The state of UX design, and a job I did not take

An old colleague reminded me of a story about a job I did not take. It’s partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2010, partly a story about the state of user experience design circa 2025, and partly a story about professionalism & org development.

I interviewed to become the First UXD at midsize company making niche consumer electronics which had superb industrial design capacity but did not have a UX design practice at all, and realized they needed it. It was a good org in a lot of ways. I liked the people I met. They did not understand UXD, but they mostly knew that they didn’t know.

They gave me an offer. It was Grown-Up Money, but the number was weak, rolling back the odometer on my career by a decade.

I told the hiring manager that I would not take the offer. He was unsurprised, had warned HR that the salary was inadequate, and was confident that he could get them to improve it significantly.

I said:

Look, more money in itself won’t change my mind. That number reflects a different conception of what this job is than I thought we understood. That number is low for someone to do UX design, and you need someone to pioneer a UXD practice.

He replied:

You’re right. We don’t have a commitment to go heavy on UX design. We are adding a UX designer to the team as an experiment. If that works out, we want to build a practice.

I said:

That sounds reasonable. And it is doomed to fail.

If you don’t address how UX design connects to your design & development process, you won’t get much leverage even from a great designer. With the pay you offered me, people in the org will smell on the person in that role that they are not worth listening to about the process & organizational elements of turning good UX design into actual products with good UX.

It is even worse if the person in this job manages to drive some product improvements in spite of that problem. The org will learn the wrong lesson. They will expect modest gains without org change. They will never invest organizational juice into supporting UXD properly.

This position is set up for failure. I don’t want that job, even if you pay me more to do it.

The hiring manager said:

That is very clarifying. I only half-understood that problem. I know I cannot address it from where I am sitting in the org.

I said:

You really need someone who has made it happen before, but there are all of a dozen people in the world with that on their résumé, and you’ll need a crowbar to pry them loose from where they work now, so the best move available to you is to roll the dice on investing a lot of trust in someone like me, who does not have that experience but has the skills and a fundamental understanding of the process & org challenges. But it is obvious why it is so hard to make a commitment to that. You need executive air support.

Because I like what y’all do and want to see y’all build a real UXD practice even if I don’t get to be the one to do it, I’ll offer you a bit of free consulting time. Put me in front of someone who can drive org change, and I will lay it out the case for them, like I just did for you.

The hiring manager was enthusiastic about that being the Right Thing. They said that they would communicate my offer, but predicted that leadership would not bite. I was unsurprised that I never heard from them again. I needed a new job, but I felt relieved that I had dodged a bullet.

In the 2010s, we saw a lot of orgs became enthusiastic about the importance of user experience. They hired a bunch of designers, then just sprinkled them into their organizations without changing any of the structures or processes.

My prophecy for that organization I interviewed with happened across the industry. User experience design “didn’t work”, as in the famous parable we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

The fanatical proponents of baseball tell us that it is a very exciting game, fun to play and fun to watch. They are clearly either stupid or evil or both, because we tried baseball and it didn’t work.

First of all, the requirements for the game are stupid: it does not scale. They say you need at least nine players on a side. That’s stupidly inefficient. The minimum number of players is clearly four: three men on and one batting. That’s how we played: four people on a side.

With only four players, we didn’t need all those bases ⋯

[⋯]

The thing that finally condemns the entire “baseball” idea, however is this: even with all these improvements, the game is no fun at all.

We tried baseball, and it didn’t work.

Frankly, the UX design profession bears significant responsibility as well. We have not delivered clarity about what we need or even what we do, because we lack it as a professional community. Too many of us were insufficiently skilled. Too many of us accepted doomed positions because we felt we had to.

Now we have a lot of capable UX designers leaving the profession or having trouble staying in it … and a lot of crappy products & services. A tragedy.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”?

I want to never lend strength to Israel apologists who disingenuously find antisemitism in anything anyone ever says and does in the name of Palestinian liberation. All people of conscience must vigorously oppose the escalating genocide in Gaza, must not settle for merely ending that horror, must support an end to countless forms of oppression for Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank, inside Green Line Israel, and in the diaspora. We must ground commitment to Palestinian liberation in the rightness of the cause, not make it contingent on the movement using the right slogans. We have a genocide to stop.

But I confess to weariness with people saying bad things and then brushing off criticisms by saying “who cares while there is a genocide?” I hope we would agree that saying “kill the Jews” would be unacceptable, so it is possible for slogans to matter.

“From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is a far cry from “kill the Jews”. Most who use it mean neither more nor less than a call for Palestinian liberation. I do not fault them.

