Natalie my friend, just because kiwis live in Australia doesn’t mean they are active participants in any testing – unless of course Centrelink is running them?
As for work ethic, well I’m gainfully employed with two jobs. The road workers you are referring to were probably those kiwis that live here given that it’s a low skilled job.
A huge part of UX is the ability to communicate clearly. The need for you to clarify your opening statement is entirely on you. It is not my job to decipher what you’re trying to convey.
You seem to make a lot of assumptions. Your constant need to bring up aesthetics is not adding value. Is there a third person in this debate? Because I certainly didn’t say that and it’s not in the topic. If your imaginary friend has indeed taken the day off, are you simply trying to fatten up the word count?
Calm the farm Natalie – no one has said that design is purely aesthetic. Speaking of farms – no, you can’t have our sheep (Yep I totally went there).
I’m honestly not surprised by your complete lack of originality in taking what I put forward and claiming it for your own (being a kiwi), but you’re totally missing the mark. You’re zeroing in on tiny details and you’re missing the much bigger picture.
UX is so much bigger than design! It’s more evolved. Design woke up and smelled the freakin coffee and realised hey without: business analysis, business modelling, marketing, backend process, strategy, communications, engineering, content management, branding, research, human factors, information architecture, psychology, sociology, software development and a zillion other things– I’m not really achieving much. UX is far greater than the sum of its parts and it has many, many parts…
We have a very different definition of the word ‘brief’. You clearly love the sound of you own voice if you think it’s ok to drag us through that 200+ word play by play of “a day in the life of Natalie”. All that noise leads to one blindingly obvious statement: your job title says designer so therefore you spend 80% of your day doing design- well duh! What else would they be paying you for?!
You also glossed over the roles of the other people you interact with: developers, business analysts, and product owners. They are all UX professionals and design makes up a very small portion of their day. You are one piece of a large puzzle and saying you spend most of your day doing design proves nothing – what about the other pieces?
But hey since you keep bringing up job titles, let’s take a look at the other job titles held by UX professionals. A quick Google search and a few articles later turned up this list as a start:
Business analyst
UX/UI Engineer
UX/UI Developer
Content Strategist
Content manager
UX Copywriter
UX Researcher
Usability Researcher / Specialist / Analyst / Engineer
UI Artist
Business modeller
Marketing strategist
Communications specialist
Engineer
Researcher
Human factors specialist
Information architect
Psychologist
Sociologist
Project Manager
Account Manager
Accessibility specialist
And many, more…
I could go on all day. Every single one of those people are UX professionals. There are more than 20 titles on that list. Each has their own equally valuable role to play in that bigger picture I’ve been talking about and what happens when you divide 100 by numbers greater than 20? Yep, you get less than 5%.
Just last year, Susan Farrell and Jakob Nielsen conducted a study on UX job titles, roles and work descriptions. From information gathered from 1015 UX professionals, they found that:
[I]The majority of UX professionals hold degrees from an immense range of other disciplines, from history to chemistry, most of which don’t have a direct bearing on UX work…There’s no single [B]job title[/B] to aim for: our respondents had [B]210 different job titles[/B]. The most popular title was “[B]user experience designer[/B],” but only 6% of respondents had this title.[/I]
[I]-Susan Farrell and Jakob Nielsen[/I]
You just said that you spend ‘around’ 80% of your day doing design work. You presented that information as though it represents the normal, average UXer. So if 6% of those 1015 UX pros consulted by none other than the Nielsen Norman Group, have your job title and spend 80% of their time doing design work, design really is less than 5% of UX!
PS. I’m devastated that you didn’t take the bait for the mum joke- were you alive in the ‘90s?