Realities of The UX Industry 101: Part 2
“Will the sequel live up to the author’s expectations?”
This is the part 2 of my previous Realities of The UX Industry 101 post.
Let me start with a low-hanging fruit that’s close to my heart, but trivial enough that I don’t want to delve too deep into: I dislike the use of “UI/UX” as a catch-all term to refer to this profession.
Why? Because it’s confusing in most cases, and lumping these two concepts together create an inaccurate depiction of this field.
UX, or User Experience, is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency. Notice the inclusion of the term “service” above: we can improve the UX of something that’s not tangible. It may also not just be associated with one distinct entity; when a staff manages a hybrid event for hundred thousands of visitors, the process may involve the use paper forms, smart devices, scanning gadgets, and whatnot. That experience is all-encompassing.
UI, or User Interface, is the space or the medium where humans interact with machines. Nowadays, it’s most commonly referring to GUI (graphical user interface), such as computer or smartphone screens, where we control the visual elements using an indirect method like a mouse or a direct method like touching with their fingers. When you use voice control to command a smart device like Amazon Echo, you’re also using a UI, albeit it’s an audio one.
The experience isn’t the interface alone, but the interface could be the entirety of the experience itself. Just like nobody should think of mastering culinary arts compared providing a satisfactory catering service — having the ability to mock up beautiful UI doesn’t automatically make a person a capable UX specialist, and vice versa.
However, as this industry bloomed over the past decade, companies are sold the idea of getting the bargain deal of “hiring one person to do two different jobs”, and plenty have picked up on the “UI/UX” term instead.
(Speaking from experience, hiring a self-proclaimed “UI/UX” person is a bad deal in a majority of cases. Especially true if the hiring manager doesn’t have a relevant background; he or she is just not equipped to tell bad candidates from good ones.)
Now that I have gotten my quip out of the way, let’s talk about less (or more?) petty things.
The Quick and Dirtier Way of UX
Before UX, there was usability. Well, the latter still exists, but it has since been merged under the umbrella of UX concepts and evaluated as a part of the UX design and research life cycle. Or at least, in theory, that how it’s supposed to be.
In practice, while there are many companies that do UX, few of them do enough to meaningfully improve the usability of their products and services (and in some cases the usability actually worsens instead). Why is this happening, in spite of the increased awareness and receptiveness of the UX practice?
I could say to blame it on the “move fast and break things” mentality that overtook the tech industry in the past fiften years or so.
As more and more tech entrepreneurs join the market, the race to come out on top becomes ever more competitive, thus the velocity of product development efforts also increases... Resulting into startups going full speed ahead towards the finish line, leaving debris that may or may not be cleaned up afterwards. This sort of practice was primarily upheld by startups, but to a large extent, it has spread across the industry and has taken root in parts of established companies.
In order to not stand in the way of innovation, the common consensus here is to “build first and refine later”. But here’s my question for the founders or business leaders is — how much later are we talking about?
If the launch was successful, they would want to ride the surge and keep pushing for a larger market share, prioritizing aggressive growth strategies and dropping everything else that doesn’t support that goal.
If it’s unsuccessful, they would switch into crunch mode and to pivot or attempt other strategies, which also means dropping everything else that doesn’t lend to keep things afloat.
In the rare case that the product has survived long enough in the market and has a firm footing, finally starting to generate a healthy stream of revenue, you then try to suggest fixing the usability issues. You’re most likely going to get the response of: “It’s making money! Why fix what isn’t broken?”, which leads to a series of “meetings” and email exchanges that may or may not work out in your favor.
Regardless of everything else plays out, companies are generally hungry for further growth and would favor new ventures (potential profit) than doing housekeeping (guaranteed cost) for existing items; this is likely to cause the UX team to move to those new opportunities as well.
And thus complete the cyclical tragedy in three acts: the need to go to market quicker leads to a condensed product development schedule, resulting into corner-cutting of areas that appear to impede the progress, and then the business needs to keep growing in order to stay competitive. Rinse and repeat.
As a consequence of cutting corners, what remains is a lot of guesswork or half-baked intel, which are unfortunately then extrapolated to influence decisions that may have significant consequences, but that impact won’t be obvious in the short term; it’s the next VP’s job to worry about it five to seven years down the road.