But the slogan itches at me. Rhymes make good chants, but the alchemy of combining “from the River to the Sea” with “Palestine will be free” gives this particular slogan unsavory implications which are not obvious to gentiles. We must closely examine it as rhetoric and see how that lands with Jews not because those are overwhelmingly important in themselves, but to contextualize the movement for Palestinian liberation choosing it as the slogan they promote.

From the River to the Sea

Defenders of the slogan dismiss Jews’ uneasiness with the expression “from the River to the Sea” as disingenuous, for good reasons. We have decades of both Palestinians and Israelis using “from the River to the Sea” as a call for solidarity between Palestinians and Israelis. But that usage emerges in dialogue with other history.

The phrase “from the River to the Sea” can be found in print well before the founding of Israel, used in aspirations to claim the whole territory for an ethnically homogeneous nation. Both Arabs and Zionists did this.

It also brings to mind the expression “push them into the Sea”, used — again both by Arabs and by Zionists, again dating back to even before Israel was founded — to name intent to expel people from the territory. Most Jews recognize it first from Israel hardliners who rationalize the Nakba — the genocidal expulsion of Arab Palestinians at the founding of Israel — with a claim that Palestinians fled their homes at the direction of Arab leaders who told them to flee in order to clear the way for Arab armies to “push the Jews into the Sea”. Reasonable people could once believe that story, since the founding of Israel was chaotic with conflicting accounts on all sides, but decades ago scholarship conclusively established that it is a pernicious lie, inverting how it was Israeli brutality rather than Arab hostility which sent 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes.

So saying “from the River to the Sea” is not a call to commit horrors, but it is not simply disingenuous to register that the more history one knows, the more hearing it summons such calls to mind. That does not disqualify use of the phrase in itself, but those ambiguities combine with ambiguities in the other half of the slogan ….

Palestine

“Palestine” can mean several different things —

1. The loosely-defined region extending far to the east of the Jordan River, including both what we now call Israel and Jordan (archaic, since this usage was typical of the late Ottoman Empire)
2. The current quasi-sovereign Palestinian Authority comprised of Gaza and the West Bank
3. A hypothetical truly sovereign successor to the Palestinian Authority with the same borders, no longer subject to Israeli military interference or settlements
4. The territory of British Mandate Palestine which between WWI-WWII included the whole area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, now broken into Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza
5. A hypothetical egalitarian unified state with equal rights for all, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority
6. A hypothetical secular Arab ethnic state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered
7. A hypothetical theocratic Muslim state, on the same territory as British Mandate Palestine, replacing both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, with Israelis oppressed, stateless, or murdered

This ambiguity confuses many conversations about Palestinian liberation.

Naming Palestine in the same breath as “from the River to the Sea” excludes ^#1-3 … which rejects the legitimacy of a two-state resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

There are good reasons to oppose a two-state resolution. I favor ^#5, a unified democracy, as ideal. But two states are a legitimate alternative one could regard as preferable on the merits … or just as more achievable.

Not only Zionists say this. The PLO publicly accepted a two-state resolution in principle back in the late 1980s. Hamas have at least nominally accepted it for about a decade; there are good reasons to doubt their sincerity, but they did say it.

It is weird to use a slogan which takes the two-state option off the table.

The slogan has room for “Palestine” to mean ^#5, ^#6, or ^#7. Most people using the slogan unmistakably intend to it to mean ^#5, the democratic, egalitarian version.

But many real advocates for Palestinian liberation demand the genocidal, undemocratic options ^#6 or ^#7. The original PLO charter called for ^#6, a secular Arab state denying citizenship to Israelis. The original Hamas charter called for ^#7, a theocracy. Plenty of people still take those positions today.

It is weird to use a slogan which excludes a two-state resolution while not excluding the displacement or genocide of Israelis.

Palestine will be free

With genocidal visions of Palestine on the table, what does “free” mean? The slogan does not say Palestinians will be free, it says that Palestine will be free. To Arab ethnic nationalists, a “free” Palestine means a state only for Arabs. To Muslim theocrats, a “free” Palestine means a state dedicated to Islam.

Plus Jews cannot help hearing a rhyme with the Nazi dream of a “Judenfrei Reich”, a Nazi slogan for the utopia they wanted to create through genocide. Will Palestine “be free” of Jews?

A cocktail of allusions

Again, we know that most people do not mean the expulsion of Jews when they use the slogan. But it evokes the prospect in several ways in the space of just ten words. Knowing what most people mean does not prevent feeling a sting from that.

I would say that Jews have an obligation to just handle how that spooks us, but yet more context complicates things further.

