UXA2023 Andy Budd - Design’s Mid-Life Crisis

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UX Australia
UX Australia 2023
Friday, 25 August 2023
Captioned by: Kasey Allen & Bernadette McGoldrick

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Alright. Let us close
things off. So, joining us via video from the UK - I made the mistake of
saying "from Europe" yesterday. (LAUGHTER) And it's not. Joining us from
the UK is Andy Budd. Hello, Andy! Good morning!
ANDY BUDD: Good morning. Well, good afternoon. And while some of my
fellow country-people might not see we're part of Europe, I still am very
much in the Europe count, so I'm totally fine with being considered a
European.
STEVE BATY: Andy is a Brexit denialist, apparently! There you go.
(LAUGHTER) I'm gonna get off the stage and I'm gonna put us in the
good, good hands of Andy Budd. Thank you, Andy. (APPLAUSE)

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ANDY BUDD: Brilliant. Thank you so much. And I just wanted to thank all
the people from UX Australia for inviting me to speak. I'm a huge fan of
UX Australia. I have been a bunch of times. I'm a huge fan of Australia. I
was so gutted to not be able to join you in person. I would have loved to
have come down and spent some time with you, and I just wanted to
thank everybody that reached out to me on social media, on LinkedIn,
saying, "Hey, look, I see you're gonna be in town, Andy, do you want to
go and grab a coffee?" I would have loved to have caught up. But also I
wanted to really thank Steve and the gang for helping me keep my
carbon footprint down. I would have loved to have come out, but a
24-hour flight there and back for a 45-minute video or call just didn't feel
like it would be fair on the planet, and so I'm really, really supportive and
appreciative that the UX Australia team were like, "Yep, no, let's keep the
carbon footprint down and allow you to dial in." But I am feeling a lot of
FOMO here, so I hope you've all had a really good time. So, for those of
you who haven't come across me before, I'm a former agency founder
and designer-turned-investor and leadership coach. And on the leadership
side of things, I mostly work with senior design leaders, and it's partly the
result of these conversations I've been having over the last couple of
years that led me to the topic of design's midlife crisis. Now, before I
jump in, I wanted to give everyone a quick trigger warning, as some of
the topics I'm gonna cover might make you feel a little agitated or
nervous, and in some extreme cases might even cause you to question
the meaning of your whole existence. If you do feel uneasy or queasy at
any point, turn off Twitter, put the phone down, lie down, a towel over
head, and hopefully the nauseous feeling will stop and everything will be
fine. With that to one side, let's get started. With the current demand in
growth for designers, design is arguably at the peak of its influence.

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Companies have spent the last five years rapidly scaling their design
teams, salaries rose at equally impressive rate, and more and more
designers earned that hallowed seat at the table. There was a period
when articles in Harvard Business Review were touting designers as the
new MBAs, while things like the McKinsey design effective report showed
how much better design-led companies fare on the stock market against
their non-design-led competitors. This was often thanks to the rise of
things like design thinking and the success of designer companies like
Airbnb. And, in fact, if any of you tuned into the sort of the buzz around
the Figma Conference, you might have seen Brian Chesky from Airbnb
arguably putting the cherry on the cake by outlining his views of the role
of designers in fast-growing companies like Airbnb, and also his
perception on product management. But we're not gonna go there today.
So, is it any wonder that designers are feeling on top of the world at
the moment? They don't. When I talk to designers, they seem more
stressed, more disillusioned, and more pessimistic about the state of
design than I've ever seen them before. So, what's going on here? I think
one reason is that there's a big gap between what we have been taught
to believe about design and how the rest of the world sees design. And,
for many, it feels like this gap is widening rather than shrinking. I think
this all starts with our own perceptions of design. We've grown up on a
diet of lectures, books, articles, tweet storms, and, yes, presentations at
conferences like this that set us up with an idealised view of our industry.
You'll see speakers at conferences and events tell you that you too can
have the perfect design environment, you too can have that seat at the
table and be driving things, if you just follow these simple steps. Maybe
they'll tell you the power of doing a product discovery session or following
the Agile process, or make OKRs will be the source of truth. Maybe the
suggestion will be to have a set of design principles or a team charter.

