Findings From the Web Design Survey

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Published in State of the Web

In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey’s 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development as practiced in the U.S. and worldwide.

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33,000 responses is a lot of data. To make sense of it, An Event Apart commissioned statisticians Alan Brickman and Larry Yu to translate raw data into meaningful findings. Here we present what they found.

Like many aspects of web design itself, our research process took the form of a dialog and included multiple stages of discovery. Preliminary findings answered some questions and raised others requiring additional study. The more we unearthed, the deeper we dug.

The attached report shares everything we learned. We offer it freely to this community that has given us so much. For the curious, we also provide an “anonymized” version of the raw data. It contains every answer to every question by every respondent, excluding only personal information—no names, just the facts. Crunch it yourself and tell us what you find.

We did not learn everything we hoped to. Ambiguities in some parts of the survey yielded ambiguities in some data. After an analysis of the survey itself, we now possess detailed recommendations for improving future surveys.

The findings we present here have never been seen before, because until now, no one has ever conducted public research to learn the facts of our profession. This report is not the last word on web work; it is only the beginning of a long conversation. Read, reflect, and let us hear from you.


Download The Findings From the Web Design Survey

Findings From the Web Design Survey (1.6 MB PDF)

Note: This PDF has been tagged for accessibility, however the graphics representing the complex charts do not yet have equivalents. An updated document will be available soon.

The Raw Data#section2

Crunch your own numbers. Anonymized raw data is provided in a variety of formats:

The Prize Winners#section3

By random drawing, the following survey respondents have won prizes:

  • Allison Klein, free ticket, An Event Apart design conference
  • Scott Smith, 80 GB Apple iPod Classic
  • Hannah Sheffield, An Event Apart jump drive
  • Jon Petto, A List Apart T-shirt

Prizes were donated by A List Apart, An Event Apart, and Happy Cog Studios.

100 Reader Comments

  2. Wow! It sounds like a great report! Sadly, it keeps timing out when I try to download it. Guess you’re popular! I will keep trying…

  3. Considering no one has done anything of this scope (lets not argue about who was first), you pretty much covered everything. No, it will never be perfect, but there is a ton of useful information here. The design is what it should be – clean and straight forward. Congratulations to all that obviously worked very hard on this ground breaking survey.

    I have always felt that web professionals are one of the most misunderstood group. This survey help us understand who we are. I was personally surprised by some things and just unaware of others. For example I would of thought a higher percent of Web Designers/Art Directors would be CSS and HTML literate. I was totally unaware of how male dominated we are. I would agree that we should be paid more for our expertise, but I didn’t need this survey to arrive at that conclusion.

    Thanks for your hard work, I hope everyone who reads this will walk away with as much as I did.

  4. given that the respondents where overwhelmingly white and male, it’s not surprising that bias based on gender and ethnicity are played down by the study. a breakdown of the data on bias by cultural identity or gender might be more illuminating.

  7. @rob s:

    bq. given that the respondents where overwhelmingly white and male, it’s not surprising that bias based on gender and ethnicity are played down by the study.

    Have you read sections 7 and 8? Have you looked at figures 8.6 through 8.11, and read the commentary?

    bq. a breakdown of the data on bias by cultural identity or gender might be more illuminating.

    Well, gender we covered. (I refer you again to sections 7 and 8.) We didn’t ask if people were Jewish or Hispanic or belonged to any of the other 200,000 cultural affinity groups. But as we keep saying, this isn’t the end of a conversation; it’s the beginning of a conversation that _should_ have started years ago.

  9. These results were very strange to me mainly because I fall into the higher percentage catergories, Male, Caucasian, Web Designer in the US. I didn’t expect that, I thought there would be a more even distribution between sexes and thought there would be more web designers in the UK, but this could be due to the fact that this is the first time this survey has been done and has admitted flaws. Thank you for the time you put in though, great to see these numbers.

  10. Okay, this is going to be a weird question among all the other posts here, but… what fonts did you use in that PDF? They work together beautifully, yet I can’t figure out what they are.

    (I’m a design student, so I like asking about these things. I hope someone will take me seriously enough to answer. 🙂

  12. I was excited to see the results, and hoped to get a bead on how job satisfaction and salary panned out in Europe, US, and abroad. There really wasn’t a way for me to eyeball this and say “Yup I ought to move…the Brits/Yanks/whoever seem happier with a better salary per standard of living.”
    No mention of which skills are growing in demand either.

    So while the survey was great I didn’t get a lot of practical info out of it. Not that Sitepoint provided anything at all useful in their Four Web Types (whoop de doo!)Survey.

    Cheers! I’m sure it will be better next year!

  13. Zeldman, et al–

    First of all, thank you very much.

    Second, a couple of suggestions:

    Within the published results in the future, possibly include the original survey questionnaire? In the interim, possibly reload the content questionnaire page?

    Maybe include in the future, a list of all referring URIs to the survey? This could serve as a source for validation and further demographic research of the respondent pool. In addition, within the survey, allow for a detailed list of where the respondent learned of the survey.

