Design is Not Dead - But the Narrative Might Be

Pamela Mead at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/xgOo-uJheeI

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Where we are in the bust cycle

[00:00:07] Today I want to talk to you a little bit about design and high tech, and what I observe as the current state of the industry, if you will. I've lived through several boom and bust cycles during my career, and I've watched how enthusiastic hiring is usually followed by incredible soul-searching and questions around the insanity that Rory was talking about. Why are we still being misunderstood? How come we're undervalued? And why do we not have a seat at the table?

[00:00:37] Today I would like to propose a couple of narratives that I believe need to change as we get ready for the next inevitable boom. I'll go through these, and I'm not really giving you answers, but I very much hope this will start the discussion amongst all of you: how do we really get to the next stage?

[00:00:58] Just to start, let's look a little bit at where we are in this bust cycle. Most tech companies did more or less okay during the COVID crisis, but then were swept up in the overenthusiastic hiring of 2022, with free money, especially in the United States, and that was followed by the crash. You can see this in this slide on the number of job openings in tech that are currently open. They've been pretty much flat since about 2023, and that very much reflects the layoffs we've been reading about for several years now. The good news is they're slowing down, but the reality is that the overall market is still quite saturated with people looking for jobs relative to the number of jobs open in the market.

[00:01:50] Bot Patel [?], a writer on Substack, did an analysis of about 2,800 layoffs across 40 companies, and he discovered these ratios. Product managers and designers are 2.6 or 2.3 times more likely to get laid off than engineers. And I apologize to my team of researchers who are here, but research is more than three times as likely to be laid off.

[00:02:22] Now let's add AI into this mix, which is what we have to be dealing with. Almost 80% of companies are now investing in AI. Everybody knows they need to really get with it and figure out how it will work for them. A lot of the services and operations being optimized through AI are very predictable. Customer support can really benefit from new technology that facilitates solving simple problems for customers. We have a lot of operational functions, and a lot of good work done in risk and fraud.

[00:03:02] But the one I want to highlight, which is really quite important for product development, is that in the top 10 is content creation. For some companies that also includes translation. Where I am, I hear a lot of expectations that by the end of next year content creation can be fully automated. I have lots of opinions about that. But I think what it really means is that we need to be really aware that in the product development cycle, all the disciplines are at some point going to be looking at a different way to work using AI.

[00:03:44] So AI will be the disruptor. We know this already. But I also believe it can be an opportunity.

A short history of booms, busts and the design discipline

[00:03:50] I want to look back a little bit at previous boom and bust cycles, just to have a better sense of history. This is an approximation. It's not a real scientific graph, so think of it more as, roughly, these are the kinds of cycles we've had since the 1990s. Somebody was asking me, in preparation for this, how often these happen. Since 1850 there have been about 34 of these boom and bust cycles. So they do happen on a very regular basis. They generally last between seven and 10 years, and sometimes, of course, they're a little bit shorter, like the one we've just experienced.

[00:04:31] What's really interesting is to understand what drives these boom and bust cycles. The boom cycles are usually driven by some kind of tech innovation, or potentially some kind of change in legislation. If you look at this, we have some innovation in the finance sector, especially in the United States. By the way, I apologize that I'm referencing the United States quite a bit here. We had several financial-services-based meltdowns, if you will: the savings and loan crisis in the early 90s, and then of course the very well-known recession in 2009.

[00:05:09] But then we also had the tech innovation that led to the significant boom of the dot-com era. I don't know how many of you lived through it, but it was really remarkable and a complete insanity. It was followed, of course, by the bust, because of the over-enthusiasm. And we've now been in a pretty steady 10-year growth cycle, very much driven by digital, by mobile, by different forms of technology innovation, with everything being in the cloud. So for anybody who's built their career over the last 10 years, you've been living through this amazingly positive growth cycle, with lots of enthusiasm for different roles and disciplines. But the reality is that was the last 10 years, and now there's a change, and this is a pretty repetitive cycle.

[00:05:59] Coming back to design, I think it's also quite interesting to look at how design as a discipline has evolved in that period of time. Very early on, we went from being graphic designers to being interaction designers, and that was super exciting, being much more digital, much more interactive. Then it became experience design, it became service design. The dot-com era really blew up the discipline with lots and lots of different titles and sub-disciplines. What's interesting is to see how that has changed back a bit and coalesced more towards what we're now calling a product designer.

