Information Architecture is a component of User Experience Design. IA is focused on the organization and “findability” of content which are important elements of designing the overall user experience.

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The new term going forward is likely to be Product Designer.

If you want to qualify it, you could say Digital Product Designer, but since nearly everything we make and buy in the future will have some sort of technology and code component, that is probably redundant.

I’ve renamed my team to the Product Design team and moved all their titles to product designers, and many other tech companies are now making that transition as well. The Facebook design team call themselves product designers, and many new startups and VCs are asking for product design. It’s a term that is better suited than UX, UI, UED, IA or IxD inside the corporate structure, and is a term that requires the designer to be focused and held accountable on the thing that they make: a product. It’s a term that also allows one to be multi-skilled or multi-faceted for their design work, so it creates a nice transition path for those whose skills may have been too siloed or walled off over the past decade. And yet the term is forgiving enough to not require those skills today while still being able to evolve as time moves on and people get better at this thing we call design.

It puts the designer on par with product managers as well for those in larger corporations, and while a lot of people say engineering or development, they really mean product engineering or product development, so it levels the playing field for designers in that context as well.

It allows business folks and recruiters to easily understand what you do while being broad enough to mean you can make something like software apps for desktop or mobile, design the Kinect, or build something like a robotic vacuum cleaner.

People get products, and in the end, product designers will be beholden to businesses in the same way that graphic designers are beholden to advertising. Our jobs exist to make money, and we exist in a corporate or capitalist environment. Otherwise we’d simply be artists.

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