Most of the UI/UX designers that I see at work and other places are basically graphics designers. I just wish UI designers learn more about interaction design than just pure graphics design.
The challenge the profession currently faces is that a lot of people go into it for the wrong reasons and who are not suited for it. Because there is no money in traditional graphic design, many graphic designers elect UX thinking it's nearly a 1:1 transfer. There is a lot of mis-match.
You really have to really like and have a good sense of human cognition and human factors first and foremost. You also have to like thinking in systems. You are basically design (engineering) solutions for how humans interact with computing in all its forms and in many modes.
Many designers, whether they admit it to themselves or to others, would really rather be designing book covers and concert posters.
And the people who ARE interested in those get less far because we don't have as many shiny things to show off to HR to get an interview in the first place.
I've hired a number of junior designers based almost solely on 'made up' projects and school projects. I know many others who have too. If you're good, or at least show potential, at the junior designer level it doesn't matter.
I took a few elective Human Computer Interaction classes in undergrad and grad school. I have never seen a company pay more than lip service to doing actual UI design.
I generally work with graphic designers who made the switch to calling themselves UI/UX designers because the realized it paid more. They’re much better than me at understanding composition, fonts, colors, visual hierarchy etc…, but they don’t know much at all about actually designing interactive UI.
In many cases the designers are the first people to work on engineering the product and they aren’t equipped for this work at all.
Conversely, many of the developers I came across in design firms were cargo cult coders who got jobs because they very confidently presented their mediocre-at-best development capabilities as plausible to non-technical people. In fact, they likely didn't even know they weren't great because they generally completed the simple tasks they were given and the people evaluating their work knew less than they did. Not knowing enough to a hire and direct qualified staff is a management problem, not a problem with the field.
TBH, the overwhelming majority of developers assume they know a lot more about UI, UX and visual design work than they actually do... I'm continually shocked by how many think bringing in a UX person to add visual polish to an otherwise complete product in any way makes sense. In software dev environments, they necessarily have a lot of say in who gets hired. If you're not clear on who does what in the design business, you get people with shiny portfolios of app UI screens assembled in Photoshop to do your "UX" if there's enough time and budget left for the "extra" sprint.
Unfortunately it seems like most staffing departments seem to think that this is what UX is. Often where you'd see "web designer" or "graphic designer" before, it's been renamed to "UX designer" and the emphasis is really on visual appeal or ability to toss together web pages etc. rather than on the skill of information architecture, usability flows, user research etc. For some people there's an overlap in these skills, but not for all people.
My wife is trained in UX research and UX/UI design and is trying to break back into the job market after years of being out (kids, sick mother, school, etc.) and although she had a background in some graphic design (and marketing and content) years ago, she doesn't feel confident-in or want to emphasise on graphic design and doesn't have an up to date portfolio of that kind of thing. And what she is finding is almost all the positions titled "UX Designer" are really just "web design" or "graphic designer" with a fancy new title, and they won't look at her, really.
The few times that I've done front end work I've always found it frustrating how the UX people I worked with seemed more concerned right up-front with pixel padding and font choices and colours and animations and logos than with getting the initial storyboard and low fidelity mockups right first.
TLDR; most shops hiring "UX designer" are really wanting to hire graphic designers and pixel slingers.
P.S. if you know of anybody hiring (remote, full or part time or freelance) for UX research, content design, information architecture, and so on and who wants a mature and conscientious worker with past professional experience in the tech sector... ping me at ryan . daum @ gmail.com
The same applies to web design. Using Photoshop to create an image that looks like a website doesn't make someone a web designer, any more than creating an image that looks like a house would make them an architect.
> Most of the UI/UX designers that I see at work and other places are basically graphics designers.
What I think is worse is even when they have a formal background in UX the company never wants to utilize it. Every time it's the same junk process. Instead of deriving features from user journeys, empathy maps, and personas the company has the "UX" person generate documents that validate the feature list the customer already wanted, users be dammed. You can also forget about A/B testing or in-person testing the person at the top with a C in their title knows what their users "need" so there is no need to pay for testing.
It's funny because I went to school for computer science, I grew up doing graphic design, and have a lot of experience having done a lot of work in both departments, but never a strict UI/UX role. When I tried to apply for UI/UX positions I either never heard back, or was told time and time again that I was lacking specific UI/UX experience.
Thought it was always funny, I guess hiring managers don't see the overlap the same way I do.
