The end of UX design: the birth of product leadership?

Giving up design as a process instead of visual excellence for something bigger

Non-UI UX is dead: noone wants “wireframers” anymore. It has far-flinging implications, but I guess the problem lies elsewhere.

Please note: I’m personally affected by this. I don’t have a visual talent — I have considerable knowledge attainable about graphics design, but just like someone with a body type of a walrus won’t became a gymnast no matter how hard they train, I will not be able to clearly see visual harmony as much as it is needed for that profession. Been there, tried that, for more years than I’d like to admit, but called myself a UX designer for 12 years.

It seems nowadays, that classic UX design jobs are scarce and are hard to be found. Everyone expects design to be just that — design. Pixel-perfect, detailed to the core, and while folks like me tried to argue for years that design doesn’t mean that, that design is a process, or that design systems will solve this problem once and for all — it just isn’t true.

People mean by design what they meant always: visual layout.

I’ve seen so many counterarguments from my non-visual UX peers about this, that

• interior design is not visual — not true: lectured in a school which trains interior designers, it is about the looks, and not much else
• product design is not visual — not true: I teach on product designer BSc and MSc. Students who signed up for this are usually content with shape and form, don’t care about inner workings or process by nature. They are in love with object-making, a practical form of sculpting essentially.
• graphics design is about the experience — not true… at the end of the day your work is judged by its looks, not conversion
• that in some fancy ways, design also means this or that — sure, but we usually have separate words for these activities

Design as a process is an abstraction invented by analytical people like me, never truly believed by anyone outside our circle

We.are.not.designers.

So I guess we made a mistake: we called UX design UX design. That’s when we brought over a bunch of folks who cared about looks more than about function and the rest is history: we lost our own profession. Mind you: a lot of these are fantastic folks! Most of them care about function somewhat. Maybe some of them are even balanced between looks and behaviour. It’s just that non-visual design doesn’t exists anymore as a separate job role in companies as simply it was never a concept adopted by the masses.

So when neither your clients, nor your “peers” accept that what you do is design, or that you can design at all — it’s time to stop calling yourself a designer. Once and for all. All of us, who can’t spend an hour about kerning, but would like to usability test a wireframe-based prototype, we are not, and never were designers: we are architects at most.

I was rejected so many times on the basis of “it’s great that this product became an overnight sensation as it provided just what was needed by a long underserved user group, but the alignment of the buttons just isn’t right so no” (actual quote), that it’s time to stop pretending.

This isn’t the end of the world: I still remember talking to Gyuri Juhasz, the original designer of ArchiCAD, a project started in 1982, about 10 years ago, that he had so many titles over the years, he doesn’t really mind what’s written on his business card anymore. Gone are the time of human factor engineers, ergonomists, usability experts, information architects, HCI consultants and the rest — UX, as a name, should simply join this list of forgotten names for the same profession, no matter how much we like it.

Product discovery and delivery

So who are we?

In fact, specifying features, behaviour, look and feel for a piece of software is a step which needs to be done, and it is affected by a multitude of roles and professions. So, instead of mulling over the changing division of labor where skills are needed which we (or at least I) don’t have, let’s look at other sets of skills and viewpoints during a software development process.

Let’s take a look at a different profession: product management — who are our clients mostly.

In the product management world, there are essentially two phases:

• Discovery — deciding what the product should be and
• Delivery — make that product and bring it to the market

Classic UX — or UCD, user centred design — definitely belongs to the former: it deals with information on what users need (not want), what is their daily life, what is their context — and tries to answer that by a series of prototypes, aimed at one thing only: to test what would be the best experience, and therefore, the best product(s) to be made.

UI however, is mainly delivery: once you have a general notion of what you want, it needs to be developed from a visual standpoint. Of course, no frontend developer would like to start coding before all pixels fall into place, but still, it’s something which needs to be “developed”, “delivered” by a team of specialist experts — therefore, it’s part of delivery.

I’m not claiming that the discovery-delivery dual notion of product management is good, and of course it may seem, that I forgot about iterations (bear with me, it was just simplified out), but it’s something which makes the difference between classic UX / UCD and UI design easier to grasp.

Discovery and delivery teams are usually separate organisations

The thing is: I still live in Central Europe.

I worked a lot in public procured projects, where we spend taxpayer money on stuff like public transportation or building permit systems. In all of these projects, without exception, there is a separate team, which does the product discovery, and once the specification is settled, it is given up to essentially an auction (a tender) to whoever can deliver it better and — in most cases — cheaper. Lowest bidder wins.

Both in these projects and in outsourcing, most development teams are delivery-only teams. A product is “discovered” — imagined or researched, but defined — by a group of people in the more wealthy part of the world, and they give money to a “cheap” team somewhere in Central Europe or Asia to deliver it. In this situation, it’s really hard to argue with the client for their own sake, especially in the beginning of the relationship: you are expected to execute, not to participate in a discussion.

