My comment is: please please please don't call it "Interactive Designer", I cringe every time I hear that.

Interactive designer means the designer is interactive.

It should be: Interaction Designer

If you just want to rename the existing roles...

UX Analyst: Sounds like UX Researcher or Design Researcher

UX Engineer: Product Designer

Interactive Designer: Visual Designer / Brand Designer

In terms of what to hire for, I agree with Ryan and Adam... I've had the most success simply hiring for a "Designer", and evaluating their skill set from there.

For your consideration our "design" team (which we simply call the Experience Team) is split up like so:

• Lead Product Designer
• Front-end Developer
• User/Developer Experience Engineer

Lead Product Designer (me): Working on building, designing and prototyping new features and products. I work with a set of tools (rack, rake, sass, erb, angular, etc.) to rapidly prototype and design interfaces for proposed features and entirely new products. I also work heavily on documentation and requirements gathering.

Front-end Developer: Working primarily on integrating our front-end angular application with the backend API. They also fix a lot issues and bugs as well as implementing proposed new features.

User/Developer Experience Engineer: Working primarily on the early stages of development. They write a lot of developer documentation, stub out APIs, work with other engineers to make sure the front-end has access to what it needs.

As you can see we have a pretty heavy focus on engineering, which makes sense given that our flagship product is very technical. In terms of UX research and analysis we typically interview both internal and external stake holders once we have a prototype ready. We tend to focus on building "mini" products first so we can actually have our users play with the product. We've found that this works better by several orders of magnitude.

For the most part I think job titles are more useful internally. You really don't want to weed out great candidates simply because they don't list the right job title on their resume. I tend to look for people with skills, regardless of what they call themselves. Once there's a good skills fit I work with the candidate to see what they might want to work on. If they really want to do research and talk with users all day then we'll come up with a job title that fits that role. The hard part is of course listing that job title on your jobs site. For that I tend to stick with the industry standard. Designer and Engineer. So a listing of jobs might look like:

• Product Designer
• UI Designer
• Front-end Engineer
• Software Engineer
• UX Designer
• UX Engineer

Chiefly the issue is that these titles are somewhat useless - only because there is no "standard" right now, so while it can be beneficial to your own organization, it won't necessarily help you source candidates.

Secondly, I'd just combine Analyst and Engineer. If the only difference is using AXURE vs HTML/CSS, why bother having both when the majority of responsibilities are the same?

I'd hire for Engineer (UX/Frontend) and Designer. Keep things simple, and that also increases your hiring range because you aren't pigeonholing yourself to titles that professionals who may fit the mold, but don't necessarily associate with the title.

get rid of titles. for cv's, let people make up their own title.

At the UK government where I worked we had roughly this split:

Researcher: was responsible for all the research

Designer: responsible for all the design. Would help researcher with preparing prototypes and creating site maps etc. Would help front-end coder with specific visual design guiding

Front-end coder: responsible for all the code

(further more there was a product owner, a delivery manager, a back-end coder and a copy writer)

This didn't mean they would only focus on these things, many designers were fine researchers, many researchers fine designers and most coders had a good eye for visual design and user research, but at least it made the responsibility very clear.

Together they would all work in the 'ux team' : http://www.disambiguity.com/there-is-no-ux/

Here at MING, we differentiate between Interaction Designers and Visual Designers, which actually works quite well:

Interaction Designers mainly deal with questions about how a website/application works, i.e. they define information architectures and sitemaps, create wireframes, and build prototypes. Since we don't have dedicated UX Researchers, they also lead ideation workshops, conduct interviews and usability tests.

Visual Designers, on the other hand, are responsible for finding and developing a visual direction for a product, fine-tuning an interface as well as creating and managing style guides. They are also our brand experts, if this is a requirement for a project.

Both groups overlap in certain areas of responsbility and skill set, but they're still mainly working in complementary fields of expertise. Think of it as the collaboration between an architect and a structural engineer building a house that is aesthecially pleasing, fits perfectly in its environment and serves its purpose.

So to answer your question: My suggestion would be:

UX Analyst -> UX Researcher

UX Engineer -> Interaction Designer

Interactive Designer -> Visual Designer

Just my €0.02

Design Researcher for UX Analyst. UX Engineer - Alright.. sounds more like a Product Designer ID - Sounds like a pseudo Visual Designer.

Is it possible that focusing on titles is solving the wrong problem? If I had to hire a designer, particularly in a smaller startup style environment, I wouldn't really care about their job title de jour. Instead I'd focus 100% on their portfolio and personality.

If you're concerned about the future growth of your employees (and it's awesome that you are), would it be more valuable to focus on how to give them all opportunities to do awesome/interesting work that would be portfolio worthy?

Branding / branding deliverables could be a stretch for the role of Interactive (yes, should be interaction) Designer. Could be a moot point but many designers are good at working with a brand but struggle with creating one. Likewise you could have a designer that's exceptional with branding but would struggle with UX design (sorry, couldn't think of a better way of explaining that side of the role).

Are you looking for advice about how to define roles in your department? Or how to re-name the existing roles?