Designing in Winter

Gloomy possibilities for software designers in the coming years

In 2014, I wrote a piece called “Designer Duds: Losing Our Seat at the Table.” I argued that some high-profile “design-led” flops from prominent companies in our industry could jeopardize design’s precarious status as co-equal with product, engineering, and data, a status only recently achieved thanks largely to Apple’s success and Steve Jobs’ popular mantra that design “is not just what it looks like and feels like…[it’s] how it works.”

I worry about the reckoning to come when… ordinary designers will be asked to please gather their things and leave the conference room in which CTOs and VPs of Sales and CEOs who remember how useless all of [this] attention to detail turned out to be will resume making decisions. Design has, after all, passed out of vogue before.

The piece was controversial, in no small part because I was a nobody taking shots at some of the luminaries of our field, sounding like the sort of metrics-oriented / hardcore business-type designers tend to loathe. My peers wanted to fawn over how beautiful the animations in Path were; no one wanted to hear that maybe those beautiful animations didn’t matter to users, or didn’t matter enough to justify their cost or help Path prevail in the market. I felt a bit like a traitor to my field, and have ever since.

I don’t think the piece was especially predictive; indeed, in the years after that post, software design roles multiplied at a prodigious rate. Ratios seemed strange to me, but I of course loved the labor market realities created by a company like Facebook having, improbably, more than 600 designers. Today, Twitter has five. While Twitter is no one’s idea of a well-run company, and many of their most pressing problems are literally exactly what software designers could’ve have prevented¹, I’m worried that the near future will see ratios closer to theirs than to those of Facebook or Airbnb during the boom times. Much more than a zero-interest rate phenomenon, the staffing of designers of all kinds reflected technological realities which are changing.

No country for old architects

Who was the architect of your apartment building or house? You probably have no idea. As the construction industry matured, and best practices were commodified, the percentage of buildings requiring the direct involvement of architects plummeted. Builders can now choose from an array of standard layouts that cover most of their needs; materials and design questions, too, have been standardized, and reflect economies of scale more than local or unique contextual realities. Buildings are, it’s true, perhaps a little worse than they used to be, but the trade-offs overall are clearly what people want:

• Structures are perhaps 30% worse, but giant failures —like collapses— are almost unheard of; variance is down and reliability is up, at the cost of genericism

• Structures are vastly cheaper and can be built faster and with less complexity than when an architect devised them from scratch (let alone: spent time understanding local ecology or cultural traditions or insisting on aesthetic or personal standards)

• The loss in “last mile perfection” is probably easily offset by the gain in affordability (and thus: accessibility), reliability, speed, etc. in a purely mathematical sense

• Cities have lots of rules and regulation about how things can be designed and built, reducing the need for and value of creativity

• There are still many cases where architects are needed, make a difference, shine; but they’re fewer and further between than they once were, increasing competition for roles and reducing overall leverage for architecture over “what gets built and how”

The situation is similar in our field. In 2009, companies might ask a designer to “imagine the shoe-shopping experience on mobile,” and such a designer would need to marshal a considerable number of skills to do so: research into how such activity happens today and how it had been attempted online before and the psychology of people engaged in it; explorations of many kinds of interfaces, since no one really knew yet how to present these kinds of information on smartphones; market investigations to determine e.g. “what % of prospective shoppers have which kinds of devices, and what designs can accommodate them all”; testing for raw usability: can people even figure out what to do when they see these screens? And so on.

In 2023, the scene is very different. Best practices in most forms of software and services are commodified; we know, from a decade plus of market activity, what works for most people in a very broad range of contexts. Standardization is everywhere, and resources for the easy development of UIs abound. It’s often the case that what the executives or PMs or engineers are imagining for an interface is fine, perhaps 75% of where it could be if a designer labored over it, and in some cases more. It’s also the case that if a designer adds 15% to a design’s quality but increases cycle time substantially, is another cook in the kitchen, demands space for ideation or research, and so on, the trade-off will surely start to seem debatable to many leaders, and that’s ignoring FTE costs! We can be as offended by this as we want, but the truth is that the ten millionth B2B SaaS startup can probably validate or falsify product-market-fit without hiring Jony Ive and an entire team of specialists.

Indeed, even where better UIs or product designs are possible, we now deal with a market of users who have developed familiarity with the standards; that 15% “improvement” may in fact challenge users migrating or switching from other platforms, or even just learning to use your software having spent countless hours using other, unrelated software. Additionally, all major platforms impose restrictions on what kinds of interfaces “make sense” in their context. We design apps downstream of how Apple designs iOS. There’s just not that much room for innovating in UI at the moment.²

Today, for a larger-than-ever percentage of projects, some good libraries and guidelines like Apple’s HIG can get non-designers where they need to go. Many companies could probably do very well with

• 1 designer to do native design + create and maintain a design system

• PMs and executives for ideation

• Front-end engineers working off of the design system / component library to implement ideas

So even where commodification doesn’t mean no designers, it still probably means fewer designers. And while we once had clear and important ownership of part of the product —at a minimum, the UI; at a maximum, a lot of “how it works” from the user’s POV— we will increasingly share ownership of these things with others. People without clear areas of ownership don’t do that well in businesses in lean times.

