State of UX in 2020
Designers, unite
The internet has become a place where people go to argue and shout rather than engage in fruitful discussions; the design community is no different. If, generally speaking, designers share the same goals, why can’t we agree on anything these days?
Design communities are not immune to the tendency towards polarization that has taken over the world. Design Twitter has become a stream of miscommunication; the most popular blog posts we’ve seen this year have polemical titles. Polarization sells.
We have a bigger challenge to solve
As designers who work for businesses, we all more or less share the same goals: to create products we can be proud of, ones which will improve people’s lives and move the economy forward.
We might disagree on more tactical points, like when to use a hamburger menu or whether to use Sketch or Figma. But in the larger scheme of things, these discussions drain us of the energy we could be using to do more impactful work.
Fighting over the “right way to design” won’t make us stronger as a discipline. Why do designers pick trivial battles on Twitter, instead of fighting against the broader, systemic forces who actually do have a negative impact in the world?
Instead of engaging in petty disputes, why don’t they lend support to those who do have something relevant to say?
If we don’t end this cycle, no one else will
We reached out to Vivianne Castillo, UX researcher and advocate for more humanity in tech, to get her opinion on the types of discussions we see in online design communities:
“Are these debates keeping our community in a constant state of prolonged adolescence that stunt our maturity or are they deepening the wealth of knowledge and expertise in our field?
With 2020 on the horizon, there comes a time when our community needs to ask ourselves difficult questions for the sake of challenging the orthodoxies around the perceived need for these endless and cyclical debates. Why would we want young designers to take part in these debates and how does that lead them towards maturity in their craft?
We can’t move on from these repetitive disagreements and debates until we understand how we got here and why we’ve stayed here for far too long. Contrary to ‘move fast and break things’ this is about slowing down and mending ourselves, our industry, and our understanding of what it means to contribute value to the rest of the professional design community.”
Offset charity won’t save our souls
Yep, design has ruined lots of things. We work for companies, and companies need to make money to reward their investors. In their drive for profits, companies often make decisions which cause social and economic problems in society.
To compensate for the harm perpetrated by the companies we work for, we designers get involved in offset charity initiatives, hoping it will make us feel better about ourselves. What if we were also able to make an impact at our own companies? What if we were able to influence, or even reverse, some of the harmful decisions made by our higher-ups?
Escaping big tech alone won’t change the game
In 2019 we have seen designers leave big tech companies because they fundamentally disagreed with decisions made by company leadership. When Google bid for Project Maven, a contract with the US Government to incorporate AI into drones (which could be used for military purposes), many designers walked off the job in protest.
While announcing one’s departure from a tech company is a powerful way to raise awareness and hold organizations more accountable, these actions alone won’t change the game — and many of us are not in a position to make this move. Is there a way we can stay in our current companies and provoke change from the inside?
It’s time we roll up our sleeves
2020 is the year to put petty disagreements aside and start taking action — whether that means meeting up with other designers outside of work to discuss the implications of our practice, or making the move to more formally unionize as a profession. In fact, the tech industry hasn’t yet seen its workforce unionize, as other workplaces like the automobile industry and the public school system have traditionally done. When executives at Kickstarter learned that its staff was attempting to unionize, employees were fired and the CEO made a public statement announcing that the company did not support the initiative.
Which is a good sign it might be time for all of us to organize.
The year of pragmatic optimism
As designers, we know that the key to solving any problem is optimism. If we didn’t believe we could fix things, we wouldn’t have become designers in the first place.
“Design is optimistic. It brings new things into the world. Designers take on problems, model them, frame them, and create responses through the distribution of material, real or virtual, in space.” — Ann M Pendleton-Jullian, John Seely Brown, Design Unbound
Optimism is the only path forward. Not that naive optimism that leads people to claim “I’m a designer because I want to improve people’s lives” or to avoid calling out what’s wrong just for the sake of being “nice.” But an optimism that is pragmatic, focused on tangible action, and which understands how to turn frustration into motivation to create better things in the world.
This article is part of our State of UX report: a holistic analysis of digital design as a discipline, and what to expect for the future.