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Maybe one-to-ones are the way they're suggesting we go forward. And if
you follow all of these things properly, you'll end up with a design-centred
practice.
But when we try to put these practices in place, they don't seem to
work, they don't seem to stick, they don't seem to act as we're told. And
so what do we do? We blame ourselves for not being good enough. We
blame our colleagues for not being design-centred enough, and we blame
the companies for not understanding what we see as self-evident.
Because we know that design, and particularly UX design, lives at the
heart of everything. And that the right way to design a successful product
is to spend as much time as researching problems and coming up with
products to ship products. We've been taught that the designers, rather
than the business, design what to build based on user needs. And that it's
our job to design the right thing before we design the thing right.
And so we get really frustrated when our business partners tell us
what to do, and more frustratingly, how to do it.
As designers, we have been taught that in order to design the best
product possible, we need to understand the context of use. As Eero
Saarinen says, always design a thing by understanding or considering the
next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an
environment, an environment in a city plan. So, to do this, we require
time to talk to customers, to run workshops. Together, the big picture of
the problem and use that to filter into our design process. And we
understandably get frustrated when we get blocked from talking to
customers, or prevented from spending time exploring a variety of
different approaches. As designers, we're also heavily user-centred, so we
naturally put the user at the centre of everything we do. As a result,
many designers believe that any trade-off between user needs and
business needs are inherently unethical. This sets designers up as the

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prime arbiters of ethics in organisations and we get super frustrated when
we brush up against the uncaring business. This often leads us to conflict
with our business partners in sales, marketing and product. Fortunately,
we have been taught about the power and impact designers can have on
business, if only the business would just listen to us. For instance, I'm
sure we've all grown up on stories like Jared Spool's $300 million button,
where a plucky designer used their understanding of usability to earn
Amazon an extra $300 million in the first year. I'm sure we've also heard
stories, cautionary tales, like Google's 41 shades of blue, where our
design hero, Douglas Bowman, ended up leaving Google because of the
mentality which meant that even something small, like choosing a colour
change, needed to be multi-variant tested across a dozen different design
colours. Why couldn't the engineers, businesses listen to the power of
design?
I mean, how can any designer work in an environment like this?
And so this all underscores a set of beliefs that we hold true. But are they
true? And are these beliefs serving us or are they maybe holding us back?
Now, it's understandable why we centre UX as the most important role in
the organisations, as we truly believe what we do matters. It's why we
chose to follow a career in design in the first place, rather than go into
business, marketing, technology or product. We need to believe what we
do counts. However, by centring ourselves in our own hero's journey, we
position everybody that doesn't buy into our thesis as foes to be
conquered or challenges to be overcome. Nothing is more obvious in this
tension, to me, than our relationship with marketing. Who we often see as
corporate shills trying to force mediocre products down the throats of our
users. I think this tension is perfectly captured in this saying from my
friend, John Willshire, "Make things people want rather than make people
want things." A lot of designers, including myself, there's a deep sense of

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truth wrapped in this statement. However, it also implies that what we
do - making things people want - is so much more important and worthy
than what the folks in marketing do - simply making people want
things - especially if those things aren't particularly good or they're things
they don't need. This sentiment can create a really toxic relationship
between design and marketing. It also sets up the false belief that all you
need to do in order to have a successful business is to make a good
product and it will essentially sell itself.
I call this problem the Field of Dreams fallacy and it's rife in the
design community. The idea that if we build an amazing product,
customers will simply just show up and start using it. I have fallen for this
fallacy myself over the years because it panders to my own sense of
self-importance. However, as a start-up adviser and investor, I've seen
many amazingly designed products fail to take off because the people
who needed them didn't know about them, or couldn't be convinced to
jump over due to the switching costs and the endowment effect. And
equally, and maybe more troublingly, I've seen plenty of really badly
designed products sell like hot cakes, often to the annoyance of the
design team behind them. The hard truth is that start-ups are often
successful despite the quality of their designs, rather than because of it.
It sort of goes against everything we have been taught to believe.
The painful truth is that design doesn't matter half as much as most
designers think. Especially in the early days of the product. And I have
come to realise that marketing, and a good, strong go-to-market strategy
often plays a much bigger role in the success of an early start-up than
we'd like to think. I should add that while I'm saying I don't think design
matters half as much as designers think, I still think it matters more than
founders and executives think, but we'll get on to that in a second. I see a
similar level of animosity between designers and product, maybe more so.

