As I'm ought to do on the cusp of starting a new role, I've spent some time reflecting on my career, but also Design as a career.
The opportunity to add another chapter in my career prompted résumé and portfolio updates. Reviewing old projects reminded me of how volatile the ocean of software creation is. Digital, by its very nature, is temporary; and the speed at which things move has, regrettably, made relationships between employees and employers increasingly transactional.
Early in my career, I decided in-house Design would provide the stability required to create things that could be refined over time. This was an important factor in choosing my next role, and joining an organisation that offered product growth and longevity. It mattered because I've noticed tenures shrink, projects become more tactical, and compromises in quality are accepted under the guise of being “Lean” or “Agile”.
Interestingly, the dictionary offers two distinct definitions for ‘career’. The first evokes a mail-room to board-room vibe,
“an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person's life and with opportunities for progress.”
The alternate definition, “move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way,” however, seems more apt when considering the current software design job market, and the software development landscape more broadly.
Designers may feel increasingly at the mercy of industry torrents, paddling sideways to keep afloat. I'll offer my advice on how designers may navigate such conditions, but first, let's explore the impacts on Design careers due to:
- changes in Design education,
- the broken promises of tech, and
- the transient nature of software development.
Starting out at the turn of the century
I decided—as a 90s teenager—to become a graphic designer. I studied Art and Design during high school, and managed to secure a spot at Design Center Enmore when I was 17. Naively, I never gave much mind to how I would actually find work as a designer. I had a hunch there would be demand for people who could design (and build) websites. Thankfully, I was right.
Looking back, my pathway from a dabbling teenager to an employed designer was somewhat straightforward. I studied hard for four years, after which I found junior designer roles; be they Graphic, Visual or Web. There was cohesion between education institutes and employers, be they Design agencies or in-house Design teams.
The work in my junior years—from 2004 to 2008—had variety; magazine layouts, photography, websites, interactive flash animations, and printed promotional assets, to list a few.
Things were in transition, and I leveraged everything I attained at college. Despite having much to learn from experienced colleagues about the profession, I too brought something to the table. My four years at Design college weren't just aimed at getting a job, but rather to develop the skills and knowledge to pursue my passion. They empowered me to say, “yes, I can do that”, and this set me up for the sea change to come.
The digital frontier
Over the past twenty years, huge investments in digital transformation and tech native start-ups have seen Software Design explode. By the mid-aughts, the stuffy I.T. vibe of the 90s was gone. Tech was becoming sexy thanks to the likes of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Digital platforms became the cornerstone of every business, including blue-chip corporations and their disruptive, digital-native counterparts. Designers, welcoming the digital revolution, rushed into the space, upping interface and interaction design skills.
User Experience (UX) Design, focused on software usability, had embedded itself in Tech by the 90s, but had become all the rage by 2010.
The boot-camp boom
Educators supported this transitional period, and courses emerged to prepare designers for the future of (Digital) Design. For designers who saw demands in traditional media dry up or who were inherently drawn to Digital, these courses were a way to up-skill. They provided ways to extend knowledge, keep up with emerging trends, and augment competencies.
Over the years, however, these supplementary courses have become an alternative starting point for Design education, and target career change seekers specifically. They promise would-be designers the skills to get a dream job, along with a six figure salary, in a matter of months.
This type of positioning isn't limited to Design courses, but Design was ripe for it because the value of Design has always been difficult to justify. For, example, it is sometimes perceived as a trade pertaining to desktop tools, rather than an ability to think differently and apply various methods to problem solve, communicate and create.
The trivialised perception of Design, coupled with the allure of working in Tech, has created a boom of short-cuts. UX, specifically, has suffered from an emphasis on tools over core competencies, frameworks without methodology, check-lists without knowledge, and blind faith in “best practices”.
Becoming a designer in the 2020s
I can only surmise the idea is that once a basic toolkit is acquired, coupled with transferable skills, short course graduates can rely on work experience to bridge gaps in their development. I have seldom been in environments, however, where this would be the case. Designers are often arranged in flat, or extremely shallow hierarchy structures as individual contributors deployed to different teams and projects. There is also increasing expectation on the variety of deliverables they can output.
