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.
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