The challenge is that achieving good usability just takes plenty of time and resources, so it’s often at odds with the business timeline; when you have to recruit users to test things, analyze the results, and then tease out actionable insights, there’s a physical limit to how much the entire process can be accelerated. If the product leader refuses to factor in the minimum time needed to validate and improve the usability, then it’s only natural that the usability may simply be not up to par. And we haven’t even begin to talk about accessibility yet.
At the very least, it makes sense when startups follow this practice, because they are cash-strapped and it’s a matter of life or death scenario for them. But it never fails to boggle my mind when financially stable and larger companies do this.
The other half of this picture is the shift in development practices and tools: hardware is more powerful and cheaper than ever; the glut of high quality open source frameworks and libraries drastically reduced the need to build from scratch; cloud computing and related technologies enable people to jumpstart product development with minimal overhead. The list goes on.
Companies can ship products faster than ever, but at what expense? Truth to be told, some days I feel like we’re collectively making great progress while at the same time going backwards. It’s a confusing awakening to an odd phenomenon.
What this all means is that you should be mentally prepared that you might not be actually working towards good usability when you take on a UX role.
The UX Industry and Bootcamps
As a relatively new person, both in the sense of as a practitioner and a new member of any organization, it’s to be expected that you will need a lot of time to ramp up.
If you’ve been a part of a large workforce before, you will be able to speak to this: it typically takes anywhere from a couple of weeks to a few months before people are ready to make any useful contribution, especially if you’re part of an important project. Learning how to navigate your day to day, how the business functions, who to ask for things, what political undercurrents are at play... This all takes a surprisingly long time to wrap one’s head around.
The added challenge with being a bootcamp grad without any prior training or relevant education, however, is that you’re going to have to do all of the above, while catching up for the lack of foundational knowledge that you couldn’t have learned in a short term program.
(If you can manage to land a position in the first place, that is. There are plenty of entry-level opportunities, but few places are willing to take the risk of hiring someone with minimal experience these days.
It’s worth noting that all of my criticisms on this topic is towards questionable business practices of some bootcamp organizers, not the students themselves. However, regardless of who the organizer is, this deal is setup in a way that the organizer will profit no matter if the student will land a proper UX position or not. There’s a reason why legitimate academic programs have rigorous admission requirements, whereas most bootcamps ask for nothing but a “small payment” that seems like a great bargain compared to college tuition.)
It’s not a rare sight these days to have people of different professional backgrounds and academic qualifications to be in the same team. This is generally a good thing from a skill diversity perspective: having members from all walks of life gives room for creativity to prosper.
This is also crucial for teams to come up with innovative solutions in today’s world. People with an orthodox background can be exposed to the practice and perspectives of other professions (since many bootcamp grads are professionals who switched careers), while the mid-career entrants can learn from their colleagues who’ve gone through a more robust education and training.
What is not so good is the existence of imbalance or social gap within the team. When you’re vetting prospective employers, these are a few scenarios to be cautious of:
When a company who doesn’t know why they need UX, and end up hiring only bootcamp grads to form the “design” team (usually because new bootcamp grads are willing to accept a lower compensation as they crave work experience). The lack an experienced leadership tend to result into a mess. During the interview, make sure you find out if you’re the first UX hire and what you’re expected to do on the job; don’t hesitate to walk away, unless you absolutely need to pay the bill.
When a team is led by a person with little to no training in UX, and that person can’t differentiate a well-rounded and seasoned practitioner from one that’s good at quickly churning out pretty graphics. This usually results in poor allocation of duty and resources, leading to lower quality work and therefore lower morale. Make sure you have a chance to talk to other people in the team before you make a decision.
When there are culture problem surrounding the team that aren’t properly addressed. Whether it’s one group looking down on another due to a difference of background and how much the management values their contribution, or there that career growth within the organization is designed as a zero-sum game, or there isn’t an established protocol for resolving communication and collaboration bottlenecks, so on and so forth. Again, talk to people and gauge their reactions.
Personally, I have a commoditization theory on how the prevalence of bootcamps and other types of job training is impacting the UX job market. This is largely an unintended side effect brought on by the boom of the tech industry.
The definition of a commodity is:
The market treats instances of the good as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them.
In other words: more places are hiring for UX positions, many of which are organizations with a lower or even non-existing UX maturity, and as a result more employers don’t distinguish people who have a well-rounded background versus those who have not. The market then becomes inundated with job opportunities that do not differentiate candidates based on their qualifications.
