When UX industry pioneer Jesse James Garrett penned a piece on the disillusionment with the state of UX design 20 years in, it prompted me to reflect on my own experience.
After working in web since 2004, I launched my freelance UX practice in 2010 and my UX design firm in 2012. Has product design become increasingly less insight-driven during that period? This may be true for many departments or organizations, but it’s not what we’ve seen in our client base.
Backing up a bit: In our early days, those who sought UX specialists were a niche audience. The fact that they even knew the lingo signaled that they knew things about design others might not.
Despite that, convincing a business to include user research in a project scope early on could burn untold hours and emotional cycles. We lost many battles and likely many projects along the way.
As smartphones transformed our relationship with the internet, the importance of UX became an HBR headline. The acronym, once unknown, was now a buzzword, and this was reflected in the level of limited understanding these new prospects brought to the table. Folks seeking “UX” might actually be seeking back-end developers, graphic designers, or anything in between. It didn’t (and doesn’t) help that many back-end developers, graphic designers, and anyone in between was willing to slap a “UX” sticker on their service to ride the wave. I did not embrace the new need to teach what user experience is on sales calls. We eventually tweaked our system for qualifying leads and sorted out the mess.
And sometime around then began the bootcamps. Programs of all stripes flooded the industry, a mixture of legit and pseudo-academia promising aspiring UXers lofty salaries in a highly sought-after profession. A glut of young people and career switchers arrived on the job boards with sticky notes and sharpies, ready to empathize–and eager to pay off the programs they’d completed.
The industry is hardly as pure as it was pitched to them. And maybe that’s in part due to the crevasse that has formed between in-house operational design and strategic design. While in-house designers sometimes find themselves buried under a backlog of JIRA tickets, many business leaders are still asking the foundational questions UX seeks to answer.
After all, broad contextual understanding of problems is not just a design need, it’s a business strategy need.
““Broad contextual understanding of problems is not just a design need, it’s a business need.””
In a dramatic shift from what we saw a decade ago, prospects these days don’t just expect user research, but they demand it.
Do businesses cherry-pick the bits of UX most compatible with their existing agendas? Of course—as they do with all types of consultation. Businesses are inherently political, and there are many forces at play that drive decisions.
Before I launched my freelance practice, I encountered many established organizations where injecting user-centered design was like pushing a rock up a hill. The Socratic method can be exhausting for all involved. Short-staffed teams were used to building their best guess and pushing it live. They didn’t always welcome someone else telling them what to do, especially someone who was holding the trump card of user insights.
But soaring software development costs made getting things right more important. Executives didn’t like footing the hefty bill for experiences they weren’t proud of, or worse—that didn’t meet the business objectives.
In that way, the same problem that set the stage for UX also set the stage for Agile. Where UX says to measure twice and cut once so you don’t blindly waste your huge investment, Agile says to cut weekly, so you maximize visibility and shatter the one huge investment into many informed releases.
Agile and UX each charted a path to the center ring.
Could we, as UX leaders, have been better stewards of the attention we got? Absolutely. Too often we spent our time on polished presentations and deep, extensive documentation that few looked at, and even fewer used. And as Parkinson’s Law dictates, we still felt that we weren’t given the time and space to do what we needed to do.
But despite our industry’s many shortcomings, we see so many glimmers of hope which are all evidence of what Garrett and his contemporaries got right.
Business leaders know what user experience is, and why it’s important. And they still crave insights on questions UX is uniquely equipped to answer.
We’ve got frameworks, communication tools, and purpose-built software we couldn’t have even imagined, and as a result, we can deliver high quality work faster and easier than ever before.
UX is widely understood to be a key part of a software development process and team.
A plethora of new talent available to our industry is amazing and eager to contribute.
Software development norms no longer encourage bloated projects that miss the mark. If Agile lived up to its promise, frequent releases and feedback cycles would protect the customer experience, shrinking the gap UX teams were originally intended to fill. But we all know that there’s still plenty of space.
““We can be proud of what we’ve accomplished without being satisfied by it.””
No industry is perfectly refined 20 years in. We can be proud of what we’ve accomplished without being satisfied by it. Just as the forefathers of our discipline spun up innovative new ways to solve problems in the business culture of their time, we must continue to adapt to evolving norms. The need is still there, and the work is not done.
Optimism will be required to advance our practice to suit the changing needs of our teams and organizations. There's plenty of work to be done.
What are others saying about the state of UX in 2021?