    Again, thank you.

  14. Finally the results! That looks like a lot of work, so many thanks for that.

    The PDF and its graphs look great.

    A suggestion for the next opus: Tables were a bit overwhelming, in terms of data. In order to make them easier to grasp at a glance, would it be possible to improve them using the principles behind tag clouds: change the style of each cell based on the number it contains? The actual cell data need not change.

    For example, change the font size proportionally (e.g. 0%->9pt, 100%->16pt), or change the brightness of the background (e.g. 0%->white, 100%-> some shade of gray), etc.

    PS: Congratulations for the live comment preview feature!

  16. I took a quick look at the raw data and would like to make a quick comment.

    One important information that I cannot find in the data is the location of the web designers who responded. A breakdown by country will make the results more meaningful because the cost of living in each country has a direct bearing on salary and income.

    For example, a web designer in India or China who earns USD10,000 may be much better off compared to someone in the US or Europe who earns the same amount.

  19. I am surprised by the small number of women responding. Maybe they have better things to do with their time? Seriously, this is disappointing.

    Half the students in law school are women and women have taken over the veterinary profession. In 2003-4 over half the applicants to medical school were women. What is it about the business of designing or developing web sites that is either so unattractive or discriminatory?

  20. When I filled out the survey, I found the regions inadequate. I live in Maryland, and I do not consider it either the northeast or the south. Being originally from North Carolina, I probably answered “northeast”; and I bet that many of my colleagues who are originally from much further north answered “south”. We generally refer to the area between Washington and Philadelphia as the mid-Atlantic.

    Also, I’d like to see some statistical analyses. You have enough data points to support more than just descriptive statistics and tables; I suggest correlations, at least.

  21. Oh, and when you say “X is more satisfied [makes more money, etc.] than Y”, make sure you’ve got the significance level to back it up. Within-groups variance can cancel out between-groups differences. Personally, I’d like to see the statistical significance — perhaps in an appendix, to avoid making the body of the report harder to understand for those who are not sticklers.
    And no, I don’t wanna do it myself. 🙂

  22. I clicked everywhere!

    I couldn’t find how to download the file.

    Then I switched to IE – maybe something is wrong with the markup? Zeldman??? No way! but what can I do?

    Then, in IE, I see the big blue image!

    What happened? I am blocking “*banner*” in AdBlock.

    The name of the image is “download-the-survey-banner.png”

    I have learnt a long time a go not to name any element in my code “banner” – be it an image, a div or any other element.

  23. With worldwide disability statistics hovering around @10% of the general population and growing, it would be interesting to see how many people in the profession(s) actually have a disability.
    The “Accessibility Expert, et al”, at 0.4% of the current respondents, would probably have the highest number of respondents, but that is an assumption based on personal perceptions.
    “Accessibility Expert”s come in all shapes and sizes and most of them have a focus based on their own disability.
    Few Accessibility Experts, that I have met, have a holistic view of accessibility and usability with adaptive technologies beyond their own frame of reference.
    Now that I am half way through this post, it sounds like another survey altogether.
    FFT (Food For Thought)

    Steve

  24. I am somewhat disappointment, no third party, for compiling the results and going through the validity of the instrument used for the research, so interpretation is in question, it feels pedestrian.

    Don’t get me wrong you have some good basic points there.

    Suggestions:

    Join with Jupiter Research, Nielsen//NetRatings or comScore for your next one, and It will spread like fire. Also it will bring more prestige and reputation.

  26. Fantastic survey.

    It would be very interesting to see data for cities; namely the big ones in the web world.

    London is booming at the moment and salaries seem to be increasing higher than usual, it would be good to find out how this compared in the other big web cities.

  28. As soon as I see a question about ethnicity, I know it’s an American survey. Seriously, haven’t you learnt anything from your Civil War and Little Rock High, etc? You need to move on! This is an ongoing challenge for all of us, but America often seems intent on maintaining the distinction and then trying to pretend it doesn’t matter, when no-one else even asks.

  29. Thanks for the fabulous job on the survey — I particularly appreciated the additional level of discussing how to improve the survey going forward. We’re all enjoying digging through the survey here at work, and I’m hoping that future versions will explore the different skills/tasks done by folks.

    And as a side note, thanks for the wonderful work on A List Apart in general. I always enjoy the articles and comments!

  31. I was fascinated at the dearth of women in the web design field. It might have been a statistical skew by who answered the survey (but the sample was very large which makes me think that there actually are so many more men in the field than women). I was looking for answers as to why web designers are so undervalued by clients (in the freelance world) and did not find my answers.

    I would love to also see a breakdown by skill set compared to fees/pay and even geographic comparisons to figure out what is appropriate to charge for a job.

    I love this magazine because it is beautifully presented and down to earth. Thanks for continuing.

