Thanks Andrew. I've thought about this a lot but not sure I have a great answer. On the one hand there is some good writing on arguing for the ROI of design. But in my experience these arguments try to use logic to overcome relational problems and logic can't do it alone
I say that because I think everyone agrees there are countless people in management or senior advisory roles don't have good evidence for their value either, but they have earned the trust of leaders and that that is often worth more than trying to provide some kind of rigorous evidence.
So in the book we're advocating relationships and studying the people around you who have the influence or reputation you want. So much of what makes influence happen is local to your team and culture and a book or good generic advice can't really do the "last mile" for anyone.
"Decisions are made without you" was my vote, but that could just as easily be seen as designers not taking enough accountability. While I see it as a persistent organizational problem, I also think we designers have a lot of responsibility in how it became that way by not properly defining our work and being willing to take accountability for our proposals (in business terms). I think this ties in closely to Andrew's comment on evidence for cost/benefit.
Thanks Keith. Agree about it being split in degrees for who is responsible between the organization and the designer. The position we take is that it's a tough argument to say to an entire organization "you are broken! Fix yourself!" :) Even if it's true, it's just not the way organizations tend to improve.
So in the book we focus mostly on the later and how to better asses if the problem is yours or the place where you work (and how to stay healthy if it's the later - including finding somewhere better to be).
Really looking forward to the book. I think there's another dimension here, which is when you realize it's the place you work and while you're trying to find your exit strategy, is there anything you can do to draw attention to the issues or make small incremental advancements that maybe won't benefit you directly, but could move the needle for those that will follow you.
Great options here - I would point out that the question in the post “which one is the most difficult that you have actually experienced in your career?” Is quite different from the prompt “What is the most important situation to learn to overcome?”. For me, there are many that were personally difficult to experience and challenging to overcome, but those were often my problem. Dealing with “there’s no time” has the most value (IMO) because it exists as the root/intersection for many of the others. Being able to demonstrate value gets you included in the conversations, and explains what you do.
You're right about the different questions - I'm still not sure which is the most valuable to ask, perhaps because they're all interesting for different reasons.
I couldn't find much of this kind of situational data anywhere - plenty of opinions and essays, but I just wanted the grounding of a poll and input from a wider group of people.
Several situations I think are subsets of what's listed above but with some other flavors:
A) access to key stakeholders is blocked resulting in flawed discovery / flawed outcomes
B)Decisions are made before UX is engaged/involved (child of both #2 and #3, and let's be honest #1)
C) UX often uncovers problems that span silos and business models but only have charters to impact change in one narrow section (where the biz people are open to design) but not influence underlying systematic design/biz issues (child of #1, #2, and #4)
Thanks Emily. C in particular is so important to recognize. It's an element of being set up to be limited, since we run into walls that the organizational leaders themselves either don't see, or (believe) they benefit from.
Timing is always a challenge. Despite stellar track records and proven, repeatable processes the impact of the design does not sink in. This is related to no one listens to your suggestions, but at a high level. Its like Cassandra cursed to know the future and have no one belive her.
One theory we have is that quality, generally, doesn't sink in. There are often incentives not to make the highest quality work, but just work that fits short term goals. In that lens, designers primary value is raising quality - engineers can make software without us, but we make it better (usable, useful, beautiful) - but the recognition or commitment to quality ranges from project to project, and leader to leader. Unless you are in a competitive, consumer business where design is central to reviews and customer expectations. These exist, but they're not as common as designers want them to be.
I fully agree with the diverent levels of design recognition and, frankly, willingness to collect tech/ux debt in service of GTM - which is a short term win.
What I was referring to has more to do with change management. Design, innovation, qualtiy do not come for free. They are the result of often blue collar work. But selling change, even when backed by rigor also means you are often subverting the status quo. Design tends to have to lead by influence even when there is design representation at a senior leadership level. This makes bringing about change even harder.
It feels like oppression when you are in it, but fundamentally, it's about a mismatch in perceived value:
- Can UX help? Yes, sometimes it can even be the thing that allows you to win in the market.
- Is a UX-based approach the only way to "win"? No, sometimes building (read: engineering) 0-1 product capabilities and getting them to market fast, allows you to win. Look at command-line ChatGPT.
- Is it important to do well crafted UX research? Yes, sometimes it even unlocks amazing innovations, or helps you dodge a product failure before you launch it.
- But sometimes a product manager can bring back a top-ten list of issues from a multi-million dollar customer, and solve issues, create new features, and double the satisfaction and revenue from that customer.
So at the end of the day, companies, and influential people within companies, with have different perceptions of the value of UX. Couple that with extreme cost pressures, and UX value will be doubted, and hard decisions may be made.
To say that UX people need to learn to play the business game better, which I wholeheartedly agree with, needs to be a stated as an assumption right up front: this is the arena you are choosing to enter. Your skill is not in question, but the value of that skill might be at times. How do you learn how to influence others and demonstrate value, when on uneven footing?
