UX devaluation hits a historic low. It’s time to address the elephants in the room.
A few years ago, I warned that UX was repeating the devaluation process that marketing had suffered. Today, our disciplines have hit a historic low: customer experience has reached its lowest point in a decade.
Jessica Leitch, Managing Director of none other than frog North America, observes:
Forrester just released a damning report into the state of customer experience within the US market. Their data shows that US consumers are having their worst customer experiences in a decade, with their cross industry CX Index score at its lowest point since 2016.
Only 3% of customers feel like the brands that serve them are customer obsessed. Brands are failing equally across the areas of effectiveness, ease, and emotion.
The Decade of UX Decadence
This is the result of 10 years of mediocre agencies and professionals who believe that the phrase “the customer is always right” applies to the one who pays them, rather than the end customer, who is the one who lives (or suffers) the experience.
Darren Hood, another veteran in the field, comments:
The massive decline in recent years is in direct parallel with the siege against UX being executed:
- The discipline has been redefined. It’s now expected to be visual design heavy.
- UX fundamentals have been abandoned, misrepresented, and/or considered to be irrelevant.
- Clients and stakeholders are executing their own designs and using the today’s wave of order takers as marionettes.
- The vast, vast, vast majority of UX operations are run by people with little to no personal UX maturity.
- The discipline is overrun with people more interested in their paycheck than the well-being of the discipline.
Cultivating the Discipline vs. “Slash and Burn”
I have the dubious honor of being part of the group of curmudgeons who have been pointing out for years what was first a risk and then a trend: if we do not define and commit ourselves as professionals to a standard of quality, nor make those who hire us understand and value that quality, the market will be saturated with cheap rubbish.
When Don Norman and then ISO 9241:2010 defined User Experience, it was understandable that managers, executives, and decision-makers did not know what UX was and what place it should have in business decisions.
Some of us chose to build that place. Others decided to sell what was faster and easier. If that reaffirmed conceptual errors and stereotypes that punished the practice, it was not their problem: no single raindrop feels responsible for the flood.
Paving that way with metastatic business models, various “schools” have emerged in recent years that promise “quick job placement.” Pyramid schemes where, for a pittance, graduates of the previous cohort teach (???) the new cohort the small subset that bosses understand as “UX”: pretty screens and shallowly applied techniques.
I’ve met people who went through some of these schools and, as a testament to their own capability, have managed to advance. But on an institutional scale, this model was always destined to be an academic tragedy of the commons.
Facing these threats required that the professional associations born to promote our disciplines be able to rethink their policy, direction, and mission in the context that was brewing.
The other option was to bury the head in the sand.
Of Ostriches and Elephants
The two professional UX associations (UXPA and IxDA, born from Usability and Interaction Design respectively), have avoided confronting the internal and external threats that have been devaluing the discipline, limiting their efforts to organizing conferences and other activities that are necessary, but by no means sufficient.
A common argument the heads of our associations have had for this inaction is that things would sort themselves out. Declaring ethical, academic, and professional standards, a need we raised from Latin America as we saw the shit tsunami coming, was always politely ignored by directors with good careers in the first world.
From that privileged position, the threats that were first manifesting in our “peripheral” communities were systematically dismissed as exaggerations, growing pains, or isolated anecdotes that did not require institutional articulation.
A policy imbued with toxic optimism that has ultimately cornered us as professionals into a decorative position in decision-making processes.
Now that IxDA is facing the dissolution of its legal entity, it’s time to acknowledge the elephants in the room.
Sick of Being Right
We anxious people have the superpower of seeing risks from afar. And the curse that, since they are so far away, others don’t believe us.
The world’s biggest problem could have been solved when it was still small, but most did nothing because they didn’t see it. Now the problem is well grown and robust. And most do nothing because it’s hard.
If you have also been seeing how our discipline is being devalued, if you also live the torture of witnessing the risks that others ignore, if you are also sick of no one believing you at first and sick of being right in the end: follow me the good ones! (in other words, like & subscribe).