Few—if any—organisations building software are cultivated environments where processes, people and cultures around Design are well structured. Most don't have broader stability and continuity of product work that would be conducive for career development for senior designers, let alone graduates or juniors.
As a student, one should develop core Design competencies—which merge aspects of psychology, communication, interaction, visual language and technology—and learn how to demonstrate them. There are more options now for traditional education pathways with more mature Digital Design subjects than I had access to, so I would always recommend a Bachelor in Visual Communication, or a Diploma in UX and Web Design, over a boot-camp.
As a junior, one can hone one's craft on the job, applying it to a specific domain while developing systems thinking and sharpening their understanding of a specific customer archetypes. Only as one gets more proficient, and experienced, can they effectively find a focus area.
Who's hiring UX graduates anyway?
When I engage with disillusioned, aspiring designers I mentor on ADPList, especially those who have come out of a short course, I feel bad for them because Design leaders aren't getting what they need from that source.
Having recently scoured various job listings, the only junior roles I came across were Graphic Design focused, this included specific graduate and internship programs. To take things further, I even did a quick scan of designers at larger, more mature companies, and noticed only “leads”, “leaders” and “seniors” among their ranks.
To be sure, there is demand for UX/UI/Product designers, but they all state requirements along the lines of;
“Proven experience in UI/UX design and product design.”
With increasing expectations for “end-to-end” Design capabilities, the reality doesn't jive with the promise of UX boot-camps. Setting unrealistic expectations and flooding the market with pseudo-supply creates bad experiences for hiring managers, and candidates.
The imbalance between supply which actually meets the demand has also meant some “junior” or “mid-level” designers are profiting from the lack of standards around seniority. Inflated titles may seem like good progress in the short term, but they have ramifications on future career opportunities because Designers may not actually be getting the development they need. Sometimes one has to take a step back first in order to really grow.
The broken promise of tech's user-centricity
Design doesn't exist in a vacuum, and so we must also look more broadly at the waters we swim in to understand Design careers.
Tech promised to change the world for the better. Google had sworn to NOT be evil, Apple had demonstrated the value of good design. Ever the idealists, designers wanted in. Unfortunately, things haven't quite panned out how we'd imagined. For instance, while using the Uber app recently, I was presented with a movie trailer. No doubt I could spin that as “user-centric” if I had to, but we know things like this don't come out of Design Thinking workshops. They are business decisions, and possibly good ones.
Another fallacy which emerged in the past twenty years is that “every company is a tech company”. While it is true that companies must embrace technology to survive, pretending newspapers became tech companies has only left us with worse, or stale sources of news. Swap “news”, for airlines, banks, telcos, retailers, and so on to find similar examples of business first practices.
While the maturity of UX consideration throughout organisations increased during my formative years, it has also become a double-edged sword. Adding to that the struggle for a seat at the table. More and more, others feel they can represent Design on behalf of designers by way of rudimentary understanding of UX heuristics. Not to pick on what is, by all accounts, a great company, but not even Canva—a design product founded by designers—has a Design Executive that I could identify in its C-Suite.
Despite the promise of user-centric experiences in Tech, Design leadership pathways are few and far between. You will notice that many Design leadership (sounding) roles still expect mostly tactical outputs, and don't actually “lead” initiatives or people.
A designer's role in how software is made
Software once offered new “digital” channels for traditional businesses, but many products are now digitally native. The tech industry has set its standard operating procedures, and nowadays, there is a certain homogeneity to how software is developed.
Designers are seldom around at the inception, and only after ideas are successfully pitched to executives, boards, or venture capitalists are resources allocated. From there, with differing degrees of process maturity, cross-functional teams (including designers) will work to uncover problems and define solutions within the idea's scope. They will likely leverage (ill-disciplined) versions of Double-Diamond, Lean, Agile, etc., to determine a minimum viable, or minium valuable product (MVP).
While delivering, product managers, programmers and designers will react to unforeseen limitations and make compromises in order to meet business objectives. It's a messy, trying process. Some organisations will do it better than others, with more appetite or runway for risk and innovation.