[00:06:40] At the same time, product development processes have been looking to adapt to these new ways of working, and Rory was already giving some of his perspectives on that. The Agile Manifesto was a really big movement, of course, but now we have all the derivatives of it. Design thinking was introduced as a way to bring design as a discipline a little closer to business, and to really start to marry that design-business dialogue.

[00:07:08] After the dot-com bust we had a proliferation of various ways to try to understand how we can do better and be more predictable in the future. Whether that's talking about whether investment in design is really building business value, with the articles written about the ROI of design; the Lean Startup and everything being lean; design sprints, which were another way to introduce a bit of design thinking into the processes; and of course now agile scaling, with ways in which teams could be organized. Again, we have a lot of learnings and a lot of perspectives on how successful they are.

How design got commoditized

[00:07:48] One of the things I want to reflect on in the conversation today is that in this continuous adaptation, especially of the design discipline, to shorter and shorter development cycles, these two-week sprints, these pizza teams, we have commoditized the value of design. Now we have one single designer in a team doing all these different things, taking on all these disciplines. They have to be good at UI, they have to be good at UX, they have to be good at animation. They have to be pixel perfect. Maybe they even have to write code. And they have to do all of this over two-week sprints, where they have to work ahead for the next sprint, support the sprint that's in action, and hopefully also QA what has been developed.

[00:08:33] I think it's a little bit insane, and I think it's actually not scalable. What has happened in the process is that designers who are really stretched have regressed to the UI layer, the surface layer. We have tools now, like design systems and Figma and all of these really amazing tools, that allow us to work really fast and efficiently. But what we're focusing on, and I say we because I am a designer, is the UI layer. That's what I call commoditization, because now we're really only saying, "What we're really good at, what we can produce, is this visual that looks good." But it is all about happy paths and MVPs, and whether or not it will really work or really solve the problem becomes secondary.

[00:09:24] So here we are, in this bust cycle. We're doing all the soul-searching, lots and lots of writing about the question "Is design dead?" But I think we really need to start to shift our narratives, and I'm going to propose three of them. There are others, but like I said earlier, I really hope this starts the dialogue for us.

Narrative one: back to our roots, beyond the surface layer

[00:09:49] The first one is about this focus we've been moving towards, which is very much on the UI layer. It is very much surface-oriented, and yet what we are failing to talk about is the underpinnings of real problem solving, which I think is actually at the heart of the design discipline.

[00:10:11] I want to add something I hear a lot in my teams, and also at the Figma conference last week. Designers explain their work, and they are very thoughtful explorations, by talking about "playing around". It drives me nuts. I usually don't let them finish. I stop them, because if there's anything you can do to reduce your work to something really simplistic and repeatable, it's talking about playing around. And I bet any executive who's not a designer would think, "Okay, AI can probably play around a lot faster." So if you want to think about commoditization, this would be it. We're really doing it to ourselves.

[00:10:56] The shift I want to make is to say: let's go back to our roots. I really claim that design has a very strong scientific basis. If you think about it, when we create solutions that are really thoughtful and that solve people's problems, we think about what somebody actually wants to do with the tool or the service we produce. They want to get the job done. They don't want to think about the tool. So we can think about flow, about Csikszentmihalyi's work. We can think about psychology and apply that. A lot of the time we do it maybe subconsciously, but we have a foundation for why we're making decisions the way we are.

[00:11:36] We know that people want to be spoken to in a way they can understand. So we have linguistics and semiotics to rely on, to create not only interfaces but also the language around them, so they make sense for people. We're now very much focused on mobile. People are moving when they're working on their phone. They're looking at their phone while crossing the street, so they want to be able to see. What are the information hierarchies? What's the information science we could apply to make decisions?

[00:12:09] And I don't know about you, but I have developed lots of applications and services, and I know that users always get something wrong. They want to feel supported in being able to get out of whatever it is they can't understand. Again, we can return to educational philosophy and use that as an underpinning for the decisions we make.

[00:12:32] So the narrative I believe needs to change is: we're not about the surface layer. We need to go back to our roots. I can't say it better than Erika Hall: design is a set of decisions, a set of choices, and we make them all the time. The way we make them allows us to solve problems and create value, and when we understand it and articulate it in the context of business needs and business outcomes, that is really, really quite powerful.

