How many other jobs are mostly about justifying your job?

The problem with contemporary UX Design

There is a lot of negativity in our industry at the moment, which I wrote about recently. The response to that article has been significant, but not surprising.

There are so many UXers who are dropping out of the game because of mental and emotional exhaustion. And from what I’ve heard following that article, it’s mostly because of the need to keep fighting every day just to do our jobs, which started me thinking — how many other careers are there, where you spend most of your time justifying your existence?

How many other careers are there, where you spend most of your time justifying your existence?

Imagine a world

Can you imagine a world where doctors have to justify being allowed to save peoples’ lives? Or firefighters have to justify being allowed to put out fires, or have access to a water supply?

OK, a bit dramatic.

What if financial advisors and accountants had to justify being allowed to make you money? What if any job where skill is involved had to argue constantly that they should do the thing.

Now imagine it’s you.

Wait — even worse — imagine you’re hired based on your skills and abilities, and then not only stopped from doing your job, but your company and clients will try to convince you that it should be done a completely different and manifestly wrong way?

That’s right, it’s absolutely bonkers.

And yet, that’s the situation many UX designers, product designers, UX researchers and even (or especially) UX and design leadership find themselves in today.

It was inevitable

As I mentioned recently in my rant about UX versus late-stage Capitalism, once UX people went in-house they inevitably became at risk of becoming part of the machine and had a front row seat for the dismissal of evidence and the making of ill-advised, business-centric decisions.

Even working in an agency is fraught with battle grounds unless it’s a pure-play UX agency and there are few of them left who haven’t been bought, merged or integrated into bigger machines.

It’s not new, it’s just louder

In UX world it seems to me that a ‘generation’ of training and mindset is about 5–10 years apart. Of my generation therefore, I’m the only person left of the people I came up with who hasn’t sacked off perm in favour of freelance roles — whether in-house or agency — simply because it’s easier to get paid for doing the best job you can and then move on and not have to stand by and watch your work get degraded and discarded.

Those pratitioners who trained my generation have either started their own boutique micro agencies where they can choose who they work with and how, or moved into a teaching or coaching role where they can create the content they want for the knowledge they wish to preserve and hand down, independent of client and stakeholder whims.

For the massive cohort of post-bootcamp young’uns coming in under me, I see little evidence that many of them have seen good, robust, evidence-based work delivered end-to-end with as much user-centricity as a rational business can muster.

I’m not talking here about purist academic HCI — I’m talking about what I consider to be the basic concepts and theories of UX, design psychology and graphic design many of which to be completely alien concepts with zero existing mental model.

But at the same time the younger generation, impacted in my country at least by the housing market (generation rent), massive student debt that’s had no positive impact on future earnings and big dollop of lockdown-based self-reflection simply are not prepared to take this any more.

And good on them.

They are genuinely and rightly asking questions about how this UX dream they were sold has not become a reality. And why they live in a world where not only are they not respected and allowed to ply their trade, but the senior UX and product design people above them barely have enough spoons left to manage them day-to-day let alone nuture their training and development with the passion they deserve.

It’s not unusual

I used to think it was just agencies that stopped good UXers doing good work. Then I started mentoring people working in every environment from start ups to in-house to government. Then I started mentoring product managers, and UX directors, and researchers and IAs…

Many many people within the user-centred design industry are fighting different types of battles just to do their jobs effectively and in line with anything resembling best practice, using an iota of user research before leaping into pixel-based decisions.

But it’s not everywhere, and it’s not every company

But it’s not everywhere, and it’s not every company. Sure, UX Utopia does not exist because businesses pay our wages, but there are companies that actually deserve good UX people.

Something has to change

We are going to reach a point where good UX people are going to have to vote with their feet and stop accepting this kind of nonsense.

Realistically, if you are competent and actually good as a UX designer/researcher/product human then you deserve to work somewhere that appreciates and values your skills and — shock, horror — allows you to do your job.

Such places do exist. There’s just going to have to be an evolution of the industry that filters the wheat from the chaff so that good companies get the good UXers they deserve, and the bad companies get the poor user and business outcomes that they deserve.

A new race to the top

Striving for mediocrity cannot become the norm. Bootcamps mass- generating inexperienced idealists to fill roles in puppet UX teams delivering UX theatre cannot be the future of this industry we’ve all poured our hearts, souls and sanity into.

I vote for education and self-improvement through continual study. I vote for striving to be the best driver you can be independent of the shitty car you may currently be driving, and going out and finding the jobs you deserve; that deserve you.

And if this happens, then those who keep fighting — not by battling politics (which drains your spoons), but by fighting to be better UXers (which fills your soul), will compete for the top jobs. And those jobs will both value and pay you for your expertise.

And they’ll let you do your damn job.

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