I haven’t experienced (E) yet, as a designer. A team I worked with briefly flirted with the idea in a dev role I worked recently, but it led to me having more cleanup work to do when we all realized that making it work reliably took more effort than ChatGPT had put into it.
The often dismissive, exclusionary mindset of other disciplines toward UX. I've long believed that Agile has (unintentionally) created a culture of exclusion by referring to the "multidisciplinary group of people dedicated to delivering a vertical slice of value to customers every interval" as the DEVELOPMENT team, allowing one discipline to claim "ownership" of the entire process. That, combined with "just a designer" mindset, is more toxic and friction-inducing than anything.
It's certainly frustrating not to be understood or feel ignored. But we've framed why this is the case differently in the book.
Stepping back like an anthropologist might - of course it's natural that the core culture of a software company is engineering centric. Founders and leaders are often engineers. And it's success with that culture that likely generated the revenue to hire designers.
So why would we as designers show up and expect they would know that much about our culture? Or what we think we would do differently if we were in charge? They already have their own deeply held values about what quality means and how designers fit in.
It's sort of like landing on another planet and being surprised that the "aliens" don't speak English. Of course they don't - we're landed on their world, not the other way around. To land on a planet and blame the locals for their local culture isn't likely to be effective.
What we think makes sense is to reframe the problem and set more realistic expectations. It's hard to to do this if there's (understandable) resentment or bitterness, but reframing the problem to make it more actionable seems the wisest way forward.
Hi Scott, late here, voting already closed. One question: "You're told there isn't time for UX" - wonder why you didn't say "You're told there isn't time for DESIGN"? For example, in some organizations "UX" encompasses stuff that happens before "design", like "strategy" and "research". I imagine the confusion about how design relates to other parts of an organization's UX practice is one reason design is hard.....
I think it is closest to your number one, but I always say it this way, “The biggest problem in design is that no one in any organization can agree on the value proposition of DOING design work.” That is to say no one understands or agrees with what “designing” as a verb is. When I say no one agrees, I include the design team itself as much as the rest of the organization.
The biggest challenge I've seen for Design in big hairy hierarchical businesses is culture and transparency.
The hierarchical nature of these orgs means that most initiatives & goals are outputs to support the career progression of senior leaders.
Design and designers face problems when they start uncovering evidence that those leaders decisions may not be right or based on much other than assumptions.
#6: there's no track record of believable evidence that design has added more value than it's cost.
Thanks Andrew. I've thought about this a lot but not sure I have a great answer. On the one hand there is some good writing on arguing for the ROI of design. But in my experience these arguments try to use logic to overcome relational problems and logic can't do it alone
I say that because I think everyone agrees there are countless people in management or senior advisory roles don't have good evidence for their value either, but they have earned the trust of leaders and that that is often worth more than trying to provide some kind of rigorous evidence.
So in the book we're advocating relationships and studying the people around you who have the influence or reputation you want. So much of what makes influence happen is local to your team and culture and a book or good generic advice can't really do the "last mile" for anyone.
"Decisions are made without you" was my vote, but that could just as easily be seen as designers not taking enough accountability. While I see it as a persistent organizational problem, I also think we designers have a lot of responsibility in how it became that way by not properly defining our work and being willing to take accountability for our proposals (in business terms). I think this ties in closely to Andrew's comment on evidence for cost/benefit.
Thanks Keith. Agree about it being split in degrees for who is responsible between the organization and the designer. The position we take is that it's a tough argument to say to an entire organization "you are broken! Fix yourself!" :) Even if it's true, it's just not the way organizations tend to improve.
So in the book we focus mostly on the later and how to better asses if the problem is yours or the place where you work (and how to stay healthy if it's the later - including finding somewhere better to be).
Really looking forward to the book. I think there's another dimension here, which is when you realize it's the place you work and while you're trying to find your exit strategy, is there anything you can do to draw attention to the issues or make small incremental advancements that maybe won't benefit you directly, but could move the needle for those that will follow you.
Great options here - I would point out that the question in the post “which one is the most difficult that you have actually experienced in your career?” Is quite different from the prompt “What is the most important situation to learn to overcome?”. For me, there are many that were personally difficult to experience and challenging to overcome, but those were often my problem. Dealing with “there’s no time” has the most value (IMO) because it exists as the root/intersection for many of the others. Being able to demonstrate value gets you included in the conversations, and explains what you do.
Which answer were you more interested in getting?
You're right about the different questions - I'm still not sure which is the most valuable to ask, perhaps because they're all interesting for different reasons.
I couldn't find much of this kind of situational data anywhere - plenty of opinions and essays, but I just wanted the grounding of a poll and input from a wider group of people.