AI Satisfices

The other major development has been discussed widely: generative “AI” tools can quickly produce huge ranges of UI variations that reflect commodity / lowest-common-denominator patterns, which again today satisfy a real and growing percentage of the overall software development market. Indeed, these two trends will amplify one another: as UIs become more standard, AI will get better at generating UIs; as AI UIs become more common, UIs will become even more invariant (this will open up some exciting, but rare, opportunities).

It is not at all hard to imagine the organization build described above working this way:

• An executive or PM or anyone else prompts an AI generation tool with a textual description of what they want and possibly some constraints or sources of influence: “onboarding flow for travel app iOS in the style of Airbnb’s iOS app blue highlight colors font is San Francisco”

• It outputs dozens of trashy UIs and a handful of decent ones

• The execs or PMs or whomever feel perfectly capable of editing and selecting among the field; they already usually reserve this right and often do a fine job of picking plausible or functional interfaces from options

• They take it to the engineers, tell them to use the design system where possible and to call in the sole designer for tweaks or elements they cannot generate

Most of us who work in this field probably expect the results of this process to be worse than the results of working with professional software designers. I know I do. But again, the question is the delta vs. the costs, considered across the market, and what that calculation will do to the field overall, especially in more difficult economic conditions. My fear is that for a large number of businesses, a large percentage of projects will get a large percentage of the way there with this approach. Even if thousands of projects cannot be executed this way, it still means a net reduction in design roles and an increase in labor market competition.

Gifted and lucky software designers will always be needed at companies like Humane or Apple or wherever else formal interface innovation, very high level of polish, or other particularities endure. But lots of software is more like construction than like art: economies of scale matter a lot in production and usage both, such that there won’t be enough high-end, novel, or bespoke products for the number of software designers seeking work. For the designers unaffected by this, there’s probably a temptation to say: “Well, good: it’s finally only the real designers now.” Maybe that’s a reasonable way for the elect to feel; I wouldn’t know!

But these tools will all also advance; soon, it won’t be single-shot text-prompts alone, but whole application suites infused with AI to help people design UIs in all sorts of ways.

The next boom and what to do until then

Hope springs eternal. What software designers who do not feel confident they can get hired at such places should do —apart from developing themselves to that level, if they so desire; but that requires real experience that can be hard to acquire— is pray that Apple (or whoever) figures out a new, absolutely massively popular paradigm for computing. If, for example, they land AR / VR, we will once again face a world of businesses who need to figure out how their goods and services make sense in a new context: how should we display Substack posts in AR, for example? Which metaphors should persist into the new world? What’s the best way to shop for shoes in VR? What affordances empower the greatest number of people? Human factors, art history, technological history, design methodologies, and all the other disparate fields software designers span will once again be necessary, although AI will make reproducing commodifying standards much faster. But there will at least be another period when engineers who “just ship” will produce such massively worse user interfaces that software designers will be important again.

For those not of the wait-and-pray persuasion, a few other things to perhaps consider if these worries seem legitimate to you:

1. Master AI. You want to be the person who generates the best UIs the fastest, whatever that takes. Learning the scene, how to prompt, a workflow for producing and tweaking, and so on could keep you ahead of anyone else for a long time; you’ll still likely —hopefully— have better taste, selection and editing skills, and prompting abilities / sets of relevant references than others in your org.

2. Get down with production. We all hate being whipped around by production processes; for years, software designers have demanded adequate pre-production time to think, research, explore, organize, and influence development. But “design process” and “design cycles” are under pressure and may face much more soon. Speed helps, and so too does a general orientation towards working with production however it’s happening. This basically sums to: “Be less precious, and try to fit in in whatever ways help your company ship.”

3. Move up, move down, move sideways: being capable of more of the work of making software can mean becoming better at strategy and ideation, such that you’re ever executive’s favorite collaborative partner; you listen well, you mock fast (maybe with AI), and you help them communicate; or it can mean becoming better at execution, learning, for example, to code. Coding is probably the easier of these two areas to get good at, especially if you can’t control where you work (and few can!). Last, you can also work on improving your content strategy capacities, your research chops, and the like. Everything you can do to be more valuable should be on the table.

I’m wrong a lot

I hope this is all completely mistaken. I hope software designers are so valuable that they can’t do without us, that our concepting and exploration abilities matter immensely, that the last mile of polish is a difference maker for every product, that PM and data and engineering and executives are driven to shout out in unison: “No, we could never do it without design!” In some cases, this will all be true.

But in many, it will not. We might want to prepare accordingly. I suspect the question is not whether this is our near future, but to what extent: will we see 20%, or 40%, or 60% of roles eliminated, for example. Whatever the reduction, the net effect could be bleak. My team and I are relatively lucky: the platform and social spaces will continue to require an awful lot of novel and contextually-responsive design work. But we’re still planning to get rather serious about AI generation of UIs, for example. If these tools are half as good as they should be, I know we’ll all be expected to produce much more.

In a way, beyond the economic pain to come, it almost feels like the 90s again: we’re back to fighting for seats at the table (or even our office badges). It’s no longer enough to quote Jobs or go on about “design thinking.” As is true in all but the rosiest of times anyway, we must scramble —like everyone else in a market— to add value or we’ll get left behind.

AI generated image from the prompt “Brasilia in ruins.”

1. This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read in my life: “Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement, and therefore views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.” This is literally the most 101-level shit imaginable, but Elon don’t have time for remedial classes from his designers!

2. If there’s still lots of room for “delight,” just wait and see how much that matters to firms in a recession.