The great balloon of User Experience: from UX to Product Design

This is about my journey from me being an Information Architect to UX Designer to Product Designer, and what I think about the current state of our industry.

Over 10 years ago I woke up one day and I decided to change my job title from Information Architect to User Experience Designer. I remember many Usability Specialists, Information Architects, Interface Designers, and Interaction Designers were telling me it is a fad back then. The term is imprecise, it’s bullshit-y, can experience even be designed?

And then, last year, I woke up one day and I decided to change my job title from User Experience Designer to Product Designer. And some UX Designers are telling me it’s a fad, and there is no real difference between User Experience Design and Product Design.

But to me they are different. And importantly: to me this new title is just more humble and true. And I think this is the thing that User Experience Designers need the most right now: to be more humble.

I’m not suggesting you should change your title as me. Frankly, you better not do it. I don’t care, really. But I’m here to tell you my reasons, and how I see the current state of our industry.

On the surface level it’s the most boring subject in the world: titles, just beating a dead horse, but as designers, we always love to discuss it, don’t we? But maybe it’s a little bit deeper.

It started with our need to be more important

I always loved the title that Alan Cooper was proposing: Interaction Designer. I think it’s still brilliant at capturing the essence of the job. But it seemed too narrow 10 years ago. Digital designers wanted to grow more and more, and UX Design seemed like a wider responsibility.

And it caught on. Today UX is immensely popular. Everyone is using this acronym, but the problem is everyone understands it differently. After all these years it’s still a very fuzzy concept.