A designer’s job is not empathy (and other unpopular opinions about UX design).

Inspired by agreements and disagreements with: Stop telling designers to stop being designers

1. Be a designer.

This is a fair statement: If you are a designer, be a designer. If you’re not a designer, stop telling designers to be something else. This is also an unfair oversimplification.

What is design? In short, it’s synthesis. Whether you’re producing design systems, wireframes, storyboards, or high-fidelity mockups, your value as a designer lies in the ability to take in a dozen disparate, conflicting, ambiguous inputs and create something cohesive, whether you’re design web-based tools or a plate. You can only be good at synthesis if you are able to have other perspectives – not just that of your user, but of services, technology and business as well. To that end, learn about how to understand your users – finding their needs, how they learn, and how to teach them; but also explore web frameworks, business process, and customer service processes (or whatever needs you have).

2. Embrace design.

Your goal is to shape whatever it is that your customer will use. Use your entire design toolset to generate artifacts that shape this process – and design every single one. Every text file. Every wireframe. Every research report. Every mockup. At the end of the day, you’re not just shaping your end user’s experience – you’re shaping the experience of the product manager, who is trying to digest your user journey to understand if we’re doing the right thing (or not).

3. Designers are not researchers or strategists.

Part of embracing design is caring about craft and the end product. I don’t care how many sticky notes you use on a daily basis – our job is to craft a product or experience. If you can’t create that thing, then you’re not a designer.

You might, however, be a researcher or strategist. And while this might sound as if I’m putting them down, I’m not. In fact, I feel that the constant push to make designer also responsible for research and strategy devalues both roles.

4. Empathy is (hopefully) not your job.

Empathy is not the unique domain of a designer. Literally everyone involved with building a user facing product should have empathy for the user, or they’re doing a bad job. If you genuinely feel that empathy is your sole domain, you might need to develop some.

5. On Job Titles

User Experience Designer is a terrible title because User Experience is a deliberately vague phrase that obfuscates what designers do, and allows everyone else to abdicate their responsibility for the “experience.”

There’s a cliché example that to create a successful restaurant, you don’t just design the menu, you design the experience. This is true, but most of the time, the person who designed the menu is not the person who created the menu, cooks the food, picks out the plates, or designs the lighting and acoustic environments. I prefer the term product designer because those are the things I’m creating – products – just like I work with product managers and product developers (and yes, that’s a real title, meant to differentiate from developers working on infrastructure).

An experience is a nebulous, vague thing with no specificity designed to generate importance via obfuscation. People don’t use an experience. They use software via a UI. They touch physical devices. They play games. They eat at a restaurant. Our job titles should represent the work that we produce, not a sticky-note driven cliché.