The Golden Age Of UX: Why It Won't Last

Jonathan Courtney at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/K6tBk1af9ks

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.

Who we are and why this talk annoys people

[00:00:06] My name is Jonathan. I'm actually from Ireland, I was born in Cork, and I moved to Germany about ten years ago, so my accent is really, really [expletive] up. Like was already mentioned, I run a product design studio in Berlin. Perfect. We're about 15 people, very international, pretty much one person from every country. Well, that's not true at all, but anyway, it sounds better than what it actually is.

[00:00:37] So, 15 people, a product design studio. We started around 2011, and we actually started as a pure UX design agency; that's what we called ourselves. As has already been mentioned, it's a pretty big, very different mix of clients, and essentially what we're doing for them is helping them to build products, helping them to concept products, helping them with the product strategy. Usually they come to us when they have nothing and they want to get something on the market very quickly, or maybe they have some very specific product-related problems.

[00:01:10] Now, that's just some context before we go into the next bit, because I know some people get annoyed about this talk. The Golden Age of UX is over; let's go into it. Before we start, and I know the projector is a little bit small, but at least when I go to conferences, one of the big reasons I go is so I can tweet pictures of the conference, so it shows that I've been there and I'm doing stuff and I'm learning. So I've put this little tag called "tweetable quote" on the top left. You can ignore everything I'm saying, but whenever that comes up, you can take a picture and you can say, "Oh yeah, I learned this thing at the conference." It's a really easy way to show your Twitter power. Okay, and I just put an arrow there to show you that as well.

The golden age: finish the sentence with "the user"

[00:01:53] In 2011, myself and an Australian guy started off AJ&Smart, and to be really, really honest, we didn't 100% know what UX design was. It was a mixture of UI design, information architecture, graphic design, I don't even know. It was one of these really big, messy terms that we were confused about. We weren't just confused about it; we were confused about how to even tell our clients about it. While we were trying to explain to them that UX was important, we were also trying to figure out what exactly it was ourselves.

[00:02:26] It was between 2011 and 2015 where this whole UX thing, and I'm talking specifically around this mobile craze and this digital craze, exploded into something that was maybe a buzzword, something that people were very, very excited about. You can always tell when someone's getting excited about it when the large, old companies start putting UX and talking about design on their website and start pushing this as a big topic. Innovation, UX design, everything was starting to get more and more important.

[00:03:01] The very few people who could understand what UX was, and the very few designers who were actually UX designers, were seeing their salaries drastically rising and having a really easy time finding jobs. If you were a UX designer, if you were calling yourself a UX designer and you could do some of this digital, responsive design, whatever stuff, then there was absolutely no chance you were going to be unemployed. I'm trying to figure out what this next slide is about here. I think that if you remember back to maybe even just two years ago, there was still so much discussion about, "Oh, should we do flat or skeuomorphic?" or "What about the hamburger menu?" There were all these conversations that would just go round and round in circles.

[00:03:45] And the companies would actually allow us to have these conversations in the product meetings. I would be called into the room, and it's like, "Okay, we need to increase the conversion rate," and I'm like, "Wait a second, wait a second. Should we really be doing these flat icons here? Is the navigation really going to be understandable to the users?" And everyone would stop, and that would be the conversation for the next hour. The UX designers just came into the room and everyone had to stop what they were doing, and it's like, "Listen here, I'm the UX designer, I know about the user. You're just a business person, you don't understand products."

[00:04:16] So this was some of your lives and my life for the last few years, and it was really great. I'm really hoping that some of you got to experience that, or are still in companies that are still uneducated enough to allow you to do it. It's really great. This was what I'm calling the golden age, where you could just get away with saying whatever you want as long as you finished the sentence with "the user." As long as "the user won't like that." So whatever, let's put eight hamburger menus on top, because the users, they love those hamburger menus.

Six years later: UX is table stakes

[00:04:49] Black screen. Okay. Six years later. Hey, that's a cool animation. Okay, so six years later, still running a product UX, some sort of digital agency. The difference now, six years later, is that this UX and UI and digital and mobile and all of that stuff is not really so special anymore. The companies who used to be scrambling to figure out what to do and how to go digital and how to go mobile and all of this stuff, they get it now. They understand that you need to hire these people.

[00:05:30] UX designers are being trained in colleges. It's just much, much easier to find UX designers. About three years ago, just hiring for AJ&Smart was a nightmare, because every time you put out a call for a UX designer, just graphic designers came in. And now basically every person we interview is doing just as good or a better job than I was doing maybe five years ago. So the market is slowly starting to normalize. This upward trend of salaries, and the low supply and the high demand for UX, is just starting to level out. Whether you believe that or not, that's what's happening in the industry.

[00:06:08] So, tweetable quote here. One of the big reasons for that is that the companies used to say, "Okay, the users, they blame themselves when they're starting to use our products." And the UX designers always had to explain to companies that we need to make sure that the usability is perfect and all of this stuff. Now the companies 100% understand that if they want their products to be successful, they have to have great usability. It has to have almost this table-stakes level of UX design, because these days users don't blame themselves anymore when they get stuck. They blame the company.

