2016 Design Salary Survey

Tasks

A MUCH BETTER WAY OF ASSESSING JOB FUNCTION than just a title is through questions about specific tasks. In this survey, we allowed respondents to answer “no involvement,” “minor involvement,” or “major involvement”—the latter meaning that this task is “essential to most or all of your projects and responsibilities, and that you perform it frequently (i.e., most days).” The tasks available were “user research,” “usability testing,” “information architecture,” “user interface design,” “data analytics,” “prototyping,” “wireframing,” “brainstorming,” “project management,” “managing people,” “requirements gathering,” “storytelling,” “sketching,” “pitching (to clients or management),” “presenting (to clients or management),” and “leading design critiques.”

For each of the 16 tasks, a majority of respondents reported that they have minor or major involvement—even managing people. Furthermore, for all tasks except “sketching,” respondents with more involvement earned more. That is, the more tasks a respondent indicated they take on, the higher their salary.

The median salary of the 20% that had major involvement in at most 4 tasks was $73K; the median salary of the 26% that had major involvement in more than 10 tasks was $118K.

Despite the explicit definition of “major tasks” provided in the survey questions, we think respondents appear to have interpreted “major” differently, i.e., respondents who report that they work on two or three tasks might not see the 10 tasks other respondents ...