I’m trying to figure out how to deal with all the layoffs in tech and for UX designers. I’m writing this for myself, to myself, to figure out my thoughts where UX design have been and where it’s going and how I can advise the more junior designers on my team.
As you may know I’m trying to get an overview for myself on the current state of UX. Last time I wrote about all the different roles that got incorporated under “UX Design” by the time I started getting into it. Today I will try to sketch out some current developments.
I will keep this brief since I mostly work in large enterprise environments and don’t often come in contact with this type design. It seems like there has been a shift to calling yourself Brand designer for may of the people who might earlier have been graphic designers. I’m guessing that there were more and more customers out there that wanted things like logos and other brand assets and slowly people just started calling themselves brand designers. This group of people work as freelancers or in agencies more often than the other groups.
UX designers have always had it tricky to justify themselves. There have been a lot of discourse about how designers should change. “You need to learn about business”/“you need to learn how to code” and I don’t know how many articles I’ve read about showing ROI of design. I think that if you were leaning more towards the business side you started calling yourself a product designer in 2020 and if you liked to code then you might slowly be moving into a design engineer role right now.
Being a product designer I think also reflects the changing climate around design. Compared to the beginning of the 2010s we don’t talk as much about representing users any more. We were maybe a bit idealistic back then and maybe right now we are a bit cynical and jaded (There seemed like there was a potential back then to work towards something larger than ourself and more important than a bottom line. That potential seems gone now). Today you need to justify yourself by showing how you improved various metrics that are important to the bottom line.
There have recently been some good articles written about the design engineer and what they do (example, example, example). For the purpose of this post I lump in all kinds of “designers who code” under this category. I also put design system engineers/designers in this category. The design system have helped product designers enormously. In an enterprise environment it is not uncommon for product designers to drag and drop readymade components in Figma (sort of similar to wire framing) and this would not be possible without design systems.
For a company of small or mid size I think it makes a ton of sense to hire someone who can sketch out an interface and then code it. In large companies it probably depends more on that particular organisation. There can be a lot of politics and protecting of ones turf which makes a design engineer a bit difficult to fit in. Unless they work in a design system team of course.
Although PMs have a background from marketing they are one of those roles that really grew up when the FAANGs started using SCRUM and Agile. Today the PM role is often described as being the voice of the customer. This used to be something that UX designers would claim. Maybe they still do? But UX design seems to have de-emphised the research part of the profession as time has gone on. The nature of research have also changed: I see less and less discussion about qualitative research methods while there have been an explosion in quantitative techniques. PMs are more often seen looking at a dashboard of quantitative data rather than post its for a thematic analysis.
These are the major ways I think the UX designer is evolving. I don’t want to say that they are dissappearing but I believe the role was very broad from the beginning and it makes it hard to defend a role and a competency. I feel like we are moving toward a future with fewer UX design generalist and more product designers, PMs, Design engineers, and brand designers where the UX designer used to be. I feel like I need to put into words how this changes things and how you might stay ahead and ride this wave.
I’ll end here with a reminder that these are very subjective impressions backed up by nothing. If you have a different view or would like to comment then please reach out. It’s easiest on mastodon. Thanks for reading.