One Title to Rule Them All: Who Really Leads the Design Conversation?

The Turf Wars Behind Digital Design Titles

Modern digital projects often feel less like collaborative journeys and more like quiet turf wars. Job titles become flags planted in organizational soil: UX Designer, Information Architect, Content Strategist, Product Designer, Service Designer. Each discipline claims a slice of the user experience, and each believes it holds the clearest view of the big picture.

This tension becomes especially visible in online debates and comment threads where practitioners argue about ownership: who defines the vision, who shapes the structure, and who ultimately leads. Beth Mazur’s long-running discussions on information design and interaction have repeatedly surfaced these battles, with comment fields turning into a microcosm of the broader industry struggle.

At the center of it all lies a deceptively simple question: who should be in charge of the experience?

The Proposal: Information Design as the “Director”

Dirk Knemeyer has argued that information design should assume a director-like role over related disciplines, emphasizing its unique focus on clarity, comprehension, and the communication of meaning. In this framing, information design:

The metaphor of a director is powerful. Just as a film director unites script, cinematography, acting, and editing into a singular vision, an information design lead could—in theory—unite copy, interaction flows, and visual hierarchy around one guiding purpose: helping people actually understand and use what’s in front of them.

However, the notion of one discipline sitting atop the hierarchy has always been controversial. It cuts against the grain of the collaborative, multi-disciplinary ethos that many UX teams espouse.

Why Turf Wars Keep Happening

The recurring conflicts around titles and leadership rarely stem from malice. They arise from overlapping responsibilities and misaligned expectations. Several forces keep these turf wars alive:

1. Blurred Boundaries Between Disciplines

Content strategists define messaging, but information architects organize it. UX designers plan flows, but interaction designers refine the details. Visual designers set hierarchy and emphasis, but information designers argue that this hierarchy is, in fact, their central responsibility. When responsibilities overlap without clear agreements, tension is inevitable.

2. Organizational Confusion

Companies often adopt fashionable titles without understanding the underlying skills. Someone hired as a “UX Designer” might actually be a strong visual designer with limited research or structural experience. Another person labeled “Content Strategist” might be expected to act as an information architect. Titles become political currency rather than accurate descriptors, and different teams stake claims to the “strategic” or “director” mantle to gain influence.

3. The Power of Being Seen as “The Strategic One”

Strategy equals power. The role perceived as responsible for the big picture typically has greater access to leadership, budgets, and decision-making authority. This creates a strong incentive for each discipline to argue that its lens is the strategic one—whether that lens is information, interaction, content, or product.

4. Legacy Silos

Many organizations still operate with classic silos: marketing, product, IT, and design. Each function historically hired its own flavor of designer, writer, or analyst. As experience design has matured, these roles converge, but the old silos remain. What looks like a debate about titles is often a proxy war between departments.

One Title to Rule Them All: A Risky Fantasy

The idea of a single, elevated title—one role that definitively owns the experience—can be appealing. It promises clarity, streamlined decision-making, and the comfort of knowing who is ultimately accountable. But it also brings serious risks.

Risk 1: Oversimplifying Complex Work

User experience spans research, content, structure, interaction, performance, accessibility, and visual communication. Compressing that scope into a single “ruling” discipline invites blind spots. A leader anchored too strongly in one tradition may unconsciously deprioritize others.

Risk 2: Alienating Specialist Expertise

Designers, researchers, and writers develop expertise over years. When one discipline claims the director’s chair categorically, it can signal to others that their work is merely executional. This discourages collaboration and fosters unhelpful hierarchies.

Risk 3: Confusing Leadership with Title

The assumption that a particular title inherently leads can obscure the more important question: who has the skills and perspective to lead this initiative, right now? Effective leadership is situational. A content strategist might lead for a knowledge-heavy product; a service designer might lead for an end-to-end journey transformation; an information designer might lead for data-heavy, comprehension-critical workflows.

A Better Frame: Design Direction as a Shared Responsibility

Rather than anointing one discipline as the permanent director, organizations benefit from a more nuanced model: design direction as a rotating, context-driven responsibility.