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Because product managers are more actively engaged in the needs of the
business, which means they are much more likely to seek to need
compromise with their design partners. And that compromise often comes
not just with design but at the sake of design. As such, I often argue that
product management is actually the hardest job in tech. It's stuck in the
middle of impossible situation. Trying to get two groups of perfectionists
to compromise in order to get something out the door and in the hands of
the customers as quickly as possible before the company runs out of
money. And it's not a job I'd want to take, although, ironically, I'm seeing
a lot of designers move into product management now, partly because
they feel that design has lost its influence, and maybe that product
management has taken some of that influence, and so I'm seeing a lot of
UX designers move into product management in order to have more
influence and impact on the work they're doing.
And actually do some of the high-level design work that they were
used to doing themselves.
Now, it's hard to hear, but the reality is that designers aren't at the
centre of anything. Instead, we're servants of the business, and one of a
number of groups of people serving the business, at that. The quicker we
realise that our role, our actual role, rather than our idealised role, the
quicker we start to deliver value to the places we work. Another big
problem I see is the double diamond, which while a wonderful model, is
largely a lie. In reality, design in most organisations looks much more like
this. Very little research is actually undertaken. Very little product
exploration is actually done. And instead all of the efforts are focused
around delivery. This isn't ideal. I think we need to push for more
discovery and research and ownership. If we fixate on the double
diamond, we will be disappointed. All but a handful of companies, it's an
unrealistic and unattainable model. If we set this up to be the norm, if we

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set this up to be the expected target, we're gonna be setting ourselves up
for disappointment and we're gonna be constantly undershooting.
I think a lot of this pressure comes from our belief that we're the
voice of the customer, and that any product decisions that get made
outside the design team are, by their nature, ill-informed. As Paul Adams
said a few years ago at a UX conference I helped organise, we're A voice
but rarely The voice. We have a lot less contact with customers than sale
and support. We need to engage better. Especially as they have more
power and influence on the organisation than designers do.
Another frustration for designers comes from the belief that we
should be deciding what gets built. And we get super frustrated when
other parts of the business tell us what to build. This is especially true
when Sales tells us that a customer has been asking for a particular
feature and can we ship it because it will help them close the deal. We'll
come up with some kind of anecdote, like the famous situation where a
group, in a focus group, were being asked to decide what colour phones
they liked. And obviously, you know, when they ask, "Would you like a
blue, red, green phone?" Everyone's hands went up and they said they'd
preferred different colours. At the end of the session, as people walked
out of the session, they had a stack of phones - black, green, blue
ones - and everyone took the black one. We know that what people say
they're gonna do, their intended behaviour, isn't always what they're
actually gonna do. So, we get really frustrated when we see time and
time again people asking, particularly salespeople, asking customers what
they want, they give it to them, and then they don't use it. Now, I'm not
saying we'd do better... Sorry, I'm not saying that we wouldn't do better
if we got to choose what gets built. I personally believe we would. It's just
this isn't how most companies are organised. You're not gonna be make a
lot of friends when you dismiss the requests of your peers, especially