[00:06:46] And the companies really do understand that. It's not something that I need to go in and explain to these companies; they get it, most of them. I know some of you might be here saying, "Well, my company still doesn't get it," but I'm talking about the majority of the companies we're working with now, or even the ones we're not working with. They get it. And if you need any proof of that, Samsung even gets it now. Samsung's starting to release products that are getting ten out of tens in design. They've now managed to actually put the effort in to build their design teams. It's really, really crazy: Samsung even starts getting higher design scores than Apple now.

[00:07:21] If this doesn't prove to you that the market is getting saturated in terms of UX and UI design, even product design, it's a bit of a warning, I would say. And I have all positive stuff coming up. One thing that's important to know is that good enough is getting easier than ever to achieve. Pretty much someone coming right out of college today can learn how to use InVision in a day. They can learn how to use Sketch in a day. They can learn how to make pretty high-fidelity prototypes extremely fast using some really easy-to-understand and basic design components.

[00:07:55] If you look at Google's Material Design, most of the successful apps that are on the market right now don't look like anything special, because they're taking these pretty good components that weren't around maybe five years ago. Five years ago I had to figure out what's the measurement of the header, and what does this look like when it's on desktop. Now it's zero effort, ten minutes. Jesus Christ, that went fast. Wait a minute. Okay, I'll go faster. So you get the point: it's all really easy now.

Good enough is not enough

[00:08:24] The level of difficulty, the barrier to entry for becoming a good UX designer, is very low. And I would say that the juniors of today, and I'm talking about the almost production-level skill of a UX designer, coming out of college and being able to have access to these tools, are not much different from the seniors of about five years ago. I know some people will [expletive] about the experience thing, but that's another talk.

[00:08:52] The problem is, if you're looking over the next five years for your career, or for my career, for anyone's career who is going with this UX wave, good enough is not really enough. You can coast on for maybe, who knows, you can coast for quite a while. But if you're looking for growth in your career, this good-enough, table-stakes level of design is not really going to be enough for the companies that we're seeing starting to hire people, and maybe the next gold rush of hiring designers.

[00:09:22] So this is the core point of it, at least from what I understand. If you really want to be this new type of designer, and I'm just going to, for the sake of it, call it a product designer, if you want to graduate or improve or add some skills to your UX design catalog, it's not going to be enough to understand the user, because the companies expect you to do that as your baseline job. You're also going to need to understand the business. It's a tweetable quote, by the way, and I see a good few people taking pictures of it. I'm really happy about that. I'll leave it up there for a little bit. Okay, some people hate me right now.

[00:10:02] It's just important to understand that it really used to be okay to say, "Look, the user won't like it, so we're going to do it the way the designers think," but it's just not going to cut it anymore. With a lot of these companies who have reached this table-stakes level, what's going to happen is that the UX designers are going to be pushed down into production roles, whereas the people who understand the business are going to be part of the actual product decisions. The thing about production roles, as in creating wireframes, creating screens, doing the actual handwork, is that it's easier to commoditize. The salaries are going to get pushed down. It is super easy to find people who are good at this right now.

[00:10:44] So, now that I have ten minutes, how do you or I actually make sure that we stay relevant during this phase of commoditization? That's cool, I can see totally different fonts there. I didn't do these animations, though; they're doing them in real time right now.

Three things to learn, starting with strategy

[00:11:08] The three things, and I'm just going to blast through these, are the three things I think you need to understand as a designer over the next few years if you want to come into a company and start moving your way up from production-level UX to actually being part of the business decisions and being in the room with the stakeholders while the product decisions are being made. I think that understanding these three things is the perfect way to not just have a seat at the table, but to be the most valuable designer.

[00:11:39] The picture in the background, you're going to get used to. The first thing is strategy: product strategy and business strategy, and just generally understanding the topic of strategy is extremely important. The product you're working on, how does it connect to the other products and services within your company? Is the product that you're creating just a pure data collector for the company? Why does this product even exist within your company? What's going on there?

[00:12:03] Strategy is one of these super vague terms, and I'm not going to go all the way into it. I'm just going to tell you where you can learn exactly about it today. One of the best articles that I've read on it is called "What the [expletive] is Strategy" by Vince Law [?]. Just Google "What the [expletive] is strategy" by Vince Law and you're going to get an excellent article that breaks down product strategy step by step using the example of Tesla. It's an excellent article. I think just reading this article will give you an absolutely excellent overview and great ammo the next time you're sitting in the room with the product manager or someone involved in the business and you want to sound super smart. It's a primer. It takes about six minutes to read, and you already have a very good understanding of product strategy.

[00:12:46] I also think these three articles from M.G. Siegler: it's the leviathan, the whale and the squid, or something like that. I don't know if it's squid, but it is actually the squid. This is about Amazon, Netflix and Tesla, and it's a broad picture of their product strategies over the next ten years from this investor, M.G. Siegler. It's a fantastic read to understand products not just on a "here's exactly what I'm working on" level; it's "here's the bigger picture, here's the bit that's actually valuable."

