“UX Design is over”: online opinions in an offline reality

Over my career, I’ve noticed something that’s always interested (and confused) me: online, there are lots of strong opinions argued about how design should be done, but they never (or, charitably, almost never) apply to my day-to-day work. And, if not for the internet, I’d also never (or, charitably, almost never) hear these strong opinions represented in my day-to-day, either — not from colleagues, managers, nor anywhere else in my daily life. And this is precisely what I want to explore in this article: why?

But I want to be clear: my motivation in writing this opinion piece is not that I do (or don’t) want those opinions to be shared — it’s that, despite the forcefulness of the opinions concerning correctness in how one “does” design, it all seems entirely unrecognizable to my daily life (and, cumulatively, the entire arc of my career), and I find this very confusing. This is never more obvious than when I spent some months mentoring heavily: every mentee told me they’d never heard of my advice before, and I’m not the only mentor who’s talked about this. What’s more, with every passing year, these aforementioned opinions only grow less relevant to my daily life.

But then I open LinkedIn once in a while, or see suggested articles on Medium, or video recommendations on YouTube, or stumble across design subreddits, or mentor pre-career designers from bootcamps (or self-taught via the aforementioned online sources), and these views reappear once again, and it’s professional whiplash all over again. So, again, I wonder: what explains this?

What are some examples of this?

Before I go into my analysis of this discrepancy, I do want to spend some time elaborating on what opinions I’m referring to in the aforementioned section. I try my best not to cite specific sources that represent some of the strongly held opinions I refer to in this article, as I prefer to focus on ideas, rather than on organizations or individuals. Instead, I’ll do my best to provide a list of commonly argued themes that I only hear outside of my daily work, rather than within it:

1. Arguments about “UX” being “ruined” by “UI,” or that they are separate functions, or any derivation of this.
2. Arguments about product development and interface design being a “science,” or any derivation of this.
3. Arguments about “information architecture” being a separate role, function, or step apart from regular, daily design work, or any derivation of this.
4. Arguments about design “needing to get a seat at the table” (needing to prove itself as a valuable function), and that the way to do this is to connect it to “business outcomes” in order for design to justify itself as useful in an organization, or any derivation of this.
5. Arguments about “design maturity,” and how (at low design maturity companies), UX Designers are often treated as little else than visual designers with no agency or impact on whether something should ship, or how something works, mindlessly improving the look of mocks created by PMs (or any other function), or any derivation of this.
6. Arguments about designers “needing a process” of their own (usually involving frameworks, methodologies, or things like user journeys, empathy maps, wireframing, agile/scrum being good or bad, double diamonds), or any derivation of this.
7. Arguments about how “UX Design is over” because we have “left behind traditional User Centered practices” (or any other design framework that is not commonly used), or any derivation of this.
8. Arguments about titles, where “UX Design” is a different role (with different expectations) to “Product Design,” or any derivation of this.
9. Arguments about how there are specialties within interface design, or any derivation of this.
10. Resources with particular focuses on design for websites, or very simple web apps (e.g., e-commerce sites, etc.).

And so on. I’ve touched on many of these topics in the past but, looking at this list, none of these focuses or themes come up in my daily life at work. I’ve worked at big tech companies (the fruit company, previously the camera app company, the bird factory app, the yoga project management app), all the way to unknown, smaller tech companies of eight to one hundred people, and I never (or, charitably, almost never) saw hide nor hare of these arguments or focuses. I also never see any of these processes, frameworks, ideologies, etc., feature in my (or my colleagues’) work.

Certainly, it’s the internet, so people will opine on anything and everything, which is a great thing! But this is not why I write this, again: what I’ve been trying to understand is why this discrepancy between online opinions and offline reality has cropped up in the first place. I haven’t been able to put my finger on this — that is, until more recently.

From where does this tension source from?

