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#UXDesign is not dead. But our stakeholders have retreated from it, informing business decisions with carefully groomed metrics rather than by listening to user needs. Here's how designers fight back.

We've tried renaming design. We've tried learning how to code. We've tried yelling at people. Now let's try something that actually works.

To start fixing what's broken, we have to get out of Figma and build influence, trust, and - most importantly - relational power.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/st…


Steering a design career (why design goes wrong and how to set it right, part 2)

The work of design starts long before you open Figma. We must first seek out – or create – conditions in which good design is even possible, by building our own relational power.
The Product Picnic
#uxdesign
in reply to Pavel A. Samsonov

Brian Dear
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Brian Dear
• •

#UX deserves to be dead. It’s failed.

If only designers focused on the repeated success of the customer. That’s it. Obsess on the customer.

But by building barriers to keep customers at bay if not away (no_reply emails, anyone? so-called “AI” “support chat” time-wasters, anyone?), companies increasingly miss what customers are trying to
communicate but cannot because they cannot get through.

Things will change when the customer’s plight is more important than designer’s job.

#ux
in reply to Brian Dear

Pavel A. Samsonov
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Pavel A. Samsonov
• •
@brianstorms The Merholz piece I link to talks about this a little bit. Designers cultivated expert power (which no one cares about) and got flattened by positional and relational power. The only way through is by building political capital that needs to be spent on doing the good design work.
@Brian Dear
in reply to Pavel A. Samsonov

Brian Dear
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Brian Dear
• •
Nobody cares about designers. Customers don’t care about designers. They just want to accomplish tasks, day in, day out. The design profession is not aligned with the success of the customer, but rather with survival in the organization. As Yoda would say, “that is why you fail.”
in reply to Brian Dear

Pavel A. Samsonov
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Pavel A. Samsonov
• •
@brianstorms Unfortunately, business is not aligned with the success of the customer either; it is much more profitable to treat the symptoms than the disease. Nonprofit work on the other hand (especially UK GOV which I mention in the piece) is doing some excellent user centered work, for the obvious reason that citizens are not customers.
@Brian Dear