job Title Generator.

Clearly, job titles aren't a lot of use in deciding on the skills needed for a UX team. I expanded on these thoughts in an article titled 'How to design like Leonardo da Vinci'.

Instructions for use: Choose a seniority from the first column (e.g. 'Lead'), add a practice orientation from the second column (e.g. 'User Experience') and finally choose a role orientation from the third column (e.g. 'Designer') to generate 882 different job titles in user experience.

UX Job Title Generator, version 1.

Seniority	Practice Orientation	Role Orientation
Senior	Usability	Analyst
Junior	User Centred Design	Architect
Heavyweight	User Experience (UX)	Champion
Middleweight	User Interface	Consultant
Principal	Human Factors	Designer
Chief	Visual	Developer
Lead	Content	Director
	Information	Expert
	Interaction	Manager
		Practitioner
		Professional
		Researcher
		Specialist
		Strategist

About the data

51 people on Twitter took the survey and listed 259 job titles. (If you took the survey for me, many thanks!) Many of the job titles were duplicates or near duplicates. I added some other seniority qualifiers (like 'Heavyweight' and 'Middleweight', though not, curiously, 'Lightweight') that I've seen in job advertisements. I also added some practice orientations that were missing from my list but I know exist in the real world (like 'User centred Design' and 'Human Factors' — the Twitterverse is obviously a biased sample).

Update

The UPA's 2011 annual salary survey (published August 15th, 2011) shows that the most common job titles in the field are "User Experience Practitioner", "Usability Professional", "User Researcher", "Experience Designer", "User Experience Manager", and "Interaction Designer". You can pretty much generate all of these from the table.

Acknowledgement

Many thanks to John Knight (UX Architect at Head London and Editor of Usability News) for sharing his UX Competency presentation with me. The column titles are from his similar analysis of UX roles.

About the author

Dr. David Travis (@userfocus on Twitter) holds a BSc and a PhD in Psychology and he is a Chartered Psychologist. He has worked in the fields of human factors, usability and user centred design since 1989 and he has published two books on usability.

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