The Past and Future of UX Design in a Product World

Why has design's impact plateaued while technology is ramping up? A look at what's needed in design leadership today to get ahead of the innovation curve.

Summary: For product design to continue innovating, design leadership’s role must move from that of design as craft to orchestration, working cross-functionally to expand what’s possible. This requires a reframing of how innovation happens, rethinking design thinking, and creating a new breed of design leaders.

It's fascinating to see how the role of the User Experience (UX) practitioner has changed as our collective technology, tools, and development methodologies have matured. When I started my career in technology in the late 90s, I was expected to do everything, from gathering requirements and user research to designing and coding the darn thing. I wasn’t alone.

Most people who were building websites (we didn’t call them products or apps yet) at the time came from a wide range of disciplines, each with a passion for designing technology for people — my own training was in city planning and urban design. These website builders were called by many names, but the title “webmaster” perhaps best captured the jack of all trades, master of none nature of the job.

As technology improved, it became more complex and also big business. To scale, the design industry spawned ever more specialized roles. Yet if you were a designer concerned with user experience, your title seemed to change every few years, keeping pace with tech maturity and Moore’s Law.

But times have changed. Where once a UX designer was expected to make the programmer's work less ugly and more usable ("make it pretty"), today UX permeates countless touch points in the customer journey. In short, UX is everyone’s job now.

Every interaction, every word on the screen, and every newly minted feature adds up to the sum total that is the user experience. Next to business goals (profit, growth, and reduced costs) UX remains the most critical metric for growth. It builds the trust and customer loyalty that enables everything else.

Current State of Design

Thanks to IDEO, the “Design Thinking” framework has infiltrated the corporate and tech vernacular, and Apple has shown us the way to do it in the product world. Yet despite all the talk about the importance of user experience and design for a business’s bottom line, the UX discipline still appears like a squishy profession. Both design and UX seem to have been hijacked by the demands for continuous development and the elevated stature of product management. At the same time, the “production trap” of moving fast and breaking things has pushed designers back on their heels; more reactive than proactive, more about output (quantity) than outcomes (quality).

Part of the challenge is that in every project, there exists 1001 decisions that need to be made, both big and small, that influence the real world user experience. All these decisions — from the product pitch leading up to acceptance testing — introduce new constraints and opportunities. Without design in the mix early and often to influence those decisions and process their ramifications, designers are left to make do with the outputs of those decisions, with little time to make a real impact.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

To borrow a phrase from the excellent book by Ben Horowitz, building product is hard. Designing products well is perhaps even harder. The skill set needed to ensure design is accounted for in every aspect of product development is rare. It requires a special someone, not quite a specialist, but someone who wears a lot of hats, often an introvert with extrovert tendencies. The role puts a premium on those who can collaborate with non-designers to push the boundaries of technology.

At this point, it’s important to make a distinction between two types of designers: the design specialist and the product designer. The specialists are, like the name suggests, focused on the craft of design, caring, even obsessing about the details. Examples include interaction design, prototyping, service design, brand designers, illustrators, and data visualization.

Product designers are both generalists and strategists, focused on the overall product experience, armed with a product speciality and a deep understanding of the domain space. Unlike design specialists, product designers partner directly with product teams and business to create the overall design strategy and road map for the product.

The product designer skill sets are not something that designers have typically been trained to posses, nor expected to know. And yet, in the digital product world, this is the future of how effective design leaders work. By speaking confidently with engineering and marketing, it affords designers the time to make the case for experiences that can transform a product.

Limits of Traditional Design Thinking

We’re all familiar with the Venn diagram of feasibility, desireability and viability. It illustrates how innovation happens at that tiny intersection of where they overlap, the Reuleaux triangle of hope. Yet if designers are not wrestling with technical feasibility and business viability, then desirability becomes a pipe dream.

The new way of looking at product moves away from this traditional Venn diagram of three interlocking circles toward a model that puts the user first, making desireability the overarching goal, the “north star.” What’s good for the user is good for business, a twist on IBMs 1973 adage “Good Design is Good Business.”

IBM CEO, Thomas J. Watson Jr.

