Evolution of the Designer Desktop

How digital product designers playing an increasingly strategic role in companies led to the emergence of a major market opportunity.

It’s hard to imagine that less than a decade ago, tools for web designers were mostly limited to Fireworks or Photoshop. Designers had already started to play a more strategic role in companies but, in many ways, the tools reinforced the outdated role of a designer — to just create good-looking pictures of products.

The landscape today is vastly different. Design, and digital product design in particular, has earned a seat at the table. Designers are driving more value across the business through their involvement in product strategy, championing the voice of the customer and creative problem-solving. In turn, the designer desktop has emerged as a major market opportunity.

InVision, Figma, Zeplin, Sketch, Adobe, Abstract, Framer, UXPin…the list goes on. Innovative companies who understand designers and see the opportunity are jumping into the market all the time. But how did we get here and what does it say about the evolution of the design role?

Consolidation Creates Opportunity

Like many people who joined the burgeoning field of user experience in the early 2000s, I didn’t go to design school. I learned just enough Photoshop to cobble together some mockups for my first interview at eBay. When I arrived, I was surprised to find two camps of designers who each lobbied for their preferred tool with fierce passion.

Visual designers insisted on Photoshop and Illustrator, while UI/UX designers championed Fireworks. Then you had Product Managers going rogue in some combination of Visio, Powerpoint, and Paint. Needless to say, file sharing was extremely painful.

Design leaders were faced with a tough tradeoff — alienate talent by mandating the use of a single tool, or sacrifice efficiency and consistency by letting everyone use the tools they prefer. Fortunately as Adobe acquired Macromedia, signaling the demise of Fireworks, there was opportunity around the corner.

Digital product designers were establishing their seat at the table and entrepreneurs started to take notice of this appealing new market.

Suddenly tools like Sketch and InVision emerged — created by people who understood the digital product designer workflow, pain points, and opportunities. This changed the game.

Standardizing on a single tool for source files is no longer a question. Nothing ends a debate faster than a clear winner; Sketch meets pretty much every need for creating source files and has created an ecosystem that enables customization and plugins to deliver increasingly more value. While we may have converged on the tool to create the screen design, there continue to be endless opportunities to innovate across the designer workflow.

Opportunity Drives Proliferation

We have a proven market opportunity for design tools and the door is wide open for competition and innovation. With tools like Invision, Abstract and Framer that can do everything from prototyping to managing design systems to motion design to user research, designers are expanding their toolkit at unprecedented rates. While we benefit from the capabilities of all of these new tools, we also pay an early-adopter tax to evaluate and learn new tools.

Adopting new technology is part of a designer’s job description, but with a finite number of hours in the day and an infinite number of directions to be pulled in, they have to prioritize judiciously and ensure they’re investing time in the highest-priority things. We’re making progress.

Designers are spending less time debating the relative merits of outdated tools and more time experimenting with new ones. It’s great for innovation but creates other challenges.

Design leaders have to balance ensuring their teams have access to the best tools and maintaining a budget. At SurveyMonkey, we decided on Sketch for source files, InVision for prototypes, and UserTesting for remote research. Beyond that suite, individual designers have the autonomy to explore and champion the usage of other tools through free or low-cost plans. If a tool emerges as a winner, then we’ll look into a team plan.

Now Back to Consolidation?

Designers still make products look good, but the role has expanded significantly. Bringing a product vision to life starts with asking questions, understanding our customers, telling a compelling story and showing not just what but how. Tools that have been successful in this space understand the workflow of a designer and integrate adjacent capabilities for tasks like prototyping, communication, feedback, sharing, and more.

We’re seeing a strong correlation between designers’ increased strategic value within organizations and the emergence of a competitive design tool market. It’s a virtuous cycle with a higher value customer meriting a greater investment within their organization which, in turn, increases the market opportunity for entrepreneurs. But who is benefiting the most? For now it seems to be designers…let’s hope it stays this way!