When Companies Question the Value of Design
‘What’s the ROI of UX?’ is the most idiotic question ever asked
Designers get asked the value of their work all of the time. They never have a good answer.
There are good reasons for this. Often, designers don’t actually add value. They tweak colors and shapes of objects on the screen, or they move controls from one side to the other. They change the hamburger menu to a tossed-salad menu. When much of what passes for interaction design is really just visual tweaking, what quantifiable value does it provide? Not much.
But far and away, the reason design practitioners don’t add value is that their organizations prevent them from doing so.
If your boss is asking you to quantify the value of your work, you need to understand that your work indeed has no value. Not at that company. Not with that boss.
The people who hire designers and ask them what their value is pretty clearly don’t know what designers do, don’t really care, and don’t really want any value they might contribute.
There are far, far more “UX designers” employed today than there were 20 years ago, and yet most of the newly created…
