Welcome back, picnickers. If you’re joining me for the first time, there’s a part 1 to this story, but it’s not mandatory to read. If you’ve spent any time in the industry, you have the context you need.

Good Questions

Scott Berkun asks what is perhaps the most important question of all – what will make you fulfilled? He cites the top three causes of design malaise from a survey, which resonate with me personally – designers feel stuck because of an inability to get feedback, lack of design strategy, and lack of advancement opportunities.

Unfortunately, these three three reasons for unhappiness feed into one another. The inability to advance into higher & more influential echelons of the profession results in design’s agenda being set by people who see design as tactical rather than strategic. And without that understanding, there can be no meaningful feedback loops that design uses to iterate towards desired results. As a result, design is stuck pitching the easiest thing to sell – visuals – as its value.

It’s time to break that cycle.

These three categories neatly set the framing for the rest of our series (because it turns out that we can’t identify and solve everything wrong with design in 2 issues). In this issue I’ll be talking about the design career, and in the following weeks I’ll cover how to establish a “definition of Good” and set up the feedback loops that make design design.

The Timeline

The latest thinkpiece (derogatory) making waves in the discourse is another “is design dead” take from Fast Company. This is nothing new – design has died a thousand times, if the writers of these pieces are to be believed. However, this clickbait article drew a ton of great discussion. 

One camp (Matthew Holloway, Ryan Rumsey, Peter Merholz) pushed back on the premise of the article. Design isn’t dead, it’s just headless; our ineffective leadership is contesting status rather than solidifying the value of the discipline. Ironically, the status games are the reason design lost the game of thrones to begin with.

Some of these leaders have leaned into their defeat and deployed instinctual defenses: coming up with yet another rename of our practice. But designers have been renaming ourselves since 2003 to no avail; stakeholders see us as a delivery function regardless. Changing the signifier without the signified – calling the same thing by a different name – doesn’t actually accomplish anything.

Frankly, backing away from design is a mistake. We should instead embrace it. Good CEOs are finding immense value in UX, often stumbling on it by accident because they didn’t have any better way.

Design’s value is not defined merely by the C-suite, either. Another camp in the discourse (Cameron Tonkinwise, Marco Van Hout) rightly points out that design has the capacity to drive real change, rather than merely plug into profit driven models. A few good resources on that topic have come across my feed: Design for Safety has been reissued, and the Deceptive Patterns Archive rescued from the rotting corpse of Twitter. Public sector thought leaders (as always) also present a great example of what design can do when it chooses to be better.

Design doesn’t need to wait for a leader to give us the kiddie seat at their table. Design – and more importantly, an individual designer – is perfectly capable of making a new table.

Reading Material

The reason I started this issue with what is usually the last section is that Scott’s question cuts straight to the heart of the matter. Design’s malaise starts with expectations; designers are taught and hired with a laser-like focus on features rather than systems. But when has UX learning ever not been broken? We learn from each other all the time and figure it out as we go along, starting wherever we happen to be.

Scott Jenson’s GIST checklist (helpfully updated after I covered it last week) is designed for exactly this: doing good design at the micro scale, rather than trying to single-handedly drive some kind of top-down process transformation. And doing good work is the best way to leave a design-hostile environment and go somewhere you can do even better work; the real resume-driven development is not about technologies but about demonstrated impact.

So assuming we can go at all, where do we go from here?

There is a common meme in UX discourse that goes something like this: once upon a time we were building great products, until graphic designers smelled the money and muscled us out of our turf. Interestingly, the people who were there tell a different story - the strategy part of UX, which the graphic designers allegedly ruined, historically fit much more snugly with marketing rather than product. In fact, UX and product have had ongoing enmity about who gets to own design judgment for quite a while.

I bring this up because – while UX currently sits within (and some might even say, beneath) the Product Triad – our position is not decreed by fate. Our role within the process of software design is constantly evolving - Adaptive Path and Cooper found ways that made sense back then, those ways have changed several times over in the intervening decades (some would say, for the worse), and they are changing again.

In order to move forward, we need to do the same thing UX has done since before it was called UX: find or make a new niche in the prevailing system.

As business models shift from the industrial “make a thing people want to use and charge more than it costs to produce” model to the post-industrial model based entirely on vibes, those who make the products are increasingly insulated from the FO part of FAFO. And the higher up you go, the greater that insulation becomes - there are entire jobs that boil down to simply fitting the outputs of the various dashboards into one slide deck that tells the leader “everything is good” so that the deck-presenter can get promoted.

And when the input part of the feedback loop becomes fouled up, the outputs swiftly follow. Leadership demands “answers on a postcard” when they allow research at all, in the name of velocity.

If this is the ground on which we have to build our table, then we will need a solid foundation. That foundation is visibility.  Designs cannot speak for themselves and designers cannot do everything alone. As long as our work is mediated by legions of deck-presenters, the feedback loops of our profession cannot function. So we need to do what the deck-presenters do, and build up our own relational power.

Fortunately, there’s a ton of advice out there on how to build up that power. Shannon Leahy has a great interview here, aimed at content designers but useful for just about everyone. Charles Lambdin describes the process of influence mapping, aimed at product managers but immediately recognizable to UXers. Jack Garfinkel talks about how to find cross-silo allies responsible for the same user journey as you. Keith Ford explains how to speak in a language that decision-makers understand.

In the past, designers who managed to build this power hoarded it by trying to convert it into positional power (promotions into management); this is a big part of why we are where we are today. This power is no good unless you use it, and next week we’re going to talk about just that: what to say once you have bent the ear of your stakeholders.

— Pavel from the Product Picnic