Is the value of UX falling?

Whether it’s a sign of the strapped financial circumstances (the cozzie livs) or there’s something else in the water, UX seems to be having a tough time right now.

It seems like every time I wade into the quagmire that is LinkedIn, there is a list of very good, talented UX folks struggling to find a new role or contract or having recently been made redundant. Obviously, it’s not a secret that tech is having a slight wobble, and we’re seeing products and large tech giants making sweeping layoffs across their teams, but anecdotally, many of those roles appear to be in UX.

There are even articles written about UX being oversaturated (it isn’t), but I think it’s missing the biggest point that we are, as a community, still struggling to articulate.

What do we think UX is?

One thing that I’ve experienced over my many years in the industry is the shifting attitude, awareness, and understanding of user experience as a concept.

More than ever, within the industry, we confuse each other with terms that rarely mean much. User journeys, user flows, user maps, empathy maps, user stories, user scenarios… it’s a confounding array of terms that serve only to make our jobs sound more important, and technical, and necessary.

We’re thinking about the wrong things. UX maturity comes from understanding the strategy behind a product’s development, setting great, realistic goals to edge it toward the end vision, and being pragmatic and flexible about the work that’s done to achieve those goals.

Really, nobody outside of UX or product design gives a shit what all your tools are. We should continue to share our practice amongst ourselves, strive to improve our methods and find new ways to discover information or test our assumptions, but we need very different conversations to convince others of our value.

This is how we fail.

Sure, there’s a place for other business areas to understand what UX is for, what it does, and where it fits. The best product organisations - the ones that stand the test of time, that produce artefacts that are desirable and coveted - are ones with founders who understand user-centred design or are designers themselves.

That’s not an accident. Working lean, understanding what’s important for people, and keeping the customer truly at the centre of everything is the crux of great design, after all.

But as UX leaders, when we fail to use our ‘seat at the table’ to actually integrate UCD as part of the business, we fail the teams that rely on our leadership. It’s a problem that I’ve failed at as much as anyone else, and there’s no easy way to do it, but it’s happening nonetheless.

UX should be everything.

We lament that UX is the centre of it all, that it’s not just visual but how a product feels, and we discuss in detail that it’s about everything the customer experiences - and that almost every decision that a business makes is, by its very nature, a design decision. If you know what design is, that’s an easy argument to make.

If that’s the case, UX is no less important than it ever used to be. But perhaps the separation of UX is something we should talk about.

Should it be a separate function? Or actually, is a great design decision something that anyone could - nay, should - make? Should we actually be simply teaching our product founders and leaders the skills they need to do good UX themselves?

I’m talking myself out of a job. But into another, I suppose.

I’ve always said that a huge part of our role at The User Story is teaching and coaching. How do we help others around us to think in a more user-centered, lean, test-and-learn way? Perhaps it’s time for us as an industry to have a difficult inward conversation.

This feels unfinished.

Honestly, I’m not sure how to finish up this post. It feels like it’s hanging like an errant bag of dog poop accidentally thrown into a tree.

I suppose I feel as though our industry has been through a lot, had growing pains for years, and is still struggling with self-definition and promoting understanding to the point where it feels like we’re not getting much further overall. But we have people that have incredible skills, in a broad set of areas, all able and willing to share them.

We are, if anything, definitely not gatekeepers of knowledge after all!

I just don’t know where my position ends and where it starts any more. I’ve helped startups to build incredible products, understood user needs in vehicle mechanics, financial services, and even the medical industry. But is that a ‘UX’ thing? Is it product? Am I consulting or entrepreneurial? I don’t know.

All I know is that the value in UX design is still absolutely huge and we need good design in order to help people to eat better, find the things they’re after, and protect our planet. I just don’t know if our roles make sense any more.

The value hasn’t changed. But what we think of the industry might have.

But I’d love to hear what you think.