- Raw thoughts of a UX designer — Act One -

“Hey man I got a genuine app idea that could make us millionaires!” — Every random person thinking of becoming an entrepreneur.

I’ve heard that sentence many times. I’ll admit, there was a time I would get excited when hearing it. However nowadays this sentence makes me cringe. The hype around startups ruined the perception of time and the concept of great ideas and here’s why…

The advent of the digital age and the rise of startups sparked also the rise of entrepreneurs. It all happened so fast, that in nearly 12 years, since the advent of GAFA* in 2006, the number of successful startups stories grew exponentially.

Those numbers grew so fast that every day you would hear “ X startup raised millions” , “this guy that you’ve never heard of is the first billionaire under 30 by forbes”, “these 200 startups, that you never knew existed yesterday, make millions of profits everyday”.

The fact that every day we hear such amazing stories about successful entrepreneurship adventures has sparked an unrealistic conception of success in the mind of many.

In fact, many people came to believe that starting a startup or becoming an entrepreneur is an overnight job and that the next day you’ll be cruising around in your bugatti…Well i’m sorry to burst your little bubble but it’s all a dream!

This erroneous perception of the time and effort needed to achieve success impacts many people, especially me and my job. People tends to think that we designers, whatever our field of work is (graphic, service, web, ux or ui), are magicians that will magically create a full design project or concept overnight and allow you to become an entrepreneur overnight… Well I am sorry but no.

This “fast-paced” perception of time, only allow us to come up with bad ideas. As designers we are capable of researching the next big idea and this research needs time. Since I started working as a UX & Service designer I discovered to my surprise that no organization , either big or small, allocates enough time to research or user research, I have seen many great ideas fail because they lacked enough facts to strengthen its concept.

Hence, this absurd misconception of time has also ruined the concept of great ideas. Any idea you can have is GOOD, not great. It will be great when you prove it has a market and more importantly, that it is feasible, desirable and viable (the 3 pillars of design hello?)! I cannot keep track the number of ideas I’ve heard that look good on paper but are actually impossible to implement.

The problem here is that many people who want to become entrepreneurs lack basic understanding of coding or design to understand if their idea is doable. These very people are the one who go around telling you that they have the next big million dollar idea and annoy you… But they aren’t the only problem. Even in big companies, someone in management, whom we’ve never even heard of before, ask us designers to fire up something exactly the way they want to without consulting us about its potential and asking for our feedback. No, apparently UX designers are just “ apps “ and “web” architects, made for drawing wireframes but have no say in the concept, service or idea.

This is the problem in the world today, this misconception of “time” and “great ideas” has created a form of syndrome and the Medias are to blame because these “successful” stories aren’t told the way they should be told.

They always emphasize on its CEO’s genius, its profits over the year, or the very product itself and how amazing it is. They never tell us the hard work it involved or the research it took into consideration… nor do they talk about the genius developers behind the code or the talented designers that made the perfect wireframes and service blueprints. Telling successful stories are meant to inspire others and give them directive to achieve their own success, failing to do so will push people to dream more and accomplish less.

Thus, I urge successful startups and entrepreneur to rethink the way they tell their success stories for the sake of every dreamer, every aspiring entrepreneur, by keeping in mind that they should inspire them and not make them dream and have unrealistic expectations of success.

Sincerely,

A fed up UX designer.

GAFA*: refers to the four companies that triggered the digital era: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.