Job Title

JOB TITLE WAS COLLECTED AS AN OPEN-TEXT FIELD, and respondents entered 183 unique titles. Many of the titles are clearly just variations on the same type of role, but perhaps more accurately, they are points on a continuum: “Software Designer & Consultant,” “UX Consultant,” “UX Researcher,” “Design Research Associate,” “Visual Interaction Designer,” “Senior Mobile Interaction Designer,” “UI Developer,” “Web Developer,” “Front End Developer,” “Software Developer,” “Programmer.” Even this small list of titles could be binned in multiple ways. Our strategy here is to assign a title based on the first keyword it includes from a sequence: “Director,” “Manager,” “Architect,” “Consultant,” “Engineer/Developer” (or “Programmer”), “Researcher,” “Analyst,” “Graphic Designer,” “UI/UX,” “UX” (or “Experience”), “UI” (or “Interaction”), “Designer,” “Other.” So, “UX Director” becomes “Director” and “Designer Consultant” becomes “Consultant.”

Even though they come at the end of the keyword sequence above, “UX” and “Designer” were the top categories, each with 22% of the sample. The median salaries of these two groups, $91K and $92K, respectively, are approximately the same as the overall sample average. “UI” and “UI/UX” were broken out from “UX” to see if there were any key differences between these groups; the only real observation of interest is that there were far fewer titles containing “UI” or “UI/UX” than just “UX.” In terms of salary, respondents with “UI” or “UI/UX” titles earned less than the larger “UX” respondents, but this is entirely explainable by other variables; in particular, “UI” and “UI/UX” were much more common outside of the US, where salaries tended to be lower.

Most of the “Manager” job titles were some variation of “UX Product [or Project] Manager.” As we would expect, median salaries of managers ($126K) and directors ($116K) were the highest. In the sample, managers earn more than directors, likely influenced by more than half the managers working at companies with more than 10,000 employees while more than half the directors worked at companies with fewer than 100.

In the sample, managers earn more than directors, likely influenced by more than half the managers working at companies with more than 10,000 employees, while more than half the directors worked at companies wither fewer than 100.

Such a pattern shows a problem with trying to read too much into the job title results in isolation. While directors are generally understood to outrank managers, a “UX Director” at a small company may have similar duties and manage a similar number of people as a “UX Manager” at a large company— and we know that the number of people managed tends to correlate with salary.

Architects and engineers/developers made up 6% and 5% of the sample, respectively, but did not have significantly larger salaries than “UX” or “designers.” Graphic designers, however, reported much lower earnings than most other respondents (median $49K). This discrepancy turned out to be the one parameter from the job title question we used to build our linear model. That is, the factual information captured in other questions from the survey, e.g., “do you manage people” or “do you code,” helped predict salaries better than nominal data like job title.