Narrative two: not the misunderstood heroes

[00:13:06] The second narrative I want to shift, and it all comes with the soul-searching, is that we are the misunderstood heroes. Nobody quite gets us, and we're the only ones who really know how to do this right. We're the ones who are actually user-centric. Maybe we've been hired to be user-centric. Yet if you think about it, how many decisions are being made by companies that impact users, whether it's pricing or whether we automate customer support? The decisions around how we really interact with our users, how we treat them, are owned by many, many people in the company. So again, we feel misunderstood, because aren't we the only ones who really think about the users?

[00:13:56] We think we're the arbiters of what is good design. We talk a lot about good, but what is good, and good for whom? I will tell you, we have a lot of conversations in design leadership in my company where we all say we need to define what we mean by good, because we all have different expectations. And I think one of the challenging realities is that good design doesn't necessarily mean it's good for business, just like doing good business doesn't necessarily require good design.

[00:14:27] And this is one where I'll tell you right away that I'm guilty as charged. I definitely always think that design can solve all the problems. If we could just be the designer at the table, if we could just facilitate the conversation, if we could just bring all the stuff we know that nobody asked us about to the table, we could solve all these problems.

[00:14:48] I have a lovely anecdote, Chris [?], at Telefónica. I was there, talking to one of the VPs, and I was trying to bridge a bit of an internal political divide. He kept talking about all these problems, and I kept talking about how design could help. At one point he looked at me and said, "It sounds like design has the answers for everything." And I was like, well, that really wasn't what I meant, but I really did feel that. The reality is we can't solve all the problems. The problems companies are facing need to be solved by everybody in the room and by lots of different disciplines.

[00:15:25] So if we aren't the owners of all of that, if we aren't the heroes, what is it that we also need to be doing? Rory already brought up leadership and collaboration, and I think that's a skill we undervalue: how important it is for designers to be lateral leaders, if you will, really working with all the different disciplines. It's not that we have the answers. We need to work together to arrive at the answers.

[00:15:52] At SumUp, we value the written word very much. It was a bit scary for me to have to bring my writing brain back. But communication is super important. It's about storytelling. It's about bringing others into the conversation and making it all happen. So for me, the dance of these skills is super important, and a really key piece of how we can move beyond what we think we're contributing and really bring everybody into the conversation.

[00:16:19] Again, quoting Erika: design is only as user-centered as the business model allows. I thought that was a really powerful statement. She actually proposes that we think about being business- and value-centered as opposed to user-centered, or at least bringing that bridge together, so that these two areas of focus coexist.

Narrative three: AI as an opportunity, and design is not dead

[00:16:48] We are in the bust. I do think the boom will happen, and I encourage us to think about AI less as a threat and more as an opportunity. I've already said I'm a designer. As I'm looking around, we know content is already under the gun. We know engineering is being supported with AI tools. Designers are beginning to sweat a little about what exactly this means for our role, because we have lots of engineers believing they can use AI to create interfaces a lot faster than designers. And PMs are probably also trying to figure out what this means.

[00:17:26] While I am a little biased towards design, I do think we have skills like discernment and science-based decision-making that will be super, super valuable in the world of AI, of prompting these new tools. However, I really don't believe AI is a winner-takes-all game. I think it is ultimately going to be about the collaboration all these different disciplines have to have together, figuring out how to use these tools and getting ourselves ready for what I think will come, which is the next boom. But I do think we need to do that together.

[00:18:08] So, to wrap up my provocation, the narratives I think we need to change, for design in particular: I think we need to return to our roots and reclaim the scientific backing in the decision-making that actually drives the work we do. I think we need to get away from feeling misunderstood and being lone heroes, and really think about being value-driven, working with other people to solve the problems for the business and bringing all these different perspectives to the table. And lastly, I think the next wave will come, and AI will be the driving force behind it. If we engage in that now and work with each other, we can figure out how to ride that wave.

[00:19:03] So I definitely think design is anything but dead. I think it is very much alive. It is full of potential, if we can really figure out how to leverage this next wave that is coming.

[00:19:16] To finish, in the last 29 seconds, I'd like to share one narrative that's my own. I came into the field of design a bit by accident. I came at a time when computers were disrupting not only design but also business, and I decided to really go with it. I embraced it, and I always put myself at what I call the bleeding edge of technology. I won't tell you how many years later, but I still feel like I'm relevant and have something to contribute. I've always relied on the foundation of my roots, of processes, of the science underpinning what I'm doing, and adapted it to these new situations and the new technology. So I think it's a very exciting time to be alive, to be figuring out what is actually happening and get ourselves ready for the next wave. Thank you.