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Are shareholders the real users?

Waves of layoffs in the tech sector are revealing the ultimate end user. And it might be you.

T. Robert Roeth
UX Collective
7 min readApr 3, 2023
A large ballroom filled with people seated in rows, listening to a man at lectern.
The Siemens Corporation annual shareholder meeting, circa 1960, Conference Hall at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Source.

“You are not the user.” is a foundational maxim in the design field for anyone designing in the service of others. It is a guiding mantra that accompanies design processes that go something like this: research and design teams spend billable hours in primary, generative research on quests to find and then understand a target group of users. We work to know what these users think, feel, and do. We listen for articulated and unarticulated needs. We map their experiences, build personas for them, we survey them. This is what empathic designers do. We sometimes call it Human-Centered Design. We sometimes capitalize it to make it sound more legit. Things get built. Hopefully shipped. Then we measure our work based on task completion time studies of the user, or cart abandonment rates of the user, dwell times of the user, user satisfaction, even user happiness. It’s a decent process and has delivered value for organizations and paychecks for design and research teams.

“You are not the user.” But who, then, truly is?

The economy also has its way of doing things. And right now, it is doing them. We are presently in a southward slope in the sine-wave of an economic cycle, especially for those…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by T. Robert Roeth

Working in design, business and tech, and for the people in between ↬ toddroeth.com

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