A good design is a good essay
Developing a persuasive argument is at the core of how UX creates value. When we shirk that responsibility, we set ourselves up to fail.
The fundamental job of UX is to propose change. From the basic double diamond to more esoteric diagrams like the analysis-synthesis bridge model, we envision our work as closing the gap between a “problem” current state and a “solution” desired future state.
In many ways, that is the easy part. The hard part of the job is seeing that change through.
While our design tools give us total control over rectangles, designers get no such power over people and “nobody listens to us” is perhaps the field’s most persistent complaint. And yet as a field, design is headed in the opposite direction: by shifting the burden of crafting persuasive arguments onto AI tools that are not fit for the purpose, we are making ourselves less and less convincing.
Technology is not going to save us here. Designers hoping to break out of merely validating stakeholder biases need to reach beyond STEM and start designing arguments.
UX is persuasion
We’ve known since the 60s — before the term “UX” occurred to anyone — that to frame and solve the type of wicked problems that are design’s raison d’être, designers need to not only identify an issue, but to articulate their position and support it with argument.
The argument is critical because the value of UX lies in persuading stakeholders to do something different than what they were going to do.
Work that does not do this has no value. Charles Lambdin explains why through the Sure Thing Principle: if we were going to do the same thing before and after we did the research, then the effort spent on research represents waste.
If our audience doesn’t need to be convinced — if we’re only validating what stakeholders already believe — we are not providing any new insight. If our audience does need to be convinced, and we fail to convince them, then our insight is not acted upon and the result is essentially the same.
Either way, we didn’t actually add any value.
Even when it comes to the “design” part of UX — the work of defining how the product will behave, rather than discovering why — we are not free from the work of having to convince stakeholders. They will never perfectly recreate the system we imagine inside their own heads, and so we do the work for them through diagrams, models, flows, and presentations. The majority of our outputs are something that describes the user experience, but for which the user is not the audience.
And they must describe that experience persuasively, because design is far from the final arbiter of what will be shipped. In a standard “three legged” model of ownership, “feasible, viable, and desirable” are not independent factors. They are always in tension. There is no such thing as “infeasible” without the cost-benefit analysis of “viable” — a sufficiently lucrative business opportunity can justify unlimited investment into technology.
If design cannot make that kind of argument — that a good experience is worth extra effort from the other two “legs” — then we will be stuck in a world where our impact is only in the margins of the business model and the tech stack.
(Un)fortunately, that doesn’t mean going to meetings and shouting the loudest. An argument must work across many form factors — some for when we are in the room, and others for when we are not. In order to persuade across a variety of situations, we first need to design the argument in its purest form.
An essay.
An essay, like in English class?
I will readily admit that there are few things less popular than essays. When I was in school, I didn’t appreciate them either. My approach was similar to that of many students: start typing and stop when the page count meets the rubric.
But of course, all of us were missing the point. The objective was not to write text — the objective was to practice forming an argument.
Over and over, our teachers told us the formula: state your thesis, present the evidence, and then explain how the evidence supports the thesis. Rather than simply asking the audience to trust us, the format of the essay guided us to convince our readers by explaining how we got from facts to the conclusion.
Issue, position, argument.
It’s no surprise that humanities graduates secure some of the highest-paying jobs across industries, often in leadership positions. Being able to comb through texts, pull out relevant information, and combine it into a convincing pitch to solve difficult problems is the foundation of how companies organize strategy in the first place. If we accept Charles Stross’s argument that corporations are a slow, procedural AI then humanities majors are the data scientists that train that AI for the necessary outputs.
And it’s well known that the structure of a company determines the products that it will create. Over the course of many decisions and releases, layer by layer, the system optimizes itself to make the thing it is making. When a designer proposes a change to that output, they are pushing against the collective force of a system producing the one product that it is capable of producing.
If their weapon of choice for that fight is a Figma file, they will always lose. All but the most tactical changes will become stripped away not because they are not feasible, viable, or desirable — but because the established path of least resistance lies elsewhere.
To produce a different product, designers need to change the prevailing system. And in a corporation, that is done through persuading its constituents.
AI can’t do this job for you
Unfortunately, the field of UX — like many fields — is trending away from changing the prevailing system, and towards the opposite goal: racing down the beaten path as quickly as possible. Designers are asked to cut the research process short to focus on the real work…
…except that this is the real work.
Relying on LLMs to lubricate your time-to-insight so that you can go Do Design puts you in the same boat as feckless teenagers who rely on LLMs for writing C-minus essays faster than they otherwise could. You get the essay-shaped piece of text, but not the benefits of having written it. A report that truly embraces X=0 from Lambdin’s diagram by confirming all of your assumptions in the fastest possible amount of time.
Because an essay is not just a container into which a human might place an argument — it is a tool for building the argument in the first place. The most interesting discoveries — the most impactful insights — come from a hunch that two ideas are connected, and the itch to dig deeper into the link between them. When you can go from “customers do this and this” to “customers do this because of this” you find opportunities that no one else can see. The axis between those two points becomes the structure around which everything else falls logically into place.
This connection is valuable precisely because it is not obvious. Its novelty has the power to significantly change the decision being made — but it also means that the argument needs to be that much more convincing. A deliberate approach to the design as an essay is a flywheel for value — it strengthens both the design’s innovativeness (by helping us as authors to find two distant data points) and its persuasiveness (by building a strong connection between them).
When you use AI to summarize (or worse, generate) transcripts and responses, you are just getting back text. An LLM cannot draw the inferences that discover interesting arguments, or make them compelling, because it is just shortening the content fed into it. It cannot “think harder,” but only generates a slightly different list of statistically average ideas.
A well-developed point of view can never be commodified, and so the skills to persuasively articulate it will always be a worthwhile investment.