As the hiring practice becomes less selective at these organizations (either the hiring practice is full of holes, or the manager isn’t capable of judging, or both), it also means their hiring standard is one doesn’t vet whether the candidate is a good fit for the organization, but rather whether the candidate checks predefined boxes that are easy to judge, like “beautiful designs of current UI trends”, “familiar with ABC tools”, or “have XYZ keywords in the resume”.
This is all objectively bad for the UX industry, as it dilutes the baseline of the professional practice and stunts beginners’ career development. I hope it will right itself eventually, but we may have to put up with the chaos for now.
The outcome is that most bootcamp grads will continue to struggle to break into the industry, with new grads from academic programs and less experienced candidates having to suffer some of that collateral damage, all the while that the relatively small portion of established practitioners are happily job hopping for higher and higher compensation... That is, until the recession hits.
(There’s a more fundamental question of whether a college should be required for knowledge work, but that’s a such a complex and touchy topic that I don’t dare to go into it for now. Maybe some other day when I’m inebriated enough.)
To Learn or To Not Learn Visual Design
Short answer: yes, you should.
Long answer:
If you don’t have an arts related background, it’s always worth improving your visual design skill, regardless of whether it is part of your responsibility, because people will judge your work based on their aesthetic even if it shouldn’t be a pertinent criteria.
Note that I’m using the word “improving” and not “mastering”. You can achieve a lot by just having a solid grasp of the core principles.
To name a few: use colors with high contrast; only use quality fonts that are easy to read for your body texts; prefer simple and clear graphics over fancy but complex ones; don’t fill up all the whitespace and give things room to breathe; don’t break conventions unless you have a very good reason for doing it.
Now, considering I started out as a graphic designer, I have a belief that’s particularly controversial: unless you aspire to become a master of visual design and want to commit the rest of your career on that path, don’t invest more time than necessary to learn about it.
Before I’m crucified by other designers, take a minute to hear me out. The truth is that there will always be demand for beautiful and thoughtful visual design, but then my question for you is — what are you trying to achieve?
Here’s what I believe: if you want to be a great UX practitioner, you should put your understanding of human cognition and behavior, as well as social dynamics, above anything else. That means keeping up with insights coming out of cutting-edge academic research, maintaining a habit of reading relevant articles and books, and thinking deeply about factors that influence how people interact.
Visual design, programming, statistics, whatnot... as UX is inherently multi-disciplinary, these are all important skills to have in your toolbox, but you shouldn’t view them as a means to an end. Improving human conditions and solving people’s problems should be the first and the last goal of our profession.
In practice, though? It doesn’t elude me that this mindset is idealistic, given that we have to abide by our work contracts, and that our performance (in a for-profit entity) is mainly tied to how much we contribute to the bottom line. So, setting my belief aside, maximizing the visual quality of your work is perhaps the most straightforward way to have it be noticed by the people in charge — I have had to learn that the hard way myself.
(And if you were to ask me whether you should learn to code if you’re a designer, my answer is always yes. You don’t need to become a full-fledged software engineer, but it can be useful if you learn enough of it to better understand the technical constraints you’re working with. I recommend CS50.)
Generally speaking, the approach I described here is a good rule of thumb for whenever you’re considering to spend time to learn anything. Ask yourself:
What’s the ideal level of this skill that I need to command, so that it can maximize my career success within the next five years?
How likely is this skill going to be replaced by low-cost and widely available labor, or can even be automated entirely in the near future?
(I’m aware of the irony of writing about this in the context of the commoditization of the UX labor market, but it’s also the exact reason why you should think about how you want to allocate your time.)
We are in an odd point in time where even non-designer roles are expected to have gorgeous portfolios, because of the blurring of responsibilities in companies that have a less established UX team. Despite that “creating good visuals” shouldn’t be the primary responsibility of these positions, that’s the aspect they are being measured upon and they are expected to reflected that in their work.
So, yes, do learn visual design — at least a little more than knowing just enough to be dangerous.
Interestingly, there’s an opposite side of this whole talk about visual design: there are actually many people designing GUIs who don’t actually know how to design them correctly. They either fall into the camp of visual designers who lack the proper knowledge in usability principles and training in systems thinking (a good example is one of those “which UI is better” posts floating around social media), or worse, the kind that’s only proficient enough to fake it with premade assets to fool oblivious stakeholders.
