Designers' titles in webdev

Over the past ~10 years I've been earning a living by (mostly) designing things on a screen, torturing pixels and vectors until they make sense to create digital knobs for online products, so that people can use whatever it is the company is offering.

In the course of my design career, I've held three or four different titles (sans seniority) and seen many more used in the industry, referring to the exact same thing I was doing but not the one I held. Different companies have different approaches on labeling their designers. Some that come to mind are, regardless of seniority:

• Web Designer

• UI Designer

• UX Designer

• UI/UX Designer (or the other way around)

• Product Designer

• Full-stack Designer (sigh)

• Interface Designer

• Front-end Designer

• Digital Product Designer

• (New) Webflow Designer

and so on and so forth.

I'm not really sure how this fragmentation came to be, though the most prevalent ones in the current market (Dec 2020) seem to be Product and any combination of UX, UI. I personally tend to go for the Product title, if anything, as I think it involves a bit less fluff than UX, which people seem to be struggling to explain their occupation to their relatives around the dinner table than us who are surrounded by the tech bubble with all it's jargon.

Now the issue I have with my selection is that you have to explain that the product is Digital, and not a tangible object you're going to buy at a store. So to fully encapsulate the craft under which the designing of software products falls under, people have been adding the word "Digital" in front, thus differentiating themselves from Industrial Product Designers, who address the needs of the physical form & function of the objects that surround us in everyday life.

On the contrary, naming the craft UI Design seems to be removing the "how it works" part from people's minds. This, in my eyes, leaves the designer with the sole responsibility of creating the Graphical User Interface over a given digital system. Designers working on digital products being told that "this is how it works, go make a pretty interface" usually comes with a sense of dread, at least for me.

If we were to omit all of the complexity described here and go with the simple "Designer" title, the question "But what are you designing?" is still there.

A title that I would love to catch on and fits the craft 100% is Software Designer.

Software** encapsulates the Digital Product part and it's separation from Industrial Product Design, the User Interface as well as the experience part of creating an application, a website or even a admin panel for a B2B company. All of these are software, and along with developers we are taking part in defining how it works by crafting the human to computer interaction as well as the system architecture that will empower the user to do the thing they want.

The one major problem with Software Designer is that the title seems to be claimed by developers in the early days of the digital revolution. A quick google search shows a number of definitions, that sometimes describe the coding part of making the final product and the architecture behind it, sometimes including the interface part.