Death of a UX designer, long live UX consultants!
As designers we fought for years to be at decision makers tables. What happens now that we won?
Last week I was working with my studio mates and we were trying to identify the core tasks that an interaction designer must be able to do.
The list of things we actually do was long, very long, longer that we expected: concept creation, design strategy, research, understand analytics, creating user flows, managing content and information architecture, mastering card sorting stuff or other UX methodology, performing usability tests, knowing usability guidelines by heart for every device, every context, every interface, every target segment, conducting workshops, sketching, wireframing, designing in Sketch but also in Photoshop, Illustrator and why not InDesign, prototyping in InVision, Proto.io, Axure and other hundreds tools, creating outstanding presentation and presenting them to clients like a pro, interacting with visual designers and sometimes being a visual designer yourself, creating customer journeys, stakeholders mapping, system mapping (???? whatever) other than earning a degree in social science and psychology to deal with developers, strategists, sales guys, clients, project managers, cleaning the kitchen and mopping floors and so on.
And these are considered hard skills. If we talk about soft skills, well there is a brand new universe.
Anyway, the task was simple: we needed to highlight the must have, things we wanted to improve at, things every designer willing to work in the field is expected to know. Easy breezy. Must haves isolated were: wireframing, prototyping, analytics, user research and other similar shit.
“Wait a moment guys, I haven’t done this stuff since years ago”
I said. Except for some minor project. Not big money projects. Big money projects is something else. We do something else. We fill excels. We work in Power Point. We say adiós to beauty. Even if we tried. We tried hard to stand the helm. But reality is: we failed, under the heavy weight of business and consultancy. And there is more: that day, the day we were discussing the list I was actually working in the studio and not by the client. And this is something rare, very rare these days. Nowadays it’s all about “help them at home”, not only when it comes to migration.
You know what guys? Let’s try another list, a more realistic one. I will get some help by looking at a recent open position on LinkedIn for a UX consultant, offered by a big consultancy firm with no experience whatsoever in user experience before like, today. First of all, the dude’s job function is considered to be: project management and consulting. Interesting. Then he/she must be able to gather functional requirements and produce functional documentation during the whole product/service lifecycle, identifying business goals.
Fair, but let me translate this to you: filling excels for a CTO team and over producing PPT presentations on behalf of clients.
Wrapping up: be prepared to say goodbye to all those beautiful things you were used to do as designers and embrace badges, presentations, meetings, pre-meetings, politics…
I am not complaining about my specific job. I actually like it. I could not imagine myself designing wireframes my entire life. But I guess it’s a decision designers should be able to make. Instead this is a common shift all designers are experiencing. No one asked me if I liked it. It just happened. Designers fought for years to gain the honor of sitting at decision makers tables and not only working in the backroom. I think it’s like the old Yiddish curse:
“Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true”