The only exception seems to be small product teams, where a product organisation contains a bunch of developers to deliver what they might see right, and are judged by external factors (like, revenue generated by the given feature or product), not by precision and speed of execution.

No delivery-only team can be truly agile: their profit lies on sold development hours, or spared development time out of the fixed price. Their contracts define what requirements to execute against, and they are praised for their speed of delivery, not by the user experience their results provide. In fact, their bottom line is hardly affected by the experience: as long as the client got what they had in the contract, they get paid, and rarely get paid more for achieving a better experience than required.

Product management has its own issues

Of course I’m not to tell all former UX designers to become product managers. First off, there is no labor shortage in that regard: in fact, the Product Manager (PM) job market is oversaturated, especially now, that all the FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon…) have let quite a lot of their PMs go. Also, I don’t think that we don’t need to learn more in order to become product managers, even if it’s less about a born-with talent like graphics design and more likely a set of learnable skills.

However, what UX has, and product management seemingly does not, is method: everyone knows what to expect of a true UCD professional. It even has its own set of standards, like, ISO 9241–210 and ISO 25000 series and whatnot, and one can reasonably assume, when hiring a UX person, to execute along the line of these.

Also, most product managers are terrible UX designers: their knowledge of cognitive psychology is superficial, they don’t necessarily know what constitutes a proper interview question, have interesting (if not terrifying) ideas about statistics and product validation (no, if 5 people out of the first 10 you’ve ever asked likes an idea, it doesn’t mean a thing) and let’s not get into the intricacies of design patterns and interaction.

But still I see a potential here:

Maybe if we unite the formal knowledge of UX design, to what is expected from contemporary product management during discovery phase, we could have a new profession.

After all, thinking of it, a crucial difference between a Business Analyst and a UX Designer was this notion of user advocacy, being biased towards this particular set of stakeholders and taking up responsibly for them. Maybe if we take this responsibility a bit further, instead of just nagging our direct clients, we could have more profound impact in a way we would like to see?

A profession with a new name

What every UX and service designer knows, at senior level and especially above, that you have to “lead without authority”: you are never given the accountability and power what a “higher-up” has.

There is a crucial difference between management and leadership: while management is about controlling resources, leadership is defined by having followers. You are a leader in case people do what you say without requiring them to do so. Not that we wouldn’t need managers: I, for one, would miss all deadlines if I hadn’t had good managers around me in the projects I do (especially the quite long running, complex ones).

All successful UX designers are leaders by default

In most cases, UX designers have to act as leaders: noone forces developers, or product managers to execute a UX designer’s ideas to the last detail. You have to carefully craft the message, the vision, sometimes individually, sometimes towards a group, in order to make sure that the experience actually gets delivered. For service designers, it’s even harder as basically by definition they work across organisational boundaries.

Product management is looking for its new name also

Product management never actually managed the resources they were working with — in any Agile enough organisation, that’s usually a work of a Scrum master, if it isn’t given to a team to organise themselves.

So here comes “Product lead”

Since their job is more about showing a direction, being a product director, or product lead is what describes their profession better, and some of them would opt for this name it seems from recent discussions.

Unifying two professions

It’s obvious, that teams need leaders to follow when executing such a complex behaviour as building software: teams need a vision executing towards for. But what that vision will be, how will it adhere to market and human conditions?

Apart from leadership skills, can’t we add the skillset of a good UX designer? To unite, present, illustrate and visualise visions, to make sure, it’s based on what users truly need, to make sure, that whoever designs software understands its implications on the human psychè, not just on the level of a Cosmopolitan article, but with actual, proven models of cognitive and behavioural psychology, by speaking to and observing the target audience, to have an external, not an internal focus on what the market needs, yet to be able to facilitate internal discussions around business needs in order to survive the ever-changing complexity of real life?

Because actually, this is what most classic UX designers do: they not only watch what the competition does (albeit that’s something required at the beginning of every project), not only speak with stakeholders, but they actually do observe the contexts where a potential product is used, identify the needs, prototype and test solutions iteratively before coming to a conclusion — usually a requirements document along with a set of screens.

Are we the chipper guys?

In the Mitchell and Webb sketch above, as roles of ancient industrialisation change, so do certain jobs — this time, the chipper’s, who is making stone blades — become irrelevant. I can’t help but thinking of this… but, there is no way for some of us with a primary analytical mindset to learn graphics design.

I believe that UI does not define the experience if it only defines shape, but not content. Then the definition of experience lies elsewhere, in someone else’s hand, and they are the true designers of user experience.

Also, I believe, understanding customers and users, and bringing more useful solutions for their jobs to be done, which take less effort to use, convert better, solve more edge cases and bring less errors, is still a crucial part of software development — and revenues and sales figures on my side.

Even if the buttons didn’t align, that damn thing took 40% of a 10-year old market in 6 months from launch.