I know what you’re saying and I might agree a bit. But reading “…people who understand collaborative environments…” makes me think of the responses in Bill Gates’ blame email about the horrible experience he had trying to install Windows Movie Maker from their web site.

I’ve never worked on a web site that had more than 5 people involved but I’ve worked with management for stuff like concerts and events that had large teams. It’s far from the same as making web sites but it does have a lot of resemblances in terms of management. You can impossibly know all the technical details of the whole process but you need to know enough of every area to be able to end up with a holistic result.

It might be because making web sites involves such different fields that are all at a high technical level that you need titles as “UX designer”. I can’t tell for sure because the teams I’ve worked with all had an idea of what the goal was. They knew the purpose of what they were trying to achieve.

I see people in the comments getting at this site’s design because it’s not “good UX design”. It’s true that some of it is not great usability – like the > on the hover menu making you think there’s supposed to be submenu’s but leaving you thinking it’s broken or the commenting form and so forth. But UX is far from being about usability alone. The commenting form is very fitting for the audience of this site: the graphics provide great learnability and it’s sophisticated which the target audience most likely will appreciate very much. The comment form is a little bit of “branding” as in it communicates the identity of the site owner which the audience can relate to.

As with branding, design in general and UX: it’s not something you add as a step, it’s something you put at the core of the whole process and consider it through every step.

From what I read about the different opinions of what a UX designer should do, honestly sounds like what the project manager should do (if you disregard those who think it’s interface prototyping / I’d never consider UX “designing” to be prototyping or interaction designing).
A project manager should be able to make the team work together and so they can do their part in making the final product. He/she is to prioritize the importance in the decisions and is the person responsible for communicating the purpose of the final goal and maintaining the vision of it.
If that person is unable to do that because of having too many other tasks I’d add in an assistant planner or something and not a UX designer or whatever you want to call it. If the person is not capable of understand the aspects of the final product, integrating the different team members in the work and steering the project to it’s destination perhaps he/she should not be the project manager.

As for the responses in the Bill Gates’ email I think it really shines through who’s to blame. In every single response to the mail you see people trying to blame someone else and all their “corporate talk” makes it clear they have forgotten what the purpose of what they are doing is. Bill Gates himself is to blame with lack of leadership. Had he clearly communicated responsibilities and maintaining consistency within the production, it had not come as far as it did.

I feel that as an architect I have to take a number of things into account. I have to know what the business is trying to accomplish. I have to identify who the target demographic is and develop the user personas and stories. I have to think how I can make the site, mobile app, mobile site or whatever I’ve been asked to architect work for both parties. I have to take into account how it will be coded, the framework used, about how long it will take and more. I can also code so I’ll do the Html, CSS and Jquery dev as well. As an “UX Architect” I have to know all of these areas and what it will take to pull off what I’m proposing.

I like the term Visual Designer for the person doing the look and feel. I might do this as well if the team is smaller and I just need to step up.

I can say though that by calling myself an “architect” my hourly rate jumps up big time and my yearly salary is at least $30,000 over a UX Designer, Visual Designer or Web Designer.

Everyone is not a User Experience Designer. Being able to articulate a problem as well as a solution is a strength and skill set. Otherwise it is just an uninformed opinion.

The problem I truly see is in that people’s skills and talents (within the professional agency, shop, boutique) overlap more than ever. And some choose to work in a silos, instead of harvesting and collecting as much insight as possible–iterating from there on.

And sometimes, budgets and crazy clients make it hard, too.

Understanding how colour & layout* influence people emotionally and psychologically is the first step of good interaction design, but the step after that is how you use content and interactive* features to guide a user to the desired goals painlessly and efficiently.

It’s both of those things combined that a web designer has knowledge of. If you only know colours and layout you are a Graphic Designer, if you only know interaction you are a Interaction Designer.

User Experience is everything, interaction is just one aspect.

* roles simplified

This article is in line with many authors’ point of view, including my own: UX cannot be designed. After the interaction designer has done his job, there are lots of other factors what affect UX. This applies independently of whether the interaction designer’s job includes responsibility of loading time.

As UX cannot be designed, there is no such thing as a UX designer.