I've followed Khoi Vinh's excellent blog, Subtraction, for a long time. A couple of years ago, he became the Design Director of the New York Times website, and in the meantime the site has really changed, for the better, mostly, I'd say. This week he's doing a Q&A about his work, the NYT, design, and all of that.As I've always been curious about what he does in his role, and the structure of the NYT.com UX department, I was glad to see that someone went there right off the bat:
As the design director, my responsibility is to oversee the creative aspects of these continual improvements. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and discrete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the members on my team: information architects (who are charged with organizing the features and the flow of information so that people can make use of them most intuitively), design technologists (who do the actual coding of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visual designers (who handle the overall look and feel, including layout, typography, color, proportion, etc.).You could say that all put together, the final product of our efforts is the user experience, or the sum total of the content and the framework as it's used by visitors to the site. Of course, it's not true that my design group is the only team responsible for creating this experience; it's really the result of contributions across the board, from editors and reporters to project managers and software engineers and many more.