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The McDonaldization of UX
The Dawning of the “McUX” Designer
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I’m on the phone for a thirty-minute interview with a corporation that has a specialty division in healthcare UX. The UX director on the other end of the line starts by telling me how much out of every dollar of a hospital’s profits a hospital actually gets to keep. It’s a practiced and well-rehearsed spiel she effortlessly runs through. She continues to tell me how this position, the position I am interviewing for, will help hospitals keep more of every dollar they make.
Just what I always dreamed of — making a large corporation more money.
It only took her less than two minutes to lose me. There was no discussion concerning the impact I would make on patients lives or the lives of clinicians. She asked all the right questions about my process, background and work history. She proceeded to describe the same position I work at in nearly every corporation — design systems, agile, wireframes and all the usual suspects. But it was the same shit, same position, different corporation. I pictured myself toiling away to make hospitals and this corporation more money while patients continued to shoulder the high cost of healthcare. It felt a little bit like Bizarro Robin Hood.
I wasn’t interested.
I have been, as of lately, detecting a seismic shift in the user experience profession. It might be just my perception, but it seems as though there is a subtle change occurring within UX and the direction of our profession. I have begun to think of this shift as the “McDonaldization of UX.”
This perception I have emerges from multiple sources and inputs. I have recently interviewed for a number of different positions — reconnoitering my next major career move. I routinely connect with colleagues who are either doing the same or are kind enough to fill me in on their corner of our profession. I also keep in contact with a number of great recruiters who perpetually have their finger on the pulse of UX in multiple cities. They are all telling me a different version of the same story.
There is probably no greater source contributing to my assertion than the emails and messages I receive as a result of routinely publishing articles. Recently, I have received messages asking whether I think designers should switch to product management. They ask if I have noticed a downturn in “good” UX positions. And many send messages expressing frustration with the types of positions available.
I’m not a person who subscribes to doomsday scenarios. Nor would I be unethical enough to title this article “The End of UX” or something similar in some jaded effort to gain exposure. We are seeing new titles such as “product designer” emerge with slightly different job descriptions than UX designer roles. I haven’t noticed much of a downturn in UX design positions. (There is more competition, which may explain the perception there aren’t as many positions available.) What I have noticed is the “good” positions tend to be a rarity and this, I think, contributes to designers’ frustrations with the current landscape of UX.
Good is a subjective word, so let me be specific here. Good at a very basic level means the job title and description actually match what you will be doing, the position is one in which the candidate will grow (or at the very least not dread going to out of boredom after the first month) and it is a position devoid of the assembly line nature of many UX positions. This last one is of special concern to me.
I worked on an assembly line as a UAW worker for four years of my life. I built diesel engines at Navistar for Ford trucks. It was essentially a mindless position where you did the same thing for eight or more hours. Like a chimpanzee, I stood on a line and put little screws where they were supposed to go and pushed a button to send the engine to the next station. I would note: A chimpanzee could have probably completed the work with more accuracy and at a higher success rate than I (and for less bananas), but I was eventually replaced by a robot instead.
There are a lot of UX positions I have worked in recent years that are not too different from the assembly line work I once did. Once hired, I quickly became another station on the assembly line, pumping out screens and specs for developers and having little or no interaction with users. The job descriptions for these positions all called for a critical thinker who worked well in a collaborative environment and could provide “cutting edge” design solutions to whatever problem the organization had. In reality, they needed a wireframing monkey to work up screens and manage the handoff so they could keep the assembly line running and make their release date. Any thinking or proposal that might remotely affect their timeline was quickly quashed. Any design process — research, mapping the experience, design sprints — had to fit into the cookie-cutter (read agile) model of how products were developed in the organization.
Once upon a time in many organizations across the world, there were those who were not too sure of UX. Was it a new gimmick — just a trend that would fade away in time? This was a time when UX had freer rein to explore how they would integrate with teams, how they would approach projects and what methods they would use. Organizations didn’t understand us or what we did. The result: We were able to dictate our own process and approach. Each position was unique and we held a certain level of autonomy in how we approached our work.