I’ve turned this tension over in my mind for some time, but have had a hard time getting all my thoughts connected until more recently. What changed for me was hearing some of the personal experiences of designers that typically discuss the topics mentioned above — their motivations and personal stories, and really trying to connect them all together. I’ve come to two major conclusions:

1. They are right… When these designers talk about any of those topics listed above, they are completely right in their assessments, and they are telling the truth. I’ve personally experienced all of this in my time working at Disney+, and a company called Intralinks, to offer personal examples, and can personally confirm the veracity of the above mentioned claims.
2. …But only within the context of their industry. Despite the aforementioned conclusion, the topics discussed above by these designers do not apply to the industry I’m in. This is because, despite sharing the same title (as myself and other designers I’ve worked with), we work in different industries, and their experiences are best considered within the context of theirs, rather than the one I work in, for example.

I realize this is kind of confusing, so let me elaborate best I can: I believe these designers when they say that, at their companies, the aforementioned topics are real concerns and phenomena that they experience and observe. I believe them when they say that, at their companies…:

• …UX and UI are (often) two different functions, performed by two different people.
• …Design is the last consulted when new products or features are considered, and they have a hard time convincing company leadership to change that.
• …Design is relegated to a role where they have no meaningful control over the shape of business decisions — they only exist to “beautify” some mocks a PM (or someone else) made, even if the feature, itself, makes no sense or has no hope for market fit (i.e., no consumer demand).
• …Processes and frameworks matter to their managers, and are important to help create an air of authority and respectability in the eyes of leaders whom frequently dismiss them. They want to show leadership that there is a science to this, and they want leadership to respect their authority, as seekers of customer truth, and representatives of what customers want.
• …They work (often) on web experiences, and the web is still a highly relevant platform on the market at large and to their users, especially.
• …The nature of their work tends to focus heavily on fundamental structural issues, like the information architecture (or structure) of a web page, and interaction work is mainly about animations and flourishes.
• …Design maturity is a reality they have to assess at their companies, for all the reasons listed above.
• …They often have to tail engineers, and operate using agile/scrum, when it doesn’t feel appropriate for them.
• …The situation described above (for many) is not improving, and they might even feel stuck, demoralized, and even hopeless in the face of a lack of progress in the industry, and even in their own careers.

It’s been a really long time, but after hearing some of their personal stories, it brought me back to the fact that I’ve felt this way before, most notably at the start of my career (at Intralinks, with a brief interlude at Disney+ as a reminder (which I quickly forgot about until more recently — it’s all a blur!). I’ve observed all of this at these two companies and, though I’m happy to go into detail about what these experiences looked like compared to my experiences in the tech industry, it’ll probably make this article longer than it already is, so I’ll just have to leave this to another time!

Not all software companies are tech companies

Again, like I said in point two above, these experiences I’ve touched on above — ones that designers at these companies talk a lot about — are real, but here’s an oft-neglected (but extremely important) caveat: they really only apply to their industry. What I mean by this is that, in the tech industry, these experiences are uncommon, at best.

I’ve talked about what defines a tech company at length in previous articles, but to summarize: the “tech company” is a subset of software companies, in general. To keep this concise, I’ll use examples: where companies like U-Haul, General Motors, General Electric, Fidelity, Target, Walmart, Visa, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Bank of America, Best Buy, etc., are all massive companies that make software (they can be called software companies for this reason), they are not tech companies. Tech companies also make software, with notable examples like Figma, Apple, Uber, Instagram, Notion, Substack, Slack, etc., but they aren’t like the companies listed earlier, where the aforementioned experiences are rife. Your day to day just looks different, despite sharing the same (or similar) titles.

I’ve talked about how design (generally) works at tech companies (probably my most popular opinion piece for reasons that, if not already self-evident, will hopefully become more obvious by the end of this opinion), but just to summarize some top-line differences between their experiences and those of designers at tech companies: you don’t have to “fight for a seat at the table” when you work at Airbnb or Apple or Instagram, for example — the design org can veto anything and everything, and they can even be said to have outsized power when compared to other functions. Idea generation for what to build also often comes from designers, themselves, rather than PMs, so you’re not really getting told what to do at these companies, as a designer.

