Regulating the UX Industry
Companies need to have a standardized user experience that they adhere to for UX designers.
In the UX industry, we talk a lot about skills, new software, and best practice solutions to common problems. We don’t talk enough about where our industry is and where it is going. Its more of a company-led, company-first mentality. We expect the companies that hire us for our skills to define our practices, rather than taking it upon ourselves to consider where we want to be as an industry in 5 or 10 or 50 years.
So, you might be asking, WHY would UI/UX professionals want or need some kind of standardization?
Well. Have you ever taken a job at a company, looked around, and decided that you were the only one who had any sense of your skills? Did you enter meeting rooms by introducing yourself, your title, and then find yourself explaining your job title to your new colleagues? If this hasn’t happened to you, please come have coffee with me and tell me your secrets.
There are pluses and minuses to every city, every company, and every design team that cannot be described in this short article. No doubt, some of you love the startup environments or the small companies that need a first UX hire to show them the ropes. Hat’s off to you! That is an incredible amount of responsibility to take on, and I hope you are rewarded well for your efforts.
I would also humbly suggest that we shouldn’t have to take on that level of risk without seeing it in writing on a job application. It should be a conscious choice by both employer and employee to invite someone in to change the company culture from the ground up.
This isn’t a one in a million problem. In more than half of my jobs, I struggled with explaining what my skills were - AFTER I completed the rigorous interview process! Was it naive to expect that my future employers might first know about my skills before they hired me? Perhaps. Or perhaps we should start demanding more.
In my opinion, the reason for this is our industry doesn’t require companies who employ UX professionals to be held to a common standard. Indeed, best practices are often seen by managers as annoyances that get in the way of profits rather than the necessary structure that our complicated roles (and our users!) require.
I am not suggesting that designers themselves be held to a rigorous, inflexible standard. When we become designers, we are expected to know and implement best practice standards. There are plenty of organizations that formally and informally define those standards of practice. Our industry requires those standards because interaction patterns often come from science-backed research that no one has time to do themselves.
Nor would I want to.
In addition to making our stakeholders and managers happy, we also have to defend our work to them. When I say “If you make that font size any smaller, anyone who has less than perfect eyesight cannot read that. We need to make sure our minimum font size is x” I expect that standard to be followed without argument.
When I am asked to evaluate a flow for inconsistencies, and I see that a CTA button is in a different location on every page, it is my job to call it out and recommend how to fix it. And then make sure it is fixed before it goes into production.
Not every design decision should have to go through management to be approved.
If I were teaching a course on UX 101, these would be my examples of things we need to learn to perform the basic practices of our job. When our stakeholders and managers scoff and ignore these recommendations, it doesn’t just affect that project, but how that company as a whole sees our work: that it is somehow less-than because it is design, when in fact it is design backed by formal research. Again, not to mention the impact on our users, for which it is our job to defend.
My point is this: Companies should be expected to adhere to our industry’s best-practice standards in the same way we are taught and expected to follow them. It should be the responsibility of the company to provide the tools and resources necessary for designers to follow those best practice standards.
I also believe that companies should be required to have and maintain a design pattern library so that internal standards are also maintained. I shouldn’t have to reinvent the login form every few weeks!
Companies should have their own standardized design process that they then make available to prospective hires. Applicants should have an opportunity to decide if that structure fits their expectations.
For those who need that structure, like myself, it is unfortunately very difficult to ascertain in a job interview whether or not quality work will be seen as such. My suggestion of a formal standardized design process that companies can choose to adopt or not, will at least give our industry some much-needed regulation. When we rely on the companies that hire us to define our jobs to the point where doing them well looks like a failure, no one wins.
