UX is dead. Long live UX.
While UX may be perceived to be dying, I believe the field is entering a golden age, especially in the age of AI. This is an opportunity.
I’ve been here a couple of times watching a downturn hit technology.
The 2001 dot-com recession.
The real estate crisis in 2008.
Now we’re here, starting midway through 2022. It all looks different and the same at the same time.
Each had a different flavor and there were doomsayers that said that technology was dead, and it always came back. With each downturn came opportunity. Some of the largest companies that are around today were started these times. They survived and thrived based on the lessons learned.
We are at the same crossroads today, especially with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, and adherence to business models that look more like good profit and loss statements instead of an infinite ATM. Real companies will come out of this stronger and better. They always do.
That presents opportunities that we should embrace.
I’m of the same opinion as Keith Ford about the future of UX: we are entering a golden age, but it will require change of the habits we have.
We have a lot to change.
How we got here
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
First you need to understand what led to this situation. Every downturn has a different flavor, but they all have base ingredients. The original flavors of this one are COVID and eventually, the effect of Artificial Intelligence changes how we do our jobs.
Read on for the main points.
Free money ended
When money is cheap, it seeks opportunity. The opportunity for a while was investment. That is no longer the case as evidenced by the chart.
The era of “free money” — low interest rates, venture capital that grew on trees, and easy access to funding — is over, at least for a while.
During the last 10 years, there was a model of “lose money on every acquisition but make it up in volume.” It makes sense for some businesses that can move to a soft landing — think Uber — but not most.
Growth over revenue works only as long as the music keeps playing, and the music has stopped or at least paused for quite a bit.
The good news is that investors are now focusing on models that are sustainable and have slower growth, which is better for technology. For too long, many of the startups that were funded lacked fundamentals. This is correcting to a better long-term model — businesses that work.
The bad news is we’re still in a correction. Less growth means less emphasis on features and more emphasis on making do with what the company has.
That means smaller teams, fewer designers, less innovation.
Companies over hired
I can’t unsee this chart from Indeed. What’s notable is that research can be seen as a value driver, more so than design.
Free money leads to overhiring.
At the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies did just that, a decision that later proved problematic.
All you need to know about this is looking at the chart above published by Indeed. Profits soared and perceived digital transformation accelerated. Technology companies experienced a surge in demand for their products and services.
The problem: much of it was based on free money from investors or found money. Aggressive hiring often outpaced actual business patterns that would return once the world returned to a non-COVID world. As companies realized they didn’t need so many tools, they’ve been retreating. There’s even a name for it — SaaS Winter — and the struggle is real.
Too many designers were hired, too many designers were promoted into roles they didn’t have the experience for, and too many managerial roles were created.
Now we’re seeing the consequences.
This doesn’t mean that companies have stopped hiring designers. They are just hiring fewer of them, and a lot of the larger companies have slowed hiring altogether. This means fewer roles, specifically fewer managerial roles, which is where I’m seeing the biggest impact. However, the demand is still there for good senior designers, which is evident in the hiring patterns I’m seeing.
We’re still in a correction, but we’re in a much better place than in late 2022. The ability for designers to job-hop at a moment’s notice is no longer a reality (and is bad for the field)>
That’s good because it will lead to a more stable environment.
Boot camps and other educational institutions oversupplied
Overhiring leads to organizations trying to fill the gap.
Many of the contract roles for design are offering the same rates that I charged in 2001, or less. That’s all you need to know about the designer oversupply.
For me, the evidence was that many “designers” I taught at General Assembly up until 2017 didn’t have much of an issue entering the field. By 2019, it became much harder.
Now, seeing thousands of candidates apply for junior roles is not unusual.
All educational programs contributed to the oversupply of designers. Bootcamps did so by offering accelerated, intensive programs that promised quick entry into the field without the skills needed. Universities didn’t exactly prepare designers either, judging by the quality of the work as reported by hiring managers.
The reality is that the talent pool isn’t meeting our needs. That’s not at all related to the designer oversupply; it’s a skills gap.
There will be too many designers in the field for a while, but in the end, it will lead to a stronger field as designers close the talent gap in their effort to break in.
Where we need to go
This isn’t just about me on a soapbox because I’m a data point of one. I’m also looking at other signals in the UX community that confirm my beliefs about the direction of UX, and it has a pretty clear direction.
Consider the following evidence:
- Jacob Nielsen in his Substack is urging the UX community to learn as much as possible because this is going to change technology.
- Jorge Arango is pivoting hard into training people how to use LLMs and his podcast, The Informed Life, is now a constraint stream of AI-related topics.
- Indi Young has shifted her mantra to Data Science that listens.
- Jonathan Lupo is one of a growing many that are focusing their efforts through transforming businesses with AI with a UX lens.
There are those who are fearful of this transformation, and there are those that are jumping right in.
I urge you to jump right in.
Fix the skills gap
The age of the Figma or Sketch jockey are over.
We have to embrace our contribution to the business more and learn more about the problems we’re solving. Being pixel pushers is hurting the field as a whole, and it’s not just a bootcamp problem, it’s an
We got paid too much for too long for skills that don’t contribute to the business other than being told what to do.
