The Industrialisation of Design (or why Silicon Valley no longer hires UX designers) | February 3, 2016
Despite having their roots in Silicon Valley, UX designers are a rare breed inside traditional tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter. In some cases they are so rare that other designers claim UX design doesn’t even exist. As a result I thought it would be interesting to explore where this attitude has come from, to see if it can hint at where our industry is heading.
In my (largely anecdotal) experience, Silicon Valley startups are focussed on hiring product designers at the moment. If you haven’t come across the product designer term before, you can think of them as next generation web designers; talented generalists with an affinity towards mobile and a desire to create great digital experiences for all.
While hiring product designers is all the rage at the moment, that hasn’t always been the case. Many early stage start-ups were originally conceived by individuals who considered themselves user experience designers. Many of these individuals have subsequently moved into design leadership roles at companies like Amazon, Adobe and IBM.
UX design is undoubtedly a specialism, focussing on the strategic and conceptual aspects of design, rather than the more tangible elements of UI. In that regard it has close similarities with service design, but is typically scoped around digital experiences. As practitioners traditionally came to UX design later in their careers, either through Information Architecture and Human Computer Interaction, or UI design and front-end development, there are naturally fewer experienced UX Designers than other disciplines.
This lack of supply, combined with increased demand, started to cause problems. Thankfully, a rising awareness around the general concept of user experience (as opposed to the practice of user experience design) saw more and more UI designers explore this space. Designers started to gain an increased sensitivity towards the needs of users, the demands of different platforms, and an understanding of basic interaction design practices like wireframes and prototypes. A new hybrid began to emerge in the form of the product designer; somebody who understood the fundamentals of UX Design, but retained their focus on tangible UI design.
The viability of the Silicon Valley product designer was made possible by several interesting trends. First off, tech companies started to hire dedicated design researchers; a role that UX designers would often have done themselves. They also started to hire dedicated product managers, releasing the need for designers to engage in deep product strategy. The has led many experienced UX designers to follow careers in research and product management, while others have moved towards IoT and service design.
At the same time, the rise of design systems has reduced the reliance on traditional craft skills. Rather than having to create interfaces from scratch, they can now be assembled from their component parts. This has allowed product designers to spend more time exploring newer fields of interaction design like animated prototypes. You could argue that thanks to design systems, product designers have become the new interaction designers.
This is further helped by companies with a vibrant developer culture and a focus on continual release. Rather than having to spend months researching and strategising, you can now come up with a hunch, knock up a quick design, launch it on a small subset of users and gain immediate feedback.
As a result of these infrastructure changes, tech companies no longer need people with deep UX expertise at the coalface. Instead these skills are now centred around management and research activities, allowing the companies to grow much faster than they otherwise would.
However this approach is not without growing pains, as I learnt when chatting to a design team director at one of the big tech companies recently. There was definitely a sense that while the new breed of product designers were great at moving fast and delivering considerable change, they lacked some of the craft skills you’d expect from a designer. Instead, design languages, prototyping tools, research teams and multi-variant testing were maybe acting as crutches, hiding potential weaknesses. There was also a concern that product designers were so focussed on the immediate concerns of the UI, they were struggling to zoom out, see the big picture and think more strategically.
All these concerns aside, it’s easy to see why, inside the tech industry bubble, UX design may no longer be recognised as a distinct thing.
Posted at February 3, 2016 6:00 PM
Victor said on February 4, 2016 5:43 PM
I’d love to see the specific examples that sustain your claims. My largely anecdotal experience living in SV for a bit more than two years differs much from what you expose here.
In particular:
• UX design roots, albeit from the valley indeed, were largely forgotten by the new wave of tech companies (Facebook, Twitter and Google, to mane some), and thus by most incipient startups, at least for a while. I’d argue the reason being the old UX Design value model was entrenched with a different corporate structural model: that of larger incumbents, a model startups could not copy (since they were not large incumbents themselves, and also because the value of design could only be associated with those models, and thus at that scale, and was very difficult to be measured by a model where every hire had to have a solid reasoning and ROI model baked into it. With time, startups became more knowledgeable and a new model was established, that recently is being adopted not only by small startups, but by incumbents as well, in a larger scale. So the chasm you might attribute to emphasis on UI and diversification of the discipline is nothing but an adaptation of an old ROI model into a new structure. As an example check the history of Uber and Airbnb (which is not from the valley but came here and made a difference on how the valley, and the world, thinks) and its approach to UX design (and more importantly to, and because of, Service design).
• The emphasis in UI is only a result of the superficiality of SV and its constant, absurd chanting of “fail often.
• UX design is the most sought-after discipline after software engineers (just look at the amount of job requests on sites like LinkedIn and Indeed.com).
• Tech companies did not “start” hiring dedicated Researchers and PMs, they have always hired them. in fact, SV was literally founded by Researchers and PMs, and has always had them at the center of the picture. Probably less so on what you decide to call SV: Facebook, Google, Twitter.
• “Product Designer” is but a title. Unfortunately, titling conventions in the valley are very seasonal and change in a fashionable way, so titles mutate rather quickly. However, the requirement for PDs most often tends to be the same as for IxDs or UXDs, and only changes because it is the role most small startups use (most of the times as to say “you’d do more than just UI design”). However (and it just takes a look at existing job descriptions) what follows the description after the job title tends to be extremely similar for all UXDs, UX/UIs and PDs.
All you say makes me think your contact with SV is reduced to mostly the young, big companies (FB is only 10 years old), and more specifically: Facebook, Twitter and Google. But the reality is SV is way larger than those companies, and way larger than SoMa and Market Street, or Menlo Park and Mountain View.
It’d be good to know, if this is not the case, to which companies you’re referring to, because my experience with companies such as PayPal, Ericsson, Juniper, Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, ebay, a few small startups and yes, also Facebook and Google, is not similar to yours.
In short:
• SV is hiring UX like never before. (just look at the job boards)
• Product Designer is the same as UX Designers in many cases, just used more by Seed/Series A startups.
• UX design tends to be closer to UI design for companies that have but a superficial understanding of design (and you’ll find them plenty, as USA’s approach to design keeps being mediatic, mediated and mostly superficial, and very much not as deep and thorough as Europe’s)
• Research and PM have always been part of the culture and workflow of the Valley, it is only that Research in particular has been cut short in the last 2-5 years (and my personal theory is that startups are the new research, but that’s enough theory for its own post).
• Your arguments seem of a highly semantic nature, and in reality it is all the same here (in the real SV).
This is my (largely anecdotal) opinion.