Even now, with design finally having a seat at the table (and not the kiddy table), it’s still considered an afterthought, mere talking points, or something that can be achieved with a mockup or prototype. This partly stems from the changing nature of product development, increased specialization brought on by technical complexity, the reluctance for designers to discuss their work in the language of business, and the inability to influence non-designers.

Designers are well aware of the phrase “Preaching to the Choir,” a common refrain when talking about the value of design to likeminded folks, usually other designers. But at successful design-forward organizations, the entire organization is the choir, ideally singing the same tune. It shows up in small and big ways, slowly forming the culture of UX and belief systems that put the customer first.

Design leadership has to be at the forefront of establishing the tune that is sung. But it can’t be done with craft alone, design sprints, or even product discovery workshops. It requires meaningful trust, built over a period of time, and driven by quality work. Design becomes more consultative, where the design leader becomes a true thought partner and problem solver, pragmatic enough to get stuff done within existing constraints.

What’s Next for UX Design?

For the most part, the industry has indeed elevated design and user experience in product development. But with it comes a corresponding rise in expectations and responsibilities needed to drive compelling user experiences, something design leadership must embrace to be relevant.

The classic archetypes of leadership, of managing up, laterally, and down, doesn’t completely cover the scope of design leadership today. They now have to embody the power of empathy, craft, mediation, vision, curiosity, communication and yes, orchestration.

What is design orchestration?

Design leaders are those that started out in craft, moved to management, then were thrust back into doing both, craft and management. It’s the final step, combining craft with management, that requires effective orchestration to collaborate and drive the creative process in a complex environment.

The role is similar to an architect of a home that consults with various disciplines to make their buildings real, or the film director working with a cinematographer and writers to get what’s in their head on the screen, or the musician working with a producer to make their song just right.

Unlike traditional people management, product design leadership is a hands-on activity, requiring domain expertise, curiosity in the problem space, agency over the creative process, a strong bias for action, and an ability to articulate design decisions in a language that everyone can understand. It’s akin to a product manager, with the eye and hand of a designer.

In design-forward companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Tesla, Gusto and Linea, the design leaders are actively engaged in the creative process, which includes many non-design disciplines. For them, product development IS a creative act, with opportunities for delight, magic, beauty and function.

Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
-Steve Jobs

It is through craft and a design-led process that design is applied to technology, which in turn adds value to the user.

The Client Model Drives Design

These design leaders also understand that design has always worked within the constraints of the client relationship model. Unlike art, design is in the business of business — it can’t exist without it.

In most organizations, the client is often the product owner, the founder, president, the department head, or whoever is funding the project. Keeping the designer/client mindset and managing that relationship well (often in a consultative way) ironically also engenders the trust you need to create freely.

But design has a secondary client to tend to: the user, the customer who ultimately interacts and hopefully uses the product. This is the real Venn diagram that product designers operate in; managing the needs of the business, the user, and the technology they’re working with.

New Design Skill Sets Are Needed

Impactful designers, working within a complex organization, must have various superpowers, sometimes divergent ones, operating at the same time to be effective.

They have seemingly opposing skills that must work together. These include the ability for one to:

1. Listen but ask lots of questions.

2. Avoid jargon while mastering craft.

3. Have strong opinions yet open minded.

4. Be enthusiastic yet realist

5. Be humble yet ambitious.

6. Be collaborative yet independent.

7. Be responsive yet contemplative.

8. Take a position but offer options.

9. Control your meetings but be flexible.

10. Diverge on ideas, but converge on action items.

It’s an almost impossible job. Yet product design leaders do not need to excel equally well in all these areas but must excel in a few, with the humility and awareness to delegate to others as necessary.

Stretch Theory of Innovation

By adopting the above skills sets, design leadership can begin to design and bring to market products that help transform a business. As such, we need a new model for innovation, one that 1) pushes the boundaries of what’s possible, 2) stretches what’s desirable, 3) enables teams to expand what’s feasible and viable.

The problem with the existing product development Venn diagram framework of desirablity, feasibility and viability is that it’s static, treating all the attributes as equal, unchanging.

