Introduction

IN THE FALL OF 2015, O’Reilly Media made a comprehensive online survey available, focused on designers, their work, and compensation. The 324 designers, UX specialists, engineers, managers, and directors who took the survey came from 25 countries and 34 US states. We calculated the median salary of the survey respondents as $91,000 USD, a figure we decompose using information from other survey questions covering demographics, tool usage, and participation in several design-related tasks. While we can compare the salaries of groups of respondents based on how they answered particular questions—for example, those who use a particular tool and those who do not—a more rigorous way of assessing salary differences is through a linear model, which allows us to see how salary corresponds to a variable holding all others constant. In this report, we present both methods. The reader should keep in mind that any associations or correlations presented may not be causative, and that the self-selecting nature of the survey respondents means there is no guarantee the sample is representative of professionals in the design space. That said, we have taken care to be cautious in our conclusions to only present results that are statistically significant under usual assumptions that the sample is sufficiently close to random. Even those designers who know the space well will likely find something here that is new.