2016 Design Salary Survey

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 ...