Whether you like to believe it or not, your job title doesn’t matter. You might call yourself a “Web Designer” or a “Senior User Experience Designer”, but what really matters is the result of your work.

I was kind of surprised to see the response to Ryan Carson’s tweet and article about why a “UX Professional is a bullshit job title”. Andy Budd wrote a “rebuttal” article in response to Ryan’s comment and article. As far as I’m concerned, any job title is a BS job title.

Expectations Matter

I think the community tends to get too caught up in titles and putting ourselves on pedestals. Take the title “Senior User Experience Designer”. Really? Let’s pretend you’re a “Senior User Experience Designer” and you’re at a cocktail party and you just ran into that guy asking that question.

That Guy: “So what do you do for a living?”
You: “I’m a Senior User Experience Designer”

And that guy looks at you like you just told him you’re a serial puppy killer. Why? Because what the heck does that even mean? Ask your peers and I bet you end up getting totally different answers. Titles depend on our own expectations of the terms used.

Ryan has the following expectations of a Web Designer:

• HTML (including HTML5)
• CSS (including CSS3)
• Responsive Design principles
• Accessibility
• Usability
• User testing

Do you think these are the same expectations for every Web Designer in every other company around the world? No. So why are we getting so caught up on this? We will always have different needs and expectations on roles, projects etc. Andy pointed out that Ryan is in a different place in his career than Andy, so why wouldn’t their expectations be different? Is either one of them wrong? No. Is either one of them right? Nope.

Results Are All That Matter

What is the one thing that determines if a project is a success or not? I bet your answer would be if the project accomplished the goals it set out to accomplish. I bet if you ask Ryan and Andy that question, you might get the same answer. They might disagree on which roles they need for a project, and how many people they need to accomplish the desired results, but in the end, all that matters is that they accomplish what they set out to accomplish.

I think we shouldn’t get so caught up in titles, and processes, but remain focused on the results and understand that everyone does it differently. If a “Mechanic” titles himself as a “Web Designer”, but someone hires him with the expectations to fix their car, do you think they really care that he calls himself a “Web Designer”? The only thing they care about is if he fixed their car.

When you hire someone for a project, you only care if that person can help you accomplish your goals. What they call themselves is irrelevant. I would recommend rethinking that whole title thing. In the end, your title doesn’t really matter, but what you’ve accomplished does.

Trust Your Gut

As professionals, we know our stuff, right? Well, we at least pretend to. I don’t know about you, but I often find myself second guessing what I’m doing. Sometimes we under value our own expertise, experience and instincts more than we should. It’s time to stop. It’s time to start trusting our gut.

You did what?

At BizStream we decided to take a completely different approach to a web project. Granted it wasn’t a very large project, but nonetheless it was an unorthodox approach (for us). We wanted to take an existing logo, some existing content and come up with a design with no project brief, no long drawn out client meetings. Oh yeah, did I mention we wanted to see if we could get it done (design, client approval, integration into Kentico CMS) in less than 8 hours? Stupid, right? I know, but it was surprisingly refreshing.

This time I did something different. I didn’t have time for the usual inspiration hunting, wireframing and then Photoshop’n. Instead, I locked myself in my office, turned off Twitter, turned off IM, cranked up the “rdio” and started Photoshop’n. I went with my gut instincts, with what I know.

Half way through the home page design, I started to fall into my normal routine of hating where I was going and arguing with myself that “this is never going to make the home page of Dribbble”, and “I’m never gonna be as good as [insert hot designer here], so what am I doing?”. I didn’t have time for this BS. My timeline didn’t care if I was going to make the front page of Dribbble. I needed a serious gut check.

I didn’t scrap my original direction. I kept pushing and kept trusting what I know. With 13 minutes left to spare, we had client approval and full integration into Kentico CMS.

Listen to that gut

This made me think, how much time do we waste not trusting ourselves, not believing in ourselves, throwing ourselves pity parties or listening to those demons telling us to stop? We all have room for improvement, but if you’ve been doing this long enough, it’s time to start trusting your gut. You know what you’re doing, otherwise you wouldn’t have made it this far.

What made Michael Jordan the best NBA player of all time? His willingness to trust his gut on when to dribble one more time or pull-up and take that game winning shot, his willingness to trust his gut that he was going to make it.

Challenge yourself. Find a project where you have to rely on what you’ve learned this far, and believe in it. Put yourself up against the wall and just do it. See what happens and see if you come out more confident. I’m not going to approach every project this way, but a little pressure forcing me to trust myself is going to make me a heck of a lot more confident going forward.

Extra

For those of you that are interested in the project, BizStream launched BlastAhead.com, a small business consulting firm here in Grand Rapids, MI. Tom came to us with a logo, a little bit of content about BlastAhead, and a small bio. Tom and BizStream are both really happy with the results.