Lifting UX Design from the doldrums: four key craft improvements for your teams

Rather than placing the blame on Figma, or other disciplines, how might we look at current conditions and adapt?

Do you and your design team feel like your product org doesn’t appreciate your potential impact on your shared work? Don’t give up hope, but don’t kick off your next “value of design” roadshow just yet. I’m here to tell you that while things feel dire, it’s not actually about telling folks the value of design — it’s about showing the value of design via self-directed changes in our work. It’s about leading with curiosity about our product and engineering partners and adapting our techniques to address the day to day issues they’re facing alongside the customer problems we’re already so good at addressing.

It’s tough out there in the UX community right now. I should know. I was recently laid off from my role as Director of User Experience for the Player Platform and head of the UX Craft at Riot Games. I, like many other designers out there, was heartbroken and blindsided to learn that the work I’d been hired to do over two years ago growing a design team to excellence and lifting up the craft across the company was no longer a priority investment due to financial conditions. (And I’ve been assured by senior leadership that my layoff was “purely business” and not performance, so that’s the only conclusion I can draw under these circumstances.)