It’s up to the managers to not only have higher standards, but also educate interviewees why those standards matter. It goes beyond the advice that many designers recieve on ADPList — it’s about moving to the edge of Product Management so we can align with the business.
It doesn’t mean we’re forgetting the user, it means that the user has to come with dollar signs attached to them.
It means more research, more data, and more skills current designers do not have unless their organization trains them.
We can’t even agree if designers should code, so we also need to define better what a good designer looks like so we can represent it outside our field.
Will some designers fall by the wayside? Yes. Just like in other fields, capitalism is taking hold. But we have to clearly communicate the expectations, and right now we are not.
Embrace Artificial Intelligence
A chart by PricewaterhouseCoopers. AI seems to be a thing. We need to embrace it.
The new age of artificial intelligence is here. Get over it.
Consider this particular anecdote: some companies are already asking how much of the job can be done with artificial intelligence when evaluating the need to hire a role. This is supported by evidence that companies are reevaluating their teams and acting accordingly.
Wireframing is still going to be a thing for a long time until we can produce perfect PRDs. It does mean that many tasks that contributed to specialization can be done with smaller overall teams at a level that is good enough to move the business forward.
For example, AI can summarize much of the work that designers and researchers do as a draft today. Many of these tools can do writing draft content for interfaces.
Is it going to be perfect? No. Is it going to be good enough to move the business forward? Absolutely.
This is going to accelerate even with the bumps and bruises, and it’s not going away.
What’s in:
- AI. The more we get involved in what artificial intelligence means for our field means we get to define it. Right now, businesses are defining our role for us, which is dangerous. We have to define it for ourselves so we can influence the conversation.
- Role flexibility. The magic of AI as a really fancy tool because it can enable us to do many more things. Designers need to be more flexible about what they take on. There will be an expectation in many organizations for designers to be able to take on more tasks because they will be more efficient.
Consider smaller teams and generalist roles
A prediction I’ve been floating is that the artificial intelligence revolution is spawning an interesting model: Cottage companies that are AI-first like the mobile first generation we saw when the iPhone come out — built for a world that has a new context
That’s a good thing.
AI-first companies would unlock opportunities to replace software that has been outdated for a long time. A lot of these software packages are going to be solving smaller problems which allows these companies to be more nimble.
Venture funding seems to be supporting this. Even though a lot of the Q2 2024 funding for companies is attributed to a single deal — Elon Musk’s AI venture — the market does seem to be picking up.
Other legacy organizations are hiring too.
With all the talent available on the market, non-technology companies and government agencies are seeing this as an opportunity to hire talent that might not have been available before.
The compensation might be less, but it is employment and it helps grow the field.
What’s in:
- Generalists. This is just another cycle of the specialist/generalist battle. While design systems and research are a thing on larger teams, smaller teams are required to be more nimble and flexible. This will continue until we can further prove how we can contribute to the business better.
- Low code. There are a bunch of low-code tools out there that actually flatten the development cycle — who needs a big team of developers if a Product Manager and Designer can build most of it off the shelf — and this revolution is going to accelerate.
Focus more on business and data
The more we talk about craft, the more we put ourselves at risk from being cut because it’s really hard to quantify craft.
As Scott Berkun illustrated so well in his article Bad design makes money over on Substack, business is just math. If a company has a decision for spending more on marketing to reach customers or more on design for craft, more often than not marketing is going to win because it’s cheaper and they can prove a return on investment. At times, we cannot.
With craft, it’s really hard to prove a return on investment, and that’s why I’m advocating growth over craft.
A Product Led Growth strategy treats the product itself as a conversion funnel for engagement that makes money. This shifts the power dynamic to product management and user experience. Instead of marketing or customer success controlling the funnel, we have an active influence over what engagement and business impact look like and can claim credit for it.
Leaning into product lead redefines our role from a cost center to contributing to the bottom line in a very tangible way. I’ve been preaching some of this for a while, but it’s even more important in today’s environment.
This is something we are going to have to learn past the pixel.
What’s in:
- Mixed methods. Companies are stepping away from research roles that are heavy qualitative and focusing more on roles that are mixed method because hard data is really hard to argue with. Consequently, there is already a growth in these roles — Google probably does this best because it is in their DNA — and this will continue.
- Growth over craft. Craft still matters, but designers will have to quantify their role beyond the icon. That’s why the role of describing us as Product Designers is a better description, because we are committed to the user and the business. We have to lean into a product strategy that talks more about how we impact the business.
Conclusion
This is the same mantra I’ve been repeating for quite a while — this correction I believe was needed because it’ll be a good cold shower reminder that as much as we like moving around our icons and playing with Figma, it’s not why we get paid.
The hard truth: design needs to provide a return to the business to be viable, and designers need to lean into it.
Our jobs will depend on it.
Patrick Neeman is the author of uxGPT: Mastering AI Assistants for User Experience Designers and Product Managers. It is live and for sale on Amazon at $9.99. Go take a look.
Patrick is a Director of User Experience Design at Workday working on Document Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence. He’s also an advisor for Relevvo, an AI-based software platform that helps sales and marketing leaders target their potential customers. He has been head of design for the last 13 years at places Evisort, Knowable, Icertis, Apptio and Jobvite and has over 20 years experience of the User Experience field.