At most tech companies, web experiences are less commonly a priority when compared to native apps — as a result, there’s a high expectation around interaction work (for example, iOS is highly gestural and heavily interactive — there are scarcely “pages” in iOS, outside of things like the settings view). The web isn’t a highly performant platform and also can’t take advantage of gestures, so interaction work should be reasonably limited, which means designers at non-tech companies won’t be doing much of that in their day to day.

What’s more, tech companies don’t hire UX designers and UI designers, respectively. There is usually one designer per workstream, and you’re expected to do it all. The bar is very high — you need to come up with pertinent ideas (have good product sense), you need to be able to model it taking advantage of native gestures (have good interaction skills), and it also needs to look very professional and fit into the quality of the rest of the app (have good visuals). There is no wireframing your way into a complex swipe or pinch gesture of multiple elements on a canvas (as is the case in Instagram stories), you model it by building a prototype using something like Origami (or AE, or whatever you prefer, but something like this). The barrier to entry is high when designing for these apps.

With some exceptions, we don’t frequently have to worry overly much about redesigning the whole structure of an app (i.e., information architecture at the app-level, because we usually don’t have fatal structural issues that need to be resolved — we worry about the structure of the features we add in, because the foundations we build into are usually pretty solid in the first place (though decluttering apps is normally required over time, e.g., Spotify, Google Maps, Instagram, Uber, iOS, etc., have all undergone substantial structural UI changes with time in my living memory).

I could go on forever, but the point I want to emphasize here is that, while these designers are facing real issues, these are issues experienced mainly in their industry — not in the tech industry. When these designers write things like “UX Design is over,” or “designers are relegated only to visuals now,” or “you need to prove to company leadership that design matters by connecting it to business outcomes,” or “web design is key,” or “you need frameworks in design,” or anything mentioned above, these are realities in their industry, not in tech.

I’ve had the privilege of working in their industry and seeing these realities they struggle with first-hand, but I’ve also been fortunate enough to have a look behind the curtain with first-hand experiences at tech companies, and they are genuinely just different beasts. These differences aren’t small, and they are hard to appreciate when you’ve not had that first-hand experience, yourself, so it can be very easy to write these articles talking about design at large without realizing that the experiences of non-tech designers are not relevant to the experiences of designers at tech companies.

Ending this opinion now, lol

I think these designers should continue to share their perspectives, and I hope things improve for them in their industry. I know the pain — so much so that this is actually why I decided to hustle and leave the industry and get into tech, because I knew immediately that I didn’t like the way software companies like those described made me feel about myself and my life. But I also think:

• Designers at tech companies don’t frequent LinkedIn, Medium, or Reddit, so their voices are underrepresented on these surfaces (favoring Twitter and Substack).
• Designers at non-tech companies do frequent LinkedIn, Medium, and Reddit, so their voices are overrepresented on these surfaces.

However, bootcamps and universities, mainly optimizing students for careers at non-tech companies, encourage students to spend most of their time on LinkedIn and Medium, which I’ve realized is what explains the complete shock that I (and other designers I’ve talked to who do a lot of mentoring) see from mentees when I explain how tech companies actually work. There’s even a thread from a designer who got hired from a design program directly into IG, and he talked about exactly this discrepancy (for any designer that wants to work in tech, I strongly encourage this read!).

As long as educational programs continue to encourage students on to these platforms, consuming content from non-tech designers, while not first assessing their students’ longterm goals (i.e., whether they want to have a career mainly in tech, or non-tech), then students will continue to be surprised by what designers at tech companies have to say.

And, as long as designers at non-tech companies conflate their experiences with designers at tech companies, newcomers will continue to be caught in career bootloops, and non-tech designers may never realize the changes they’ll need to make to turn those rejections into offers from tech companies they (sometimes) don’t admit to wanting to work at — the conversation will just continue to start and stop at sour grapes, with no abatement.

And, as long as designers at tech companies remain largely silent before the eager and curious, the fewer opportunities aspiring designers will have to grow.