The new model is robust and dynamic, and customer-led. It reframes the area of innovation as the area of what’s desirable to the user, but not yet feasible. The areas of viability and feasibility then become smaller circles directly within the desirability umbrella. The target of innovation becomes all about increasing technical capabilities to get closer to that north star.

And example of this approach is OpenAI. ChatGPT was not the original idea that OpenAI tried to build, but it’s the one that captured the world’s imagination. It was the result of one engineer, Alex Radford, who began to play with the idea of applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to something that we now recognize as ChatGPT.

What OpenAI has shown us is that innovation is about expanding our notion of what’s desirable so that we can stretch our imagination to what’s possible. This in turn generates business value, often in unexpected ways. By applying technology to design, OpenAI helped trigger a new wave of innovation.

To tackle increased complexity, designers must not only think like a designer, but as Mark Rober (another design/engineer hybrid) reminds us, one must also think like an engineer if they are to truly innovate.

Mark Rober demonstrating the disc launcher, the first “Think Like an Engineer” CRUNCH LABS builder kit for kids.

The new “stretch” model of innovation is about merging design and technology to create something greater than the sum of its parts. It retains the three views of product development, but allows the areas to stretch, moving closer to what’s desirable. It doesn’t dismiss constraints, but emphasizes the idea of a well-researched and understood north star for users, and works iteratively to learn, prototype, optimize and enhance the technology to identify an opportunity.

Design Orgs Built for Innovation

How do we get there. Not long ago, if you wanted innovation, companies could do one of three things: 1) outsource the “designy” stuff to creative agencies, 2) setup internal teams made up of their brightest within innovation labs, or 3) embed consultants, all in the hope of launching cutting edge ideas. The designers would work within their own team or discipline to ideate, create, and develop new concepts — within a choir in the church of design thinking.

That approach often succeeded in coming up with novel, futuristic ideas, but it didn’t pull the rest of the org with them. The new org design model makes cross-functional collaboration part of the normal operating procedure for building products.

Below is a summary of the design roles and their responsibilities:

1. Head of Design (or VP of Design): The design executive’s role sets the culture, principles, design standards, and overall experience strategy. They are the biggest advocate for not just the need for design, but integrating it into every customer-facing decision the rest of the org makes. This role is roughly 30% craft and 70% management.

2. Design Director: The role is responsible for the delivery and execution of their functional area, focused on having the right level of resources and talent in place to enable their teams to do the work. The role can be omitted if there are less than 3 Design Managers.

3. Design Manager: A true people manager that coaches and mentors his/her team of designers. Design Managers are further split between having teams of product designers and/or designer specialists. The Design Manager understands the craft well enough to provide guidance, while understanding he importance of not micro managing.

4. Design Specialist: Focused on the craft of design, with key specialties, such as prototyping, ui design, journey mapping, design systems, etc. They excel at execution, solving design problems, and generally applying the best design possible. In the product world, they are working on features.

5. Product Designer: A designer who collaborates closely with product and engineering throughout the process, from beginning to end, to design and build user-centered products. The product designer has deep domain experience in the area they’re working in. They collaborate with various creatives (be they in marketing, engineering, sales, design) to establish the general product experience direction, and then further orchestrate the various pieces to ensure all the big and small decisions are influenced by the desired product outcome — not just output. These product designers come with varying levels of strengths and experiences, but their main expertise lies in designing technology for people, while orchestrating multiple disciplines toward the end goal.

Final Thoughts

Over the past two decades, the discipline of UX design has helped to humanize technology and increase the importance of good design in business. It has established widely accepted standards, raised the bar on usability, and made technology indispensable for billions of users. We’re now at an inflection point, where design’s impact seems to have plateaued, while technology has ramped up.

Adjusting to a new model of design leadership is needed, where both craft and tech innovation can sit side by side.

The stretch theory of innovation expands the notion of design by setting a higher goal for desirability and with it, new design skills are needed to achieve. The Product Designer then becomes the vehicle to get there by pulling everyone else up with them, including technology, research, and the business. One of the best ways to do this is to raise the expectation of what designers do as product design leads, and embed them into every phase of product development. In this way, UX thinking and design doing become part of every discussion, rather than being an afterthought.