Antisemitism

Assuming universal or inherent antisemitism among Palestinians & Arabs is a racist fantasy. Contrary to what Israel hardliners claim, the movement for Palestinian liberation is not fundamentally antisemitic. Those hardliners’ use of big platforms to misrepresent any criticism of Israel as “antisemitism” makes it harder for everyone to think. It tempts advocates for Palestinian liberation to dismiss all concerns about antisemitism as nothing other than Israel apologetics.

We must resist a paranoid temptation to find antisemitism in everything. We must resist naïvely dismissing antisemitism as irrelevant. Antisemitism is tricky, subtle and complex and hard even for well-informed people to think about. Most gentiles are not just poorly informed — they rarely know just how complicated the territory gets.

Many people — Palestinians, Arabs, and otherwise — have antisemitism woven deeply into their thinking about Israel-Palestine. As exemplified in the subtle problems with the slogan inspiring this post, most of that antisemitism reflects ignorance or confusion rather than bigotry.

Fascists and other overt bigots often pose as “anti-Zionists” or supporters of Palestinian liberation. Sometimes they just use that pose as camouflage, to make their antisemitic propaganda sound reasonable. Sometimes they try to bend the movement for Palestinian liberation into an instrument of their efforts through entryism.

There are even Jewish cults muddying the waters with disingenuous opposition to Israel motivated by disgust that Israel is not the theocracy they dream of having.

With all that chaff and more in the air, “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” is only one among a host of examples of antisemitic rhetoric Jews encounter while trying to stand for Palestinian liberation.

Social justice praxis

I cut Palestinians a lot of slack for intemperate language & ideas. One must respect Palestinians’ experience of their own oppression.

But accepting confusions and bigotries without comment plants landmines in the road to a more just future.

It is profoundly unfair that the movement for Palestinian liberation bears this extra burden of avoiding & addressing antisemitism. Worse still navigating so many bad actors working in all directions. But rising antisemitism creates an obligation which frankly the movement has not met. Too many refuse to admit any antisemitism at all.

I was prompted to finally assemble this post by people telling me, “Golly gee, there is no good reason to feel spooked by the slogan. Your grumbling is no different from white people rejecting the slogan ‘Black lives matter’. You obviously will never accept any slogan because you just oppose Palestinian liberation.”

Of course there are plenty of people who object in bad faith, but I hope I have made clear how I speak from solid support for Palestinian liberation and have substantive reasons to object to this particular slogan. It is maddening that so many people serious about social justice praxis seem to forget it when gentilesplaining to Jews about antisemitism.

How much does this matter?

In the current moment, few concerns in any domain rank with the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Jews’ feelings about clumsy slogans do not remotely make the cut. Support for Palestinian liberation rests on justice, not on the conduct of the movement. We must avoid tone policing which says, “Golly, I would support the cause if you were nicer about it.”

But we can walk and chew gum at the same time, and this slogan connects to the broad relationship between Jews and the movement for Palestinian liberation.

Jews do not bear a special obligation to speak out about Israel-Palestine but we do have an opportunity in our voices bringing a different weight than gentiles’. But the more vigorously we support the cause, the more we encounter its large & small manifestations of antisemitism. We feel raw. It throws grit in the gears. The slogan is one more damm thing, doing antisemitism even when innocent of bigotry or malice.

The point, at last

It’s not about Jews’ feelings, or the reasons for Jews’ feelings. But one cannot understand what is important without having that background. Here’s the real thing:

The leaders of the movement study the history of the conflict. Many of them do know all of this context. They have heard these objections before, from other supporters of the cause. They know how this particular slogan lands differently with Jews than with gentiles.

Why do they encourage people to use this slogan despite that?

Indeed, they have plenty of other slogans. But we hear this one a lot. So they prefer it. Why? I find it hard to resist the conclusion that they choose this slogan because of the reaction Jews have to it.

At best, that choice is antisemitically callous toward Jews, a signal that those leaders do not want our support.

At worst, it maliciously uses dogwhistles which gentiles do not register to provoke Jews into seeming unreasonable, compounded by them gaslighting us by saying “don’t center your feelings, you have no good reason for them”.

With so much nonsense which the movement cannot control, I cannot imagine a charitable explanation for them embracing this heartache.

I will continue to grit my teeth and accept the slogan among countless other microagressions from the movement. I encourage Jews who feel as I do to do the same. The cause is more important than our feelings.

But solidarity does not require that I pretend not to see a problem.

Wouldn’t it be better if the movement did Jewish allies the kindness of abandoning this slogan for any of the countless better alternatives?

FREE PALESTINE

PALESTINIAN LIBERATION NOW