I always say "designers make the site pretty, developers make the site do things". Granted, this still earns me a look of befuddlement, but it's the easiest explanation I can come up with.
Actually, I'd say that a proper designer actually designs how your site should work. Developers implement, hack, do backend stuff, etc.
"Making a site pretty" is what too many coders think they need a designer for at the end of their projects ("skin my app!"), when perhaps they should be working with real designers from the get-go.
I think you're describing a user interface engineer with a design background.
There is definitely a place for "Person who makes pretty". There is a place for "Person who makes it work well from a human computer interaction persepctive".
Agreed. In reality, many developers have plenty of design experience & skill as well.
I like to separate design from pure art, subscribing to the Steve Jobs "design is how it works" mentality. To me, design is as much an engineering discipline as an aesthetic one.
While that is a good definition for the word design, the people who make software pretty usually have an art background where at best they specialize in layout (as a subset of spacing, etc), not user interaction design or industrial design degree. That degree is a thing all to it's own, and what much of the Apple aesthetic comes from. An industrial design degree is actually closer to architecture than art in many programs.
There is actual training required to be good at real design for most people. I'm saying most "designers" actually have art training. They might do the job you talk about, and want to do, but they're not the ones trained in it, and not necessarily any more apt at it than the programmer or janitor.
Some are quite talented at it. Some aren't. But that doesn't mean their wonderful art isn't incredibly awesome, even though they don't know program flow very well at all.
All this isn't saying there can't be tremendous variation in what a person can learn on their own, mind you, but many people do considerably better in something they have a formal background in.
Keep in mind /UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing. I'm a UX designer but when I was in school nothing of the sort was offered. Designing for the internet was just then becoming a concept. Most of my studies were focused on print! I would say that this is true for a lot of interaction designers with more than 5 years under their belt.
User Interface design is a new thing? Since when?!
UX may be the trendy new term to slap on your CV, but the concepts certainly aren't new.
PS: am I the only one who hates the term "User Experience Designer"? User Interfaces can be designed. User Experience can be observed & measured. Personally, I don't think you can truly design a User Experience.
Again, I'm just trying to argue against nomenclature that's confusing issues here: I feel you're improperly advertising yourself when you call yourself a designer these days if you really do know the science of interaction design and can use its tools. A great majority of people who are designers do more beautification than usability. You need a different noun if you're truly doing real usability stuff, including the studies, heatmaps etc, that make up the UI Usability world's process.
>/UI/UX/Interaction design is a new thing
I'm going to disagree with you about this. It was a specialization in many schools by the end of the 90s in computer science departments (Called Human Computer Interaction). I have two very dear friends with degrees in it who are 29 and 32. Here is one such program: http://www.gradadmiss.gatech.edu/programs/multidisciplinary/... Actual industrial design degrees (which are pretty applicable to software) have been around for decades.
There is a big difference between "People who make things pretty" and "People who make things interact well with people" and the training is different. Now if a person trained in one of those worked on self training the other, it still seems like calling themselves something acknowledging the dual nature of what they do: Something like UX Engineer and Graphic Designer would be more exact than the term "UX Designer" which in practice usually seems to mean "Artist who makes things pretty then loudly, without good reasons, without a willingness to understand costs or decades of human/computer interaction, requires a large amount of authority acceded to him without further explanation and requires we do a lot of things just so without talking about tradeoffs because he doesn't seem to really have a mental model to talk about what he does so can't really compromise well and retailor his solutions to the issue".
Those using the title often feels like people trained to do good art (even good commercial art) refusing to do a job and explain themselves when how they want their art animated doesn't actually make for good user interactions or would cost 3 arms and 3 legs more than the client has.
A lot of this is a function of how people without true backgrounds and training in design get into the field: the computing field is super tolerant of people not trained in this stuff but who get stuff done. Happens with programming too. But programming is a little less tolerant of handwavy BS than art is (at a point, its a "did it work" thing which is somewhat demonstrable for programming). Where "Did it work" for design isn't really as testable without a user study. (I'm not saying non-trained by a college to do this thing shouldn't be in the field, just that they're less filtered).
Now, all of this isn't to mean: Designers shouldn't know the flow of what they're doing the art for. But until a designer show me a track record of UI improvement and comes equipped with the tools to show you made something better, lay off the misguided airs of certainty. Those tools exist. I feel if you can't use them, and can't prove yourself you got to let your client know this is most art than science and they should also really listen to other voices in the process.
I will agree with you on the points of nomenclature. But most of everything else you said sounds anecdotal stemming from a possible bad personal experience you might have had.
Just because HCI has been studied for several decades now, it doesn't mean it has been WIDELY studied, understood and applied as a concept from the beginning. Just because you have a friend who studied it back in the late 90's it doesn't mean that it was a subject matter covered nation-wide by all universities by any stretch of the imagination and even less so as a concept widely considered by developers of the time when making their interfaces for their digital products. The examples of good interface design from this era are few. The only point I was trying to make was that it is expected to have a lot of designers from non-computer science backgrounds working in these fields at the moment because they are new fields. 20, 30, years is nothing when thinking about the lifetime of a profession. I'm older than the first Xerox GUI. It is arrogant to say that all or most of these designers only think in terms of "art". It only shows your possible(I dont really know you) lack of understanding of both design and art.