That “once upon a time” seems to have passed. A brief survey of UX position descriptions alone is enough to convince even the most ardent skeptic. Create and produce wireframes, work with product management and developers to ensure on-time delivery, create and maintain design systems to improve efficiency in product delivery, blah, blah, blah. While standardizing the work we do is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be when we allow little or no deviation — no autonomy, inhibiting creative exploration and approaches.
That UX job descriptions all essentially mimic one another becomes a vital clue in how our profession is becoming standardized. The process for developing and designing a new concept is astonishingly similar in many organizations. We have design systems (most of which are based on material design) now, which gives us consistency in our visual design language but require considerably less creativity (and thinking). And our research rarely ever involves something as time-consuming as ethnographic observations, persona development or even usability testing. Research is restricted to methods providing the most return on the least amount of investment, which means you conduct the same type of research in each position…which means you most likely won’t conduct much research at all.
This is what I refer to as the “McDonaldization of UX.” The term McDonaldization is not my own. It is a term developed by sociologist, George Ritzer. In his book, The McDonaldization of Society, Ritzer makes the case that society mimics the principles established by fast-food restaurants. He outlines five principles contributing to this phenomenon.
- Efficiency — streamlining and optimizing processes to provide maximum operative efficiency in completing objectives.
- Calculability — quantifiable delivery of a product trumps quality. That is, a high amount of a mediocre product is superior to a low amount of quality product (or a quality product not delivered on time).
- Standardization — consistently providing the same thing each time (like a McDonald’s cheeseburger).
- Social Control — standardized employees (uniform behavior and interactions).
- Irrationality of Rationality — rational systems become irrational when they subvert and dehumanize employees.
Our processes have become standardized — not too much different from the way in which McDonald's standardized making cheeseburgers and fries. This is what McDonaldization does. It standardizes, delivers a product in high volume (low in quality), streamlines efficiency and exerts a certain amount of social control to standardize the thinking and behavior of designers regardless of where they work. Ultimately, this becomes dehumanizing when a designer is so bold as to venture outside the realms of established norms in the profession.
This standardization is beginning to permeate all aspects of our profession. Every design team follows the same process (even though they probably shouldn’t). We have design systems with components to match consistency across channels and touchpoints. And most teams claim to follow some flavor of an agile process. This results in most job descriptions stating the same thing and most design positions feeling the same as the last — same shit, different organization.
This is where UX becomes a “plugin” for business. We are now, in many ways, modular. You just snap us into the organization and presto! You just improved the user experience for your new Flux Capacitor. Unfortunately, the long game here is fairly bleak for someone who came to this profession because they enjoyed exploring their creativity.
Look at it this way: If I’m making a decent salary with a decent work culture doing the same shit now as I will do for the next organization, why would I bother to switch positions? If organizations want to — as they always seem to claim — attract top talent, they have to give us something different in exchange. Instead, what I seem to encounter is a scenario where business needs creep into the interview. They tell me they need to attract more users, increase revenue or bump up efficiency for some enterprise application. I get the same old spiel about their material design system, their agile process (which probably isn’t agile) and their design process (which is the same as most other design processes). I’m holding out for something more.
Now, I know: There is a designer out there who will state they work for a company or in an environment nothing like this. Perhaps you work for a hip, new startup with beer taps and free wine starting at noon or some large Silicon Valley company where the campus resembles more of an amusement park than a place where people actually work. But for the rest of us common design folk who toil away pushing pixels in corporate America, it’s the same old shit from position to position. The UX “McJobs” available are quickly becoming a carbon copy of a carbon copy.
Maybe I have just been doing this too long and experiencing a sense of nostalgia for those pioneering days of long past. Maybe I’m just getting older or I put my ladder against the wrong wall. But I am not the only one taking note of this shift to the “ISO version” of UX where everything is normalized and standardized. I am not the only one concerned about overly complex and all-encompassing design systems (that look and function much like all other design systems). I am not the only one wondering if I should explore other job titles — those beyond UX.
I guess I am ripe and ready for a change — the opportunity to work on something different in a unique position. This wireframing monkey is looking for a different circus. The Happy Meal doesn’t make me happy any longer. And, I don’t think I’m alone.