  32. Some of the comments in here are scary in terms of people viewing this as cold hard facts and not simply a snap shot of period of time with only the reach of this company. People need to understand that any ‘trends’ seen are ‘perceived’ trends which the survey very upfront states, and its based on user response not actually hard evidence say, job data from different agencies world wide. Having said that, this is an excellent piece as surveys go.

    @Ethnicity I agree with you, but only to a certain extent. America is actually where modern day racism – in terms of the brutality that was born out of it – began so of course there is relevance and import in showing those numbers, but this is way off topic so email me for a more in depth answer to that.

    What I will say to that end though is again you have to look at this as a snap shot of the time period and reach of the survey. I actually think you should throw out the ethnicity part of the survey, not because I don’t think it matters ( being a US-black myself I was all too keen to see the break down of the data:D ), but because the numbers are too low. 1.25 of 33k is roughly 400 people, which in most US state surveys is a low number, so then base that off a global survey and you can see that any comparison of those numbers to higher participants is vastly skewed. Good job white males for messing up the numbers :D.

    What I did find very interesting is the assertion that people with a perceived bias ( women for instance ) generally make more money than those that don’t, which to me means that there indeed is a bias and either those people work harder to achieve a goal and/or the employer recognizes the bias and is trying to compensate, squeaky wheel gets the oil sort of thing. So all of those that don’t perceive a bias might want to rethink their opinion! (tongue in cheek of course)

  33. bq. As soon as I see a question about ethnicity, I know it’s an American survey. Seriously, haven’t you learnt anything from your Civil War and Little Rock High, etc? You need to move on! This is an ongoing challenge for all of us, but America often seems intent on maintaining the distinction and then trying to pretend it doesn’t matter, when no-one else even asks.

    Conflicts over religious, cultural, “racial,” or national ethnic background do not occur only in the U.S. Last time I checked, tension between groups was taking place everywhere.

  36. There is a question in the survey results that I can’t figure out. It is “Why did you turn it down?” Why did you turn what down? The question before it is about ethnicity slowing your career.
    Otherwise it’s a very interesting survey. I was very surprised at the results and the large number of people who responded.
    Must have been daunting compiling all that data.

  38. bq. America is actually where modern day racism — in terms of the brutality that was born out of it — began

    What?! Man, people have been killing each other over “race”–however you want to define that–for hundreds if not thousands of years. Modern day racism wasn’t born in America; modern day racism was born in ancient times.

    That said, I want to go on record as saying that as a black woman designer, it’s important to me to see numbers regarding minority representation in the field, and the reason is simple. Designers are culture creators, and I’m interested to know the gender and ethnicity of those who are sitting in the driver’s seat, so to speak. Growing up as a minority changes, to varying degrees, how we perceive the world as how it perceives us. (Granted, there are many things that contribute to this: ethnicity and gender are but two.) That perception bleeds into our work–or perhaps _is_ our work.

    If only 1% of designers are black, that’s interesting and significant to me, if not from a design POV, then from an sociological POV. That data allows me to ask interesting questions: what other points of view are we not seeing? How does a monolithic point of view aid or impair our culture? In what other ways are these missing black would-be designers creating culture, or are they?

  40. I just wondered if you did any kind of feasibility or pilot study prior to releasing the questionnaire to the world? I know you’ve said you found problems with some of the questions so I assume not but I’d rather know for sure (as a student doing a research methods module…).

  41. Good that these results are actually free for all to study and see. Kudos to whoever is invovled! 🙂 Hoping something in future for the other side’s survey, ie. the users 🙂

  42. It’s nice to see that the results are free for all to view analyze. Congrats to all behind the scene..:)

  44. Very interesting. I would like to see how happiness and money plot out. Also the bias section took up alot of space, what is the bias definition for each chart? it seems that many of the workers, designers- make less than the managers. I am just learning web design, I am in the 50 plus age group, i want to be part of the exciting world of websites, I am taking classes, trying by doing and reading all I can. Designers should make alot more money. Thanks for the work and results.

  45. Just stumbled on this. Props for putting it together and making it public (even the data)!

    I’d be curious to see if respondents report any education bias: Is not having a college degree, or too high a degree, a hindrance?

  47. I would love to see a survey to focus on some of the data regarding “Years at current job” and “Number of jobs held” and “Next Career Move”. I would like to see this data to explain why such a high percentage of the development community has limited time at a single employer. I would also love to see an employer/management survey focusing on the same data of why they feel designers tend to jump ship so often. Does job stress, constant education, low pay, fierce competition, etc. have anything to do with the career choices? How many web designers have gone from full time to part time and freelance? How many developers feel burned out?

  48. Wonderful information and a great presentation of the data. This survey is the only one I have seen like it. It’s good to know whats happening out there in the industry. Great job “A LIST apart”

  49. like smoking cigarettes cause cancer. But many if not most cancers have nothing to do with how healthily you live your life or how many vegetables you eat or vitamins you take.

    Jeweler’s Tools

  50. it’s just so shocking how homogenous the web industry work force is – in terms of race, gender and age. it’s really awful, shameful.

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