Lastly, you mentioned how the effectiveness of design is not quantifiable which leads me to believe you diminish the importance design for this reason. As you probably know but may have have forgotten, in HCI it is impossible to divorce the human aspect from the computer aspect of the theory. Humans are unpredictable, often preferring to go about doing things counter-intuitively or in surprising ways. These decisions are mostly influenced by social or genetic predispositions often which are unpredictable. There will never be 1 right answer or formula to anything regarding human interaction with anything. Yet, somehow through proper design, developer's and designers have increasingly been able manage this and adapt as things evolve quickly.
You completely missed my comment, saying the opposite of what I in fact said in several places. I work with lots of people, generally speaking, 5-15 short contracts a year doing drop in consulting on iPhone/Embedded Linux Devices, including products under failure/needing rescue.
While not to the point my number has a small error rate, I assure you people I am describing exist a number of places, completely unrelated to my short stay with them. They're pretty well disliked by the internal engineers at their job too, but management doesn't always listen as closely to the internal employees as to to me. Your psychoanalysis is wrong. I know good ones too! And I've had this conversation telling them why an engineer will think they're so damn good.
My issue is only with the fakers.
>It is arrogant to say that all or most of these designers only think in terms of "art".
I never said they only think in terms of art. Most seem (when trained) to be trained in either web design specifically, or graphic design, specifically print based graphical design.
Lots of them do think in terms of more than art. However these fakers are terrified of discourse about their work, unwilling to defend why it is better than lower cost alternatives, and often terrified/huge foes of quantification of their work. My issue is lots of them regurgitate cargo cult design from smashing magazine, etc, without ever measuring their work and objecting furiously when other start to put tools in place to do so.
>Lastly, you mentioned how the effectiveness of design is not quantifiable which leads me to believe you diminish the importance design for this reason
My issue is with those who refuse to accept the use of quantification of the design. It is very quantifiable. That is my only issue. I know how to do absurdly useful verification techniques to quantify a design. Many UI Designers get threatened no matter how carefully you tiptoe that into the project plan. The insistance that many of these folk require that you follow their ideas because humans are ineffable even though we can actually time how much better or worse their tiny button works is my frustration and pain until I have this conversation with the person who they've already sold their idea to. I'm talking abou the person who's trying to actively avoid developing their own understanding of a 44px button doing better than a 22px button from the statistics we deliver you on how many people miss with that small button you have there, as shown to you with a 100 person beta test trying to do a couple things.
I mean, these same people are the ones who bemoan trying two different packages in a direct mail print campaign. They wouldn't do better in print design either.
They should both know at least some of these better or at least on a comparable level to me, or at the very least, be eager for data showing them right or wrong, how well their job was performed.
I'm sure there are a few good guys out there with a non-college training regimen who don't come from a graphic design background in this stuff, because as you mentioned, it's a young field. But I'm tired of people claiming authority on crap and not backing it up. I'm tired of them resisting putting measurement in place when all we require is "we're seeing a lot of errors doing X, please look for a way that has a lower error rate".
This isn't an invective against all people who call themselves UI Designers. It pointing out that term is over broad and you're associating yourself with a bunch of fakes by calling yourself that. They're often unwilling to engage in productive discussion with the rest of the product team, and who often recoil from objective measurement of their work.
If it makes you feel better: Programmers who apply for jobs have a seeming 90-95% "can't program at all" rate in my experience. I mean, dirt simple stuff. UI Designers have a smaller fraud rate than them :D. And I'm pretty sure programmers have taken "being full of BS" to heretofore unseen levels. But enough about my field, lets talk more about yours :P
Even just in the context of visual design there is more to it than a continuum of aesthetic quality. A good designer needs to interpret culture and situate the product in relation to an environment in a meaningful way. Others will just follow trends and make things that may be pretty but are also empty and disposable. To say that this is a distinction between art and design I think denigrates both.
If they don't know the difference between a designer and a developer, it's much better to start small. Chances are, the other person was only asking to be polite and doesn't really want to know about all the nuances in designers' (or developers') jobs. If they do want to know, I'm happy to go into more detail.
Saying that designers make the site pretty and developers make the site do things is exactly the kind of thinking that makes this whole thing a mess.
The "pretty" parts is such a small part of what design is all about.
I don't just create some skin on top of some application, I help create the underlying structure maybe even the business logic.
Also developers are not just making the things work. They are actually constructing the code space by making decisions that are based on some aesthetic principles. When you construct your code in a certain way it's not just rational it is as much emotional.
To give you an example of what design also is.
We recently managed to convince a bank to put some of the knowledge they had about their clients into play. Basically all transaction come with a unique vendor number that can be paired up to a category (utilities, groceries, insurance etc) and allow customers without having to type in a single thing to see how they spend their money.
The original design I did was nice and cool and all, the final design ended up looking rather pale in comparison, but it's one of the things I have done in my life that I am most proud off.
It took not only knowledge about how some of the innnerworkings of banking, it took political fights, fights with IT departments and so on.
But the results where phenomenal. People loved it and I neither they cared that it wasn't as sassy as I had originally intended.
Design is not just about how it looks, it's as much about how it works.
Part of the problem in understanding what everyone means is that the word "design" is quite ambiguous these days.
I'm a programmer working in web "development", and some of the things you lay claim to (UX, UI) are things that I'm responsible for rather than our "designer".
So I guess there's really a spectrum of different types of activity (rather than a binary partition) and the choice of who gets what responsibility is a local one.
Some organisations have people who have exotic job titles with words such as "User Experience" and "Information Architecture" in them. I suspect that "designers" and "developers" in those organisations have much more clearly separated roles.
I dont' really see them fundamentally as different. I was just pointing out stuff I was also doing which could might as well have been done by a developer (in fact I worked with a couple developers on setting up the proper architecture)