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peers that are trying to close possibly quite a lucrative deal. Indeed, we
need to do a much better job of listening to what our colleagues are
saying and working around existing structures rather than fixating on
ideal models that don't realistically exist.
As Erika Hall says, it doesn't matter how good your data is if you
haven't done the groundwork to ensure an evidence-based framework for
making decisions is in place for doing the work of gathering other
evidence. I think this is true of design as well. It doesn't matter how good
intentions you have, or how good your design team are, or how good your
research is, if you haven't done the groundwork to make sure your
company actually supports and has that rolled into their process.
As a result of all this, we often find ourselves in what we
dismissively call a feature factory. We're on a conveyor belt, where we
have little personal agency, and other parts of the organisation tell us
what to build, and why. And this goes against everything we have been
taught about design, and I know it's super frustrating. It's especially
frustrating, we're brought up to believe it's our job, maybe our duty, to
build the best product possible. However, we have to realise there are
opportunity costs here. Businesses want to get products in the hands of
their customers as fast as possible so they can start making money as
fast as possible. And any delay to this leaves money left on the table. This
is why businesses like the promise of Agile, even if it rarely works as they
think it does. The idea that you could be consistently and continually
shipping value, rather than doing one or two big releases each year.
As designers, we often think Agile to be a frustrating process. It
doesn't give time to do proper research and discovery. We rarely get to
understand the broader context or bigger picture. We want to build the
best product possible but the Agile process often gets into the way, sort
of blocking us into this narrow kind of set. For the longest time, if any of

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you have followed me on Twitter from ten years ago, I blamed Agile for
this problem as well. However, I'm increasingly coming to believe that it
isn't Agile is the problem, although I have to admit it is a problem, I think
Agile is incompatible with the way designers naturally work and tendency
for perfection. Maybe it is that tendency for perfection that is causing the
problem.
In truth, perfection is the enemy of good. And we're always gonna
be frustrated if we're constantly chasing some unobtainable idea. Instead,
we need to learn our role isn't, and has never been, delivering the perfect
solution. Instead, our role is to ship the best solution possible in the
limited time we have available, which means that speed and pragmatism
almost always trump idealism and perfectionism. As Stuart Clarke of
Deliveroo rightly points out, a great design work at the strategic level is a
set of compromises rather than an idealised design vision. And this is the
most difficult thing for senior practitioners to wrap their heads around
when moving to leadership roles. Largely because it's counter to
everything they've learnt and come to believe up to this stage. And,
worse, because the focus on quality is often the thing that got them to
that senior stage in the first place. However, one thing we all need to
learn is that what gets us to where we are now won't necessarily get us to
where we need to go next. And, actually, that thinking might sabotage
our efforts.
Possibly more importantly, chasing perfection is a risk to our own
mental health and collective wellbeing. There are many times designers
are frustrated and disappointed by the work they produced. They got
something good out the door, something much better than before, and so
much better than would have been released if they hadn't been there,
fighting for quality. But rather than celebrating the 80% that got
launched, they're commiserating around the 20% that wasn't. The

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features, the interface details the developers just couldn't quite nail. As
such, when launch day comes around, everybody else in the organisation
is celebrating, except for the designers, because the designers, it often
feels more like a wake. They're feeling unhappy, jaded, depressed. And
each subsequent release, they see what could have been, what could
have been. And they start questioning what is even the point of kind of
bothering anymore? "Why should I be in this company if all we do is
release substandard work?" This is one of the things that led me to the
belief that design is suffering from some kind of existential crisis. Many of
the things we have been taught to believe about the world of design have
failed to materialise. Some have even proven not to be true. We're not at
the centre of the design process. We're definitely not doing enough design
research. We're usually not driving product discovery. And we're unhappy
about the quality of work we produce. Under these circumstances, is it
any wonder why many of the designers I speak to feel confused,
frustrated and a bit lost? They're starting to ask questions around the
directions they've taken and decisions they've made, and the value of
their work. It sounds a bit like a midlife crisis to me.
Here's a list of classic symptoms of a midlife crisis. I'm sure some of
you might recognise some of them. I'm speaking to a lot of designers at
the moment who are experiencing one or more of these symptoms.
Feeling like design hasn't lived up to their heady expectations, and
questioning where to go next. Questioning the role that designers play in
society, wanting to make a bigger impact, or at least to reduce the impact
design and products might be doing. Feeling lost in their careers. Feeling
nostalgic about the heady days of design 10 or 20 years ago. Feeling
maybe it's time to switch careers. "Maybe I should become a product
manager. Maybe I should get out of design altogether and start a
third-wave coffee shop or an artisanal bike-building company." I joke, but

