Unless you’re living in a Faraday cage under a rock, you’ve probably heard that a sizeable portion of the 200,000+ employees affected by the layoffs announced at many of the world’s largest tech companies (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, IBM, Zoom to name a few) include familiar design-related roles like product and UX designers, IAs, visual designers, UX researchers, content strategists, etc.. To defend laying off tens of thousands of people, PR departments have been working overtime to come up with passable economic justifications: over-hiring during the last few years, current valuations becoming too disproportionate compared to the financial reality, tightening up of the economy due to recession and inflation undercurrents. Others are postulating that the layoffs may be related to low employee performance or opposition to returning to work. But few people are tackling an uncomfortable truth: we’re also partially responsible for the current situation.
Over the last decade, most phases of the design process have improved and have become more efficient, yet others ended up going the opposite direction. In the name of ‘specialization’ we embraced over-standardization, and spearheaded the commoditization (or ‘dribble-ization’) of (visual) design artifacts. Companies that have enabled this shift (like Figma, and anyone else who builds plugins for their ecosystem) also happen to be the ones that have barely been affected by these layoffs. This proliferation of overly prescriptive approaches reliant on component libraries (like design systems, OOUX, etc.) has led to mass avoidance of meaningful work in foundational formative research, information architecture and (service) mapping, which, at least to some of us, happen to encompass the most critical aspects of ‘good’ experience design. It also indirectly led us not only to the commoditization of design components, but also towards what we’re witnessing today: the commoditization of designers, and our emergence as a potentially endangered species.
In 2023, being a ‘designer’ has been reduced to assembling prefab visual components and templated structures. Many of us have recognized early the similarities between using design systems in product design, and putting Lego pieces together to ’create’ something that resembles a good product. Most of the time we end up with cookie-cutter outputs that are clunky, barely usable, and in the vast majority of cases not particularly delightful or creative. Now that we have UI component libraries rigidly yet neatly organized within those design systems, we have no need for most of the designers who did the research, IA and design work required to put them together.
And in times of economic uncertainty, can you blame the C-suite for cutting the same people who‘ve been chest-bumping on social media for years in celebration of the very things that would eventually end up making them obsolete?
But it doesn’t stop there. While it took us anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of hours to reach our current level of expertise in the research and design-related sub-disciplines we’ve specialized in, some have decided that there would be no harm in “teaching” other non-design professions to do some of our work. What they didn’t realize is that the line between ‘doing research and design work for us or with us’ and ‘doing design and research work without us’ becomes particularly blurry when layoffs are on the table. “Wanna try design thinking?” Why hire a qualified designer when they tell you that all you need is a half-day virtual workshop? “Everyone is a designer” is a phrase that has permeated and divided design social media for the better part of the last decade. Now, we‘re in an existential fight to make sure that we’re not allowing a seemingly inevitable “Everyone Used to Be a Designer” meme to become the title of our next chapter.
Rigour in experience design is also heading in the wrong direction. Due to the proverbial bending of the knee to our Agile overlords, we no longer have enough time to complete the required research, ideation, design and validation cycles needed to ensure the crafting of an optimal experience. Four-week and three-week sprints became two-week sprints, and we eventually settled on de facto 5-day design sprints. Others, thankfully a minority, are advocating for reducing design ‘sprints’ to half-day design ‘microbursts’. At this rate, design will soon become something done by an intern for half an hour during lunchtime every other Friday. Once again, another instance of us shooting ourselves in the foot by repeatedly cutting corners, and elevating the cult of the Jack Knapps of the world to deity levels in our design approach discourse. We might as well go ahead and rebrand “Lean UX” as “Gaunt UX”, to accurately reflect that ‘UX theater’ (h/t @spydergrrl) feels more like a prerequisite these days rather than a dark pattern.
The primary directive in product design has undergone a significant shift. It used to be exclusively focused on advocating and making things better for customers and (end) users. But once we‘ve realized that our approaches generate unintended consequences for fringe actors, instead of fixing the unethical systems that were created, we’ve began spending most of our time on making it way easier for developers and engineers to code and tweak our designs at will, allowing them to bypass the checks and balances of research, co-creation and discovery. In response to a tweet on this very topic, @mrialena pointed out that companies are instructing designers to “make it only easy enough for the users to use our products, but not so easy as to increase dev cost.” In other words, RIP Tesler’s Law (the law of conservation of complexity). Even Apple, who last year ended its consulting relationship with renowned former design chief Jony Ive, has recently pushed design down the reporting org chart by not hiring a new industrial design chief, further downgrading the influence designers have in that iconic organization.
Surely we all see that we’re not that far away from an AI being able to take a design system and the URL of any live site as input, and recreate the site in its image in mere seconds and bypass designers and researchers altogether. On the prototyping side, Galileo AI already converts natural language input into editable Figma-ready mobile designs. ChatGPT is not only disrupting the way we look at UX copy and content strategy, but it has passed a Google entry-level coding position interview (L3) with average compensation of US$183,000. Uncreative, ‘the world’s first fully automated creative agency powered by AI’, is about to be released. If you read between the lines, this has an alarming potential to make design ethics a historical footnote. And it’s happening while those same designers who embraced “The Great Resignation”, or thought that resorting to “quiet quitting” and “resenteeism” would keep them in the driver’s seat when it comes to their careers, find themselves on the outside looking in towards a much less favourable job market.
So what’s there to do? Well, for once, stop! Please, for the love of Papa Jakob, stop the over-reliance on building more component libraries and design systems, and focus your career growth in areas of research and design that take advantage of your advanced cognitive processing and complex decision making capabilities as opposed to pattern recognition and pattern matching. Many (most?) of the designers I respect have moved on from product design for this exact reason. They embraced specializations in areas like strategic research, service design, systems-oriented design, design futures, strategic foresight, sustainable, circular design, design fiction, etc. that are more immune to being sidelined due to the adoption of semi-obsolete component libraries. Some have decided to atone for their past sins by joining civic design and public sector practices. Others have progressed into marginally more recession-proof design leadership or design advocacy IC roles. Those who have had it with the current state of design in corporate environments have packed their bags and forged brand new paths tangential to design, becoming ethicists, educators and design (and design leadership) coaches. What do all these have in common? Only small fraction of those laid off match these subdisciplines and subspeciations. The true value of design(ers) is starting to shift from assembling UI artifacts and informing product direction, towards informing strategic business direction and improving end-to-end services within our employer’s business ecosystems.
I’ve been trying to stay positive in my weekly coaching chats when discussing the state of design with folks entering the field or trying to navigate their way through a design career. While no one wants to admit it out loud, the truth is that right now competition in the design marketplace is on steroids. We’re suddenly dealing with an unprecedented oversupply: a highly-qualified, high-performing cohort of intermediate and senior design professionals looking for a new gig at the same time. It doesn’t look like it will be an easy 2023. This certainly isn’t the context that new folks entering the field were expecting. If we expect them to follow in our footsteps (and hopefully fix some of our mistakes), let’s make sure we’re not treating them like they’re just a new batch of empathic automatons meant to replace the more expensive previous models. The same previous models who unknowingly self-immolated their surveillance capitalism careers.
