Darren Hood, MSUXD’s Post

I was invited by LinkedIn to contribute in their collaborative articles about what makes a good UX Designer recently (apparently I’m a UX expert?). To my disbelief, the third point was about learning Visual Design! What’s funny is, this way we are disregarding both UX and visual designers! What a shame! Also, identifying the underlying problem statements, not taking the problem at face value, wasn’t even a part of the article! 😂

I went down 2 posts to this from a post shared by Dr. Nick Fine, originally by Anthony Sean McSharry: Figma - from the horse's mouth: “In a world where more software is being created and reimagined because of AI, designing and building products is everyone’s business,” Dylan Field, Figma co-founder and chief executive said. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/seanmcsharry_fromthehorsesmouth-activity-7214938090274988034-kRm3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Two other big factors: - Tech layoffs often led with “soft” roles like UX, research, and customer experience & support. So, voila. - The general panic in the industry decimated much of the values of teamwork and psychological safety that are required to create high quality experiences. We are left working in under-resourced organizations, with teammates who don’t want to talk to us, with teams who just want to do the bare minimum to keep their paycheck, and executives who dictate what we do and build. Morale is at an all time low and fear is high. Luckily I see some orgs resisting or pivoting away after realizing this doesn’t work. Good signals. Let’s hope.

Thanks to these practices, we now get words like "enshittification" to toss around.

I think it's important we be able to prove in realtime the impact of UX so that it's always front and centre with no denial of the value we bring. No one can ever argue that we have irreplaceable expertise and we deliver value  I am researching to create a product that will do this. Because no one ever questions the value that anyone else in the team brings more than how they question UX. And so many have a false bias that UX is a bottleneck and should be streamlined. But they shouldn't be streamlining us, that's our job. We have to decide how. 

We are unfortunately living the shitty future some of us predicted years ago, just to be shushed as pessimists. Or driving conference’s sponsors away. I want to give you a hug.

I have a question: Can we realistically have an UX nomenclature? I ask because I encounter UX “founders” change the names of UX processes on their whim. I can totally agree with what they are saying, but I truly believe that it adds to the muddling of The Practice.

"Clients and stakeholders are executing their own designs and using the today's wave of order takers as marionettes." — WORD!