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these are things two designers have done recently. It's natural for some
people going through a midlife crisis to look back on their careers, look at
the impact on the world and what they're leaving for future generations. I
think the same is happening in our industry. While a lot of people
experiencing a midlife crisis look to spirituality for answers about the big
fundamental questions in life. I think the design industry looks towards
the field of ethics to help them provide frameworks for living and to help
them provide frameworks for understanding their own impact. How can
we use our design skills to have a more positive impact on the world?
How can we avoid baking bias in the systems we create? How can we
push back against things we feel uncomfortable with? Like deploying dark
patterns or doing things that feel unethical? How can we create equity
and avoid creating vectors for abuse? These are questions the design
industry is asking itself and has been for five or six years. Thankfully,
there are tonnes of interesting people out there talking and writing about
the space at the moment. I'm sure you've had many conversations over
the last couple of days, and I have seen speakers who have been tackling
this subject as well. I think of this as something you want to lean into, I
urge you to take part in that conversation. Another way designers have
been trying to navigate this sense of ennui is looking at trying to
understand the language of business in order to have more influence on
how work gets done and how decisions get made. And I'm starting, for
instance, to see a slow and steady number of designers undertaking MBAs
for this very reason. I think there's a lot to be said for designers gaining
fluency in business. This is one of the reasons I moved into the VC space,
in order to better influence the conversation at the right level with the
right people. I found myself, when I'm coaching design leaders, that I'm
often coaching people that are in organisations that just don't value
design or are a little bit stuck, and trying to change a company that's five,

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six, seven, eight years' old that has never really seen design at its heart
is really tough. So, I'm hoping that through my experience in VC, I'm
talking to founders from day one, and I'm hoping to instil in them a sense
of design so they hire their first design hire really early, they see design
as a strategic lever, and design is kind of baked into the DNA of the
business.
But not only do we need to see designers moving to VC, we need to
see designers starting new companies. We need to see designers on the
boards of companies. And hopefully we're gonna start seeing designers
investing in companies. I think there's a real problem in the tech industry,
where a lot of the people who are investing in early start-ups come from
engineering and come from product. And I would love to see more design
angels coming in and offering their support to early-stage start-ups as
well.
One of the things you sort of discover when you spend a lot of time
hanging out with businesspeople is actually how aligned the thinking of a
design is. MBAs teach the importance of understanding user needs and
delivering products that exceed those needs. It's all sort of basic stuff.
The main problem with executives isn't that they don't care about this
stuff, it's that they fundamentally don't know that this is something
designers care about. They don't realise that this is how designers think.
And I'd say that designers have been pretty terrible at communicating
this, to be honest. So, us designers need to do a better job at building
relationships with executives, demonstrating how we think, and more
importantly, how we can help them achieve their goals. However, the
majority of executives don't want to have some designer educating them
about the benefits of design. And, in fact, a lot of the times I see
designers try to "educate" their founders, it actually has the opposite
effect. It's patronising and it antagonises them. So, we need to be really

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careful about how we approach this so our efforts don't end up backfiring.
As Daniel Burka eloquently explained, we need to stop trying to sell
design and instead start to demonstrate the value of design, and how that
can help people. Because while we're setting the value - while we're
selling the value of design... Sorry. Because rather than selling the value
of design, it's often more effective to show rather than tell. This is one of
the reasons why I like design sprints. Not because they're a great way of
short cutting a design process, but because they give executives exposure
to the hidden side of design. The same is true of bringing design
executives along to lab-based sessions. I think a lot of the designers are
really anti-design thinking, which is ironic because I think we've ended up
putting it in the hands of others rather than ourselves. These are much
more political tools than design tools. But I think if we're purists, we can
throw the baby away with the bathwater. And to be honest, for designers
to be truly effective in their senior leadership roles, they need to be able
to learn to be better politicians.
This is one of the reasons why I hate the design industry's
unhealthy and self-destructive mistrust of MPS. It's one of the few areas
myself and Jared Spool strongly disagree on. Sure, it's a stupid metric
calculated in a weird way - zero to ten, what's that about? It's irregularly
gained. I went to put my car in for a service and after the service I was
told I was gonna get a survey and that I should, if I liked the service, I
should mark it nine or ten. It was clearly they were just trying to gain the
NPS system. But that aside, it's also metrics that a very large number of
businesses use to measure customer sentiment and that isn't going away
any time soon. As such, it's one of the few tools we can use to influence
our senior stakeholders. Of course, gaining fluency in business doesn't
always require you to have an MBA, although I think it can be really good.
It just requires us to use our research skills on our business partners, and

