Some may accuse this newsletter of not really being about the news. But oh boy do I have a newsy doozy for you this week (although like always, the news story is illustrative of a pervasive trend in UX that has been here forever, and I am going to use the former to talk about the latter).

In many ways, this is the perfect case study to put a bow on my prior writing about vibes-based UX, design’s lack of vision for what it actually wants, and the imitation of progress towards that goal.

In the Headlines

A large part of the community was cheering on a recent announcement by the US Government that it was creating a “National Design Studio” with AirBnB co-founder Joe Gebbia as the “Chief Design Officer” of the United States. This was an incredible move, they said. Design was finally being recognized, they said. We have a seat at the table at last, they said.

Not a single one of the people saying this was actually paying attention. We already had a seat at the table; it was called 18F and the same administration destroyed it in illegal retaliation. Chris Butler has a deeper dive into the story and Dori Tunstall goes even further back to the history of design’s influence in the federal government starting in the 70s.

Rather than the “design for democratic governance” that prior design efforts have aspired towards, the NDS elevates an extremely problematic person, whose success comes not from design excellence but from breaking the law (Dan even got quoted in the NYT over this, which he also writes about).

Reading Material

Boosters of this new initiative are excited about all of the things a Chief Design Officer might be able to do for the government, if properly resourced and incentivized. We’ve seen what is possible, with initiatives like GOV.UK doing incredible work up to being the crucible of modern content design as a discipline.

But will the NDS choose to do any of that stuff? The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. And this particular pudding is shit.

The “America By Design” page sucks as a website. It’s full of obvious accessibility errors. The visuals are distracting and clearly AI-generated (as is the copyright footer, which comes by default in every vibe coded site, but has no place on a taxpayer-funded page). Almost immediately, someone put up a far better structured parody website making fun of it and highlighting actual UX design wins like Direct File that the government is killing for no reason.

And even if designers wanted to improve the government, simply being in the room is no guarantee that it will happen. Commentators (myself included) love to talk about how designers should get involved in strategy. But doing that is far more involved than waking up one day and putting on your big boy pants. Systemic forces have positioned design as a delivery function rather than a strategic partner, and digging our way out of that hole is not a trivial matter.

Gebbia’s appointment and the very framing of the NDS exemplifies how constraining this new “seat at the table” actually is. It’s the legitimacy trap all over again: you can rise to the C-Suite as long as you commit to coloring within the lines.

But agreeing to that bargain prevent any opportunity for UX to make its mark on the real grid — the business model (or its non-commercial equivalent). Instead, UX is expected to import the toxic logic of commercial design into government, framing the people as “users” and “consumers” rather than stakeholders to whom the entire apparatus is notionally responsible.

I have seen self-described leaders in our field take this bargain again and again, settling for the aesthetics of value over real value. Vibe coding prototypes is the latest of these obsessions; this shortcut accelerates us towards solving the wrong problem, but it still looks like acceleration. The more frictionless it is to play around on the front end, the more tempting it is to forget that the UX is also in the back end, the wiring, the business processes that make the whole system work.

When we don’t stop and think about the underlying system, what is easy for us will always take precedence over what is simple for the user. And because our medium is computers, we train our users to think like computers and act in machine time rather than human time. All the indicators on our dashboards are going up, but the tools themselves are making people less productive than ever.

Driven by tech industry logic, the aesthetics of numbers are already starting to replace actual rigor. Try not to be part of the problem.

— Pavel at the Product Picnic