Several situations I think are subsets of what's listed above but with some other flavors:
A) access to key stakeholders is blocked resulting in flawed discovery / flawed outcomes
B)Decisions are made before UX is engaged/involved (child of both #2 and #3, and let's be honest #1)
C) UX often uncovers problems that span silos and business models but only have charters to impact change in one narrow section (where the biz people are open to design) but not influence underlying systematic design/biz issues (child of #1, #2, and #4)
Thanks Emily. C in particular is so important to recognize. It's an element of being set up to be limited, since we run into walls that the organizational leaders themselves either don't see, or (believe) they benefit from.
Timing is always a challenge. Despite stellar track records and proven, repeatable processes the impact of the design does not sink in. This is related to no one listens to your suggestions, but at a high level. Its like Cassandra cursed to know the future and have no one belive her.
Why do you think this is?
One theory we have is that quality, generally, doesn't sink in. There are often incentives not to make the highest quality work, but just work that fits short term goals. In that lens, designers primary value is raising quality - engineers can make software without us, but we make it better (usable, useful, beautiful) - but the recognition or commitment to quality ranges from project to project, and leader to leader. Unless you are in a competitive, consumer business where design is central to reviews and customer expectations. These exist, but they're not as common as designers want them to be.
I fully agree with the diverent levels of design recognition and, frankly, willingness to collect tech/ux debt in service of GTM - which is a short term win.
What I was referring to has more to do with change management. Design, innovation, qualtiy do not come for free. They are the result of often blue collar work. But selling change, even when backed by rigor also means you are often subverting the status quo. Design tends to have to lead by influence even when there is design representation at a senior leadership level. This makes bringing about change even harder.
It feels like oppression when you are in it, but fundamentally, it's about a mismatch in perceived value:
- Can UX help? Yes, sometimes it can even be the thing that allows you to win in the market.
- Is a UX-based approach the only way to "win"? No, sometimes building (read: engineering) 0-1 product capabilities and getting them to market fast, allows you to win. Look at command-line ChatGPT.
- Is it important to do well crafted UX research? Yes, sometimes it even unlocks amazing innovations, or helps you dodge a product failure before you launch it.
- But sometimes a product manager can bring back a top-ten list of issues from a multi-million dollar customer, and solve issues, create new features, and double the satisfaction and revenue from that customer.
So at the end of the day, companies, and influential people within companies, with have different perceptions of the value of UX. Couple that with extreme cost pressures, and UX value will be doubted, and hard decisions may be made.
To say that UX people need to learn to play the business game better, which I wholeheartedly agree with, needs to be a stated as an assumption right up front: this is the arena you are choosing to enter. Your skill is not in question, but the value of that skill might be at times. How do you learn how to influence others and demonstrate value, when on uneven footing?
I'd like to add the emotional toll of caring about my work, over and over, and it getting de-prioritized due to unrelated influences/factors.
I haven’t experienced (E) yet, as a designer. A team I worked with briefly flirted with the idea in a dev role I worked recently, but it led to me having more cleanup work to do when we all realized that making it work reliably took more effort than ChatGPT had put into it.
The often dismissive, exclusionary mindset of other disciplines toward UX. I've long believed that Agile has (unintentionally) created a culture of exclusion by referring to the "multidisciplinary group of people dedicated to delivering a vertical slice of value to customers every interval" as the DEVELOPMENT team, allowing one discipline to claim "ownership" of the entire process. That, combined with "just a designer" mindset, is more toxic and friction-inducing than anything.
It's certainly frustrating not to be understood or feel ignored. But we've framed why this is the case differently in the book.
Stepping back like an anthropologist might - of course it's natural that the core culture of a software company is engineering centric. Founders and leaders are often engineers. And it's success with that culture that likely generated the revenue to hire designers.
So why would we as designers show up and expect they would know that much about our culture? Or what we think we would do differently if we were in charge? They already have their own deeply held values about what quality means and how designers fit in.
It's sort of like landing on another planet and being surprised that the "aliens" don't speak English. Of course they don't - we're landed on their world, not the other way around. To land on a planet and blame the locals for their local culture isn't likely to be effective.
What we think makes sense is to reframe the problem and set more realistic expectations. It's hard to to do this if there's (understandable) resentment or bitterness, but reframing the problem to make it more actionable seems the wisest way forward.
Hi Scott, late here, voting already closed. One question: "You're told there isn't time for UX" - wonder why you didn't say "You're told there isn't time for DESIGN"? For example, in some organizations "UX" encompasses stuff that happens before "design", like "strategy" and "research". I imagine the confusion about how design relates to other parts of an organization's UX practice is one reason design is hard.....
I think it is closest to your number one, but I always say it this way, “The biggest problem in design is that no one in any organization can agree on the value proposition of DOING design work.” That is to say no one understands or agrees with what “designing” as a verb is. When I say no one agrees, I include the design team itself as much as the rest of the organization.
The biggest challenge I've seen for Design in big hairy hierarchical businesses is culture and transparency.
The hierarchical nature of these orgs means that most initiatives & goals are outputs to support the career progression of senior leaders.
Design and designers face problems when they start uncovering evidence that those leaders decisions may not be right or based on much other than assumptions.