(This is a two-part problem: many candidates have an uneven skill set, and then there’s the lack of a robust interview process. For one reason or another, some companies really just aren’t ready to hire for design talents yet. It doesn’t count if it’s the financial director who thinks he or she “has an eye for art”.
At one point during my previous job, I got into a minor but recurring argument with a colleague on using icons with text; I was being asked to remove the label in order to make things look sleeker. The disagreement stemmed from two reasons: we were working towards consolidating our user interface style, and leaving out the words did indeed make the design look slick in comparison. I stood my ground because I knew that removing it would impact the product’s usability; sacrificing ease of use in the name of consistency isn’t a rationale decision in my book.
In the end, my insistence didn’t matter. After this was brought to a few senior colleagues’ attention, they also voiced their agreement to remove the words. To this day, it still seems bizarre to me that, in addition my advice, even the developers and QA testers stated that the lack of words confused them, yet there’s nothing I could do to change the mind of the people in charge. The bias for aesthetics was too strong.)
You and Your Work
In the previous post, I talked about the risks of joining a low UX maturity team and how it may become a source of frustration for beginners, but I didn’t talk as much about the larger environment.
If it’s a big company, that means there are many people outside of your team that you may have to frequently interact with, whether it’s coworkers that follow other chains of command, middle and senior management staff, client representatives, so on and so forth. For building relationships, this sort of environment is great, but I’m not as confident when it comes to doing good UX work.
Joining a well-established team is only half of the equation. The arguably the larger half of it depend on two factors:
Where your team is situated in the unspoken hierarchy of the main organization; the larger and more dispersed it is, the less influence your team is likely to have.
Whether others are generally informed about the work that your team does. But more importantly, whether they view your team’s contribution as only an afterthought to be tacked on.
Because educating people and getting their buy-in are both painful uphill battles — they are an even worse ordeal if your team doesn’t have a strong presence and others don’t understand the value you bring to the table. Even if the team composition has the potential for a great internal dynamic, that potential won’t bear fruit when its members have to put up with all kinds of bureaucratic and cultural obstacles from the outside. If this friction doesn’t improve over time, it will begin to gnaw inward, nipping that potential in the bud.
Frankly, I also think that it’s a meaningless pursuit to rally for changes if you aren’t high up in the chain of command. If your goal is to make improvements within your group, you need to be as close to the team leadership position as possible... But in order to extend your influence beyond your immediate circle? You will need to play the political game and climb to a much higher position. Much easier said than done.
(I don’t have any word of wisdom to offer on this topic because I have never gone that far up, though I’m fairly confident in my conclusion from talking to people and validating them in my own research. If you’re unhappy with the environment and you have the option to switch jobs, consider moving to a more mature employer instead; that’s a much quicker path to professional growth and happiness. It’s not recommended to fight for a purpose that you have no significant stake in.)
From an individual standpoint, this dynamic is a little more interesting, if not opportunistic: your UX work may not need to be good, but you need to make sure the presentation of yourself (how you speak and look) and your work are polished.
This may be valid for a number of reasons, but especially true in for-profit environments. Aside from the factors that I have just talked about, you should see if any combination of the elements below are also present in your workplace.
You’re working on an enterprise product or service, and the clients (read: ones who decides where to spend money) who sign the contract aren’t going to be the ones using it.
There isn’t a good way for people who are using your product or service to make their feedback heard. Whether it’s because there isn’t a direct channel available, or there isn’t a process to gather and synthesize the feedback.
Your company’s sales or client team has a dominating influence due to their ability to bring in loads of money, so much so that they can even shove their agendas into your plate; your success criteria then becomes meeting their expectations instead.
The UX is merely a veil for how the company stays competitive and profitable in the market. For instance, ads-driven social media platforms benefit more from maximizing retention and engagement rates, than providing a healthy UX for their users.
Having a great UX is a multiplying force and it can help a business thrive, but the company needs a good foundation to be successful in the first place. Oftentimes, a business can turn a profit regardless of whether or not they put much emphasis on its UX. Conversely, if the business is operated poorly or the offerings are fundamentally bad, then there’s not much the UX team can bring to the table; no matter how you decorate the look and fix the controls of a car with a dying engine, it still won’t run well.
All of this is another extension of the idea I’ve written before: doing UX in business environments is often a means to a commercial end. The quality of your deliverables won’t matter as much as the business results of that those deliverables can produce, whatever those results might entail in a given context.
