NOTE: This blog has been moved to http://www.looksgoodworkswell.com

Friday, November 23, 2012

User Interface Engineering Disciplines & Skills

One of the first things I did when I joined PayPal was rename the "webdev" to "User Interface Engineering". Now while there is nothing wrong with the title web developer, at PayPal webdevs were considered one step below a "dev".

Changing a title in itself is fairly meaningless. But at the same time names are powerful. Over the last year I believe we have been really growing into the title. Recently I started sketching all of the engineering disciplines as well as web development skills needed for this role. Here is the diagram I created.

Engineering disciplines & skills needed for UIEs


Here is an accessible version of the diagram above.

One of our next steps is to flesh out curricula that ties to the diagram above. We are calling this courseware "Bring Design to Life University" since our job as UIEs is to bring great design to life.


7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny you mention that webdev was one step below a dev, I remember that when I worked there in 2004-2006.

Anonymous said...

I don't think SEO optimization qualifies for an engineering classification. It sure is a specific skill but I would leave it at that.

Bill Scott said...

Good catch. I agree. Will make that change...

tony4d said...

SEO optimization should be an engineering classification. At IGN we have an engineer spend a portion of his time on SEO, he writes code most of the time he spends working on SEO. The other part of the time he is designing url structure, working with our infrastructure teams and digging into data and reports.

We've found that SEO IS an engineering discipline. Having an SEO giving direction to engineers in an anti-pattern, your SEO should write the code.

Anonymous said...

Nice diagram, I wonder how much of that skill set a manager can operate with personally. or manager is "too important" to take over the coding etc.? :)

Anonymous said...

HTTP (and Restful)

Anonymous said...

What about HTTP and REST?