Clarify the Problem Before Choosing the Leader

The nature of the product, service, or feature should influence who takes the directional lead:

Define Leadership as Coordination, Not Control

The design lead should coordinate across disciplines, not dictate from above. Their responsibilities might include:

In this model, information design, UX, research, content strategy, and product all retain their identity, but collaborate under a clearly defined, time-bound direction role.

Moving From Titles to Outcomes

End-users rarely care whether an information designer or a UX architect led a project; they care whether the product works, makes sense, and respects their time. Shifting from title-centric debates to outcome-centric practices can transform internal dynamics.

1. Start With Shared Success Metrics

Instead of arguing ownership, teams can align on concrete outcomes:

These outcomes require information clarity, interaction quality, content relevance, and visual legibility—no single discipline can credibly claim sole responsibility.

2. Use Artifacts to Create Shared Language

Artifacts like journey maps, content models, information architectures, and prototypes become powerful when they are created collaboratively. They pull discussion away from “who owns what” and toward “what does this artifact need to communicate so we all understand the system in the same way?”

3. Make the "Director" Role Explicit and Temporary

For each initiative, explicitly name a design or experience lead, define their scope, and time-box the responsibility. This diminishes territorial behavior and makes it normal for different disciplines to lead different efforts over time.

The Comment Field as a Mirror of the Industry

Online comment threads, like those on Beth Mazur’s long-standing blog conversations, often reveal more than polished conference talks. Practitioners show their frustrations, ambitions, and anxieties about status, recognition, and influence. When someone proposes that information design should take the director’s chair, reactions often expose:

These discussions, while sometimes heated, are valuable. They highlight that design is not only about pixels and flows but also about identity, power, and how we value different kinds of expertise.

What Information Design Can Uniquely Offer

Even if we reject a permanent hierarchy, information design contributes several critical strengths that deserve elevation within any team:

Recognizing these strengths does not require crowning information design as the permanent director. It requires making sure that every initiative systematically considers questions of meaning, structure, comprehension, and cognitive load.

Design Leadership in Practice: Principles to Work By

Teams seeking to reduce turf wars and increase impact can operationalize a few guiding principles:

  1. Separate craft from leadership. Being an excellent information designer, researcher, or content strategist does not automatically mean being the right design leader for every project.
  2. Co-create the big picture. Journey maps, systems diagrams, and content architectures should be cross-disciplinary efforts, not proprietary artifacts.
  3. Make ownership explicit. For each project, name who leads experience decisions, who leads research, who leads content, who leads interface design—and revisit these decisions as the project evolves.
  4. Reward collaboration, not territorialism. Celebrate outcomes that clearly depended on multiple disciplines working together, not just the brilliance of a single role.
  5. Keep users and business aligned. The design leader—whoever holds the role—must constantly balance user needs and organizational goals, translating between them rather than championing only one side.

From Control to Stewardship

The healthiest shift in mindset is from control to stewardship. Instead of one title to rule them all, teams need leaders who steward the quality of the whole experience while honoring the depth of each discipline. In this model:

The “director,” when appointed, stewards the integration of these perspectives rather than asserting the supremacy of one.

Conclusion: The Big Picture Belongs to the Whole Team

The recurring argument over which discipline should lead is, at its core, a sign that organizations still struggle to define experience design as a truly shared endeavor. Attempting to crown a single, permanent title as the unquestioned director oversimplifies both the work and the people who do it.

A healthier approach recognizes that the big picture is co-owned. Leadership becomes a role that moves between people and disciplines as contexts shift, not a trophy awarded to whoever wins the latest debate. When teams embrace this, comment threads calm down, silos loosen, and the user—the person on the other side of the screen—finally gets the cohesive, comprehensible experience they deserve.

These leadership tensions around roles and titles are not confined to software or digital products; they surface just as vividly in service-heavy spaces like hotels. Within a hotel, guest experience spans architecture, interior design, digital booking flows, in-room information, signage, and staff interactions. When no one clearly stewards the information design of that journey—how guests discover amenities, interpret wayfinding, understand rates, or navigate self-service kiosks—confusion and frustration grow. But when a cross-functional team agrees on who leads the guest-experience vision for a given initiative, and how content, signage, digital interfaces, and human service will work together, the hotel becomes a living example of design direction done well: every touchpoint quietly aligned, so visitors simply feel oriented, cared for, and in control.