(As I view it, this is largely because it’s difficult to correlate UX decisions to concrete business impacts, and maximizing such impacts are ultimately what business owners care about. In some cases, such as e-commerce, making the checkout process more transparent and hassle-free would lead to obvious business results of increased revenue.
But in many other scenarios, the impacts are less correlatable: Do accessibility improvements that make a certain subset of customers happier actually contribute to the bottom line? Would executives heed your advice if not for compliance reasons?)
While I did wish that the situation is not as uber-capitalistic, I prefer to not lament over the role that UX plays in businesses these days. After all, businesses have to thrive in order to grow, which means continuously aiming to maximize their profit. It’s only logical that companies are putting their business priorities above anything else, many of which have little to do with granting a wholesome experience for their customers.
And just to be clear: I don’t agree with the mindset of putting financial priorities above all things. I’m merely here to explain why companies behave the way they are. (See Jack Welch’s brand of management for more on this topic.)
Redesigning for Worse
I have a cynical theory: designers will keep redesigning already well-designed things to justify the necessity of their existence in a company.
That said, it’s a pure conjecture that I can’t prove. And also, speaking from experience anyway, these redesign initiatives are most likely driven by the political pressure from marketing and other business groups; they almost never originate from the design team itself, assuming that the team leadership is competent and doesn’t have hidden motives.
(For example: there are factors such visual trends that influence this decision-making. Companies often have to renew their branding and visual style every few years to maintain a fresh impression, and it does provide an opportunity to market about the updated design and attract more traffic. So, even if the existing UI is more usable, it often has to be overhauled to as a part of this campaign.)
Now, UX practitioners will tend to be able find a seat at the table rather than be viewed as a second-class citizen. Particularly at places that have a strong product culture such as Facebook or Google: they have fleets of designers and researchers working on projects that impact hundreds of millions of users. From the standpoint of an entry-level person, one can surely do much worse than finding themselves in these workplaces.
But if you’ve been using their products for some years, you may have noticed that many aspects of their apps and websites have gotten less user-friendly (despite becoming more interactive and visually appealing). How could this be happening if those companies have hired more UX experts and their culture has further matured over the years?
Part of this has to do with the tendency to increase business gains and decrease operating costs above other things. As I said: if a product doesn’t make or save enough money to justify keeping it around, then it better change, or it needs to go.
(And if we’re on the same page that UX is a neutral multiplier, then we can agree that we will do good or bad depending on the overall impact that the organization has on the society. See dark patterns and manipulative functionalities for the more notorious examples.)
In principle, we can’t just keep saying “we’re working for the company so we just have to do what we are told” or “of course we will have to do what’s good for the business”. But it is the reality: you’re an employee, and my guess is that you’re only still in this line of work because it pays well.
Doing UX work for companies, by and large, is just a path to a high income and not much else in return.
Unfortunately, many in this industry has a savior complex in which they think UX could be the last hope that can turn this ship around... I hate to break it to you, that it’s not how this works. If the person wasn’t blinded by their own passion, then they are straight up lying to project some kind of an image.
If you really want to contribute to meaningful agendas, go work for a public institution — especially in science or education — or a reputable non-profit organization instead. But be warned that there aren’t going to be many UX opportunities, if at all. The pay is much less and the bureaucracy can be excruciatingly demotivative at times.
Choose wisely.
All in all, we live in an interesting time where pathways that were historically unavailable have opened up to more a broader population — the abundance of free educational materials is one of the few undisputedly positive aspects of our time. Nonetheless, it has brought as many challenges as it has benefits.
A lot of working in UX is learning how to adapt and course-correct oneself periodically. Especially with how fast technologies are evolving and new insights are constantly surfacing, definitions are always changing and therefore our understanding always needs to refreshed.
When I started my first technology course in 2010, I learned about the phrase “above the fold”, and I held onto that idea dearly for some years. That’s the kind of thing I would hear veteran practitioners echo here and there when I was browsing around sites that offered web design tips... But the research trends in the years have revealed that there’s no fold anymore.
It would have been nice if the this field has unified definitions of principles that can withstand the test of time, but I’m not sure if that will ever be the case. And if not, we’ll just have to embrace the ambiguity (or anxiety, or excitement, however you feel about the situation overall).
Such is the growing pains of the UX industry.