The design assembly line

Leaving it to create work that matters

“When did they industrialize your job? When did they turn what you do from a craft into an assembly line process?”

— Seth Godin (1)

Really, when did it begin? It has to have happened in the last 5 years when design courses and bootcamps became commonplace, overtaking universities as the main education tool for emerging interaction designers.

In Nielsen Norman Group’s 2020 User Experience Careers report, 65% of respondents do not have a UX-related degree (429 of 658 practitioners) but learned design through online courses, certificates, bootcamps, and other means. (2)

The field is ever-changing yet companies like General Assembly and Flatiron have managed to sell a cookie-cutter curriculum, leading to an influx of designers (I’m one of them. Designlab, what’s good!). It comes from customers favoring well-designed products which showed businesses that user experience matters (follow the money), creating incentives to hire designers. Since the type of designers ranged, it wasn’t always guaranteed if they’d hire the right designer for their team, let alone recognize what kind of designer they needed. Meanwhile, people saw the demand for UX designers and…