Who are designers?

Before we get into the details about design and agile, let’s first define what we mean by design and look at who traditionally does design. Up to now we have referred to the designer in the proverbial sense. This can be dangerous as it’s not uncommon for nondesign people to assume that all designers are equal and that every designer can do everything that uses design in the title. Designers come in many shades and tones and some might have generalist skills, whilst others are quite specialised. To ensure that we’re all speaking the same language, let’s explore some of the design roles and their respective skill sets (3.7):

• User-interface design, interaction design, and usability underlie much of what we do in experience design today. They in turn were all influenced by human-computer interaction (HCI). The focus was primarily to design for and measure task-interaction completion, efficiency, error prevention/recovery, and intuitiveness.