Whatever influence a designer has on a product experience will usually be limited to the touch-points they are working on. The actual user experience will likely span other touch-points that they have limited, or no, influence over. More on that in my piece, Product service design—anchoring the org chart to a customer lifecycle.
Product transience, and the affect on Design careers and creativity
It is not uncommon that by the time a product (or service change) launches, strategic priorities change. This can lead to teams being re-shuffled, structures upended, and new leadership. Just when a designer starts feeling comfortable in a problem space and primed to add real value—beyond the MVP—they may be faced with starting over.
The impact on Design careers, when there is little opportunity to refine a product or service over time, is they become project-based hustles. Not developing deep domain knowledge, systems thinking and business acumen can also hinder a designer's career aspirations.
It's hard to be creative when you're in a constant state of flux, and this has left us with few truly innovative user experiences. Best practice play-books guide everything in every context, and that's even before we introduce AI-generated everything.
The transience leaves designers with portfolios filled with screenshots from projects they can be proud of, but also filled with out-of-date practices and endless compromises. Subsequently, they also leave Design leaders worse off—desperate for designers who can swim in the deep end, paying the cost of hiring and onboarding new recruits.
Navigating the turbulent waters of a design career
The full value of design is something we will always need to justify to certain employers. Design careers require resilience, if nothing else. Here are some principles that have helped me be resilient as Digital Design evolved over the past twenty years:
1) Make lemonade
One of my teachers scolded our class once when we were lamenting the boring subject matter of another class project. She reminded us that designers must be able to make any brief interesting, and that the work would be what we made it. A bit like the adage, “there are no small parts, only small actors”. Designers have the ability to make dry information interesting, mundane experiences delightful and difficult things simple.
Don't wait on that dream job at Google or Netflix, solve every problem as best you can.
2) Don't take good people for granted
You won't always be able to control who you are surrounded by. I have been fortunate to foster some very important relationships over the years with people who have inspired me, challenged me, and ultimately made me a better designer.
The designers I studied with had interests that spanned many creative fields, and waxed lyrical about sub-cultures and counter-culture movements, which expanded my understanding of creativity. Highly talented colleagues with expertise ranging from Business Development, Research, Design, Product Management to Engineering made me a better decision-maker.
Be mindful of who you are surrounded by, don't settle for toxicity, but also don't take great colleagues or leaders for granted.
3) Immerse yourself
Take any opportunity to dabble in all things related to Design and software. Too often we engage in discussions like, “do designers need to code?”, when we should be encouraging with enthusiasm. If you're committed to designing software, learn all you can about it. Build something with code, make it accessibility, learn about typography, colour theory and layout. Look into Web3, pick up an Android or Apple phone if you use the other.
In the age of Google, let alone ChatGPT, there is no excuse not to create your own hobby projects and immerse yourself in things you may not have the opportunity to do at work.
4) Lean in
If you want more influence over the experiences that ultimately manifest in front of users, lean in and be curious about the organisation at large. If you want to progress from a sole contributor to a leader, this is especially important.
Put effort into discovering how things work, and identify how you might be able to improve things beyond a stated brief.
5) Have conviction
To be convincing, you need to be convinced yourself that the process you're following is right. Do this by asking questions and challenging assumptions, so you can rationalise your work against the opportunity and customer need.
Be comfortable accepting fair criticism, and receiving feedback, as they are key to progress. Conviction doesn't mean being arrogant or stubborn, but it does mean sticking your neck out if you believe in something.
6) Visualise
Design is sense-making and problem solving through a creative process. The most obvious value a designer can bring to an organisation is an ability to communicate visually. Map out customer journeys, create story boards, render ideas, or build prototypes so that things can be discussed further with tangible stimulus. Remember, everyone can talk, few can show.
Alway be the first to pick up a pen (or mouse) and draw what people are saying.
Conclusion
Even as I write this piece, I reflect on a rich Design career, across a variety of industries where I have been entrusted with creating experiences that millions of users have engaged with.
Design, despite all its challenges and frustrations, remains a career that has never had me dreading Mondays. So, on the eve of starting a new adventure, I look forward to it positively, knowing I will get to be creative while continuing to learn.