Growth

[00:13:13] The second thing that you really should understand, and this is something that I managed to avoid for about six years, is growth. Check out the picture again: it's a guy cutting the grass, and I just really like that picture. I think it really doesn't matter what product you're working on. I would say that for almost 95% of the people in this room, the people who want the products you're working on to be created are concerned about growth, whether that's customer growth or market share growth. Growth is one of these things that's extremely important, almost one of those metrics that every single company can be guaranteed to care about.

[00:13:53] When you're talking to someone and they're saying, "We need to improve the usability of this, we need to improve the engagement of this and this and that, we need this to look better," in the back of their minds they're thinking of some sort of growth metric that they want to work with. I think that even being able to change your language when you're speaking to these people, and talk about growth in the way that they do, makes such a big difference.

[00:14:16] Some really quick examples of where to go. GrowthHackers.com is a big community which has a shitload of case studies showing how companies like Airbnb, Uber, whatever, how their growth strategies work. It's a really, really great resource. Five minutes? I like it, I'm actually going to get this done in five minutes. It's a great resource when you have a specific growth challenge, like someone comes to you and says, "Make the onboarding better." Okay, why do they want to make the onboarding better? If they want to increase the activation or they want to increase the conversion rate, whatever, they have a growth metric in mind. I think that GrowthHackers.com is a [expletive] excellent place to go to find really good examples of all these topics.

[00:14:56] And from the same guy, actually, Sean Ellis, he wrote this book. Google the book name. I think that's a really, really great book. Even if you're like me and you just buy loads of books all the time because you go to a conference and you're like, "Oh my god," and you buy that book, even if you just read it for an hour and then you never touch it again, you've already got such a good brain dump about growth and the terminology people use when they're talking about growth. Out of the three things I'm going to show you, I think growth is the thing that you should start with first. Understanding growth as a metric is really insanely important when you're working on products, for understanding people who are working on products.

Marketing

[00:15:39] All right, last one. This is the one that a lot of designers really hate, and I also hated it for a long time. It's also something where design departments, product departments and development departments often clash with the marketing department. I think one of the reasons that they clash, and one of the reasons I used to clash with them, is because I just didn't really know what they were up to, and I didn't know why they were making the decisions they were making. I always just thought they were really stupid. Now I think I understand it, and I now know how to speak to them, and I now have a way of making sure we align on our priorities when we're starting with the product.

[00:16:13] I think really understanding marketing, especially from a product perspective, is extremely important. How are they going to talk about the product that you're creating? How are they talking about that to the customers? It's not just about "the users want this feature, the users want that feature." How's your company actually going to talk about that to them? What is their plan for explaining that? If you Google "pirate marketing Dave McClure," you're going to find this super basic, insanely ugly website, but you're going to find a PowerPoint of about four slides which gives you everything you need to know about product marketing in a nutshell.

[00:16:55] And then if you go to YouTube and look at this guy called Noah Kagan. He's an insane douche, even more douchey than me, but I think if you just go on to his YouTube page and watch it for maybe 20 minutes, you're going to have a lot of the basics of marketing, product marketing, marketing strategies. It's like looking behind the scenes of a PM, or looking behind the scenes of a marketing manager, for a few hours, and it's just really, really great to immerse yourself in that.

[00:17:24] And finally, some of you probably know this guy, because he seems like the biggest cokehead in the world, but Gary Vee. His advice is invaluable. He's got a podcast, he's got his YouTube vlog, he's got every single social media channel. If you want to understand marketing on a basic level and then dive deeper and deeper, Gary Vee is an entertaining look into it.

You are a creative problem solver

[00:17:49] So, to finish up, and I'm one minute from done, I promise: I'm not telling you that the role of a UX designer, I used that picture again, is dead. I'm not saying that the end of this golden age is a bad thing. I'm just telling you that it is a thing, from someone who hires designers. The entire industry is reaching a point where the demand and the actual supply are starting to meet each other. There are actually a lot of people who do a pretty good, good-enough job at being a UX designer.

[00:18:26] But I want to tell you that there are ways now to become more valuable as a designer, and these three things which I mentioned, marketing, growth and product strategy, I think are three really, really great ways to become a more valuable designer. And to finish it up, I want to say that it doesn't matter what you're calling yourself now: UX designer, product designer, UI designer, I don't even know, a motion designer, or someone called an emotion designer. Hey, you keep putting your hand up for stuff, yesterday as well. Innovation designer.

[00:19:00] It doesn't matter what you actually call yourself, because your actual job is to be a creative problem solver. That's your value to companies. That's why they bring you in, and that's why they actually call you in: to help them solve problems for themselves. I think the more you can understand the bigger picture of a product, the better, and the more you can help them solve their problems. You'll make your life easier for yourself, you'll make your life easier for them. And yeah, thanks, guys.