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The fetishisation of UX design

Is our showboating doing us more harm than good?

Amy Rogers
UX Collective
5 min readMay 25, 2021

Decorative

In 2012, Google Ventures created the design sprint. It’s a five-day collaboration with a variety of members in your product team. You “sprint” through the whole design process in a week, from defining the problem to creating a prototype. The idea is to bring in ideas from key stakeholders, and to help them empathise with their customers.

And it seems to have worked.

Nine years later, workshops and ideation sessions have become commonplace in product teams. Non-designers throw around terms like “usability” and “design thinking” as often as we do. But what’s the consequence of this? Has involving stakeholders in the process this way actually harmed us?

The dumbing down of design

UX design is complex. There’s more to our work than thinking of the customer needs. We have to create designs that developers can feasibly build. Come up with solutions that will provide value to the business beyond looking nice. We also think about how to make them accessible, work across many devices, and the impacts it’ll have on the other parts of our product.

When we run design sprints with our co-workers, we sweep this stuff to the side. We level the playing field. Everyone gets the same…

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Published in UX Collective

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Responses (24)

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