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learn what they truly value and take an active part in delivering it. And
this really isn't rocket science. Most businesses only really care about one
of five things. Acquiring new customers, retaining those customers,
keeping them engaged, tracking satisfaction, and cost-to-service. And all
of these things ultimately boil down to making more revenue or retaining
revenue. These five things, if you're familiar, this is basically the private
metrics funnel. These are all things designers can have a direct affect on.
And so we need to be able to demonstrate our ability to affect these
metrics to our stakeholders.
So, I appreciate that a lot of designers are suspicious of having to
demonstrate ROI. Especially when our colleagues in engineering aren't
held to the same standard. It doesn't seem fair. But I used to joke that
companies don't need to justify the ROI of their janitors, so why should
designers be expected to do this? It's simple. If design is happy to be
considered as a cost centre, like the inevitable cost of doing business, like
hiring cleaners, we don't need to bother justifying our value. However,
this means we will always be forced to fight for every additional item.
However, if we want to be seen as a profit centre, a group you invest in to
deliver value, we need to be able to demonstrate that for every dollar you
spend on design, you get $5 back. Now, this isn't just a casual
suggestion. This is, in fact, what Stuart Frisby did during his years at
booking.com. He proved in the first couple of years that, for every dollar
spent on design, the company got $5 back. This helped him grow his
team from five people to a hundred people over a 5-year period. The key
to getting executives to value design isn't by telling them how valuable it
is, it's by showing them how much value they've currently generated and
how much more they could be generating with further investment.
This requires designers to get comfortable doing things that they're
uncomfortable with - like tracking performance, writing business cases,

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making estimates. The number of times I've been in meetings where
designers have been asked to, kind of, you know, pull a figure out of the
air. "How much will working this product increase the performance,
increase the acquisition?" And designers feel really, really nervous about
putting a figure on something, in case, like, somehow they're gonna be
sort of held up to account for it in a few months' time. And yet often you
see business partners, engineering, product, marketing, comfortable
using figures that might be wildly out in a few months' time. I'm not
suggesting you pick things that are likely to be out, but just that we need
to be comfortable with making estimates, because that's what estimates
are. The more we can lean into this, the more we can actually show how
we can influence these things and the more we can show how much value
we can bring.
Now, businesses generally look at designers as executors. They
generally look at us on the execution level because we fundamentally
behave like executors. This is really what people mean when they're
talking about learning the language of business. It's not about knowing a
particular clever 3-letter acronym. It's about moving your mindset from
an execution mindset to an ownership mindset. And focusing on impact
over delivery. I see so many design leaders who really, really struggle to
do anything other than take instructions. They want to know all the
details from a leadership team rather than filling in the blanks. And as
designers, we need to move away from that. We need to stop positioning
ourselves as executors and start really, really focusing on adding our own
value layer to the conversation.
I think one of the problems is that designers live in a world of
abundance. We know that if we were just given the right amount of time,
another week here, another month there, another head count, we would
be able to figure out the perfect solution. Anything less than the perfect

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solution feels like a cheat, feels like a missed opportunity.
However, by comparison, most businesses don't live in a world of
abundance, they actually live in a world of limited resources and
competing demands. If they're lucky, they'll be operating on a 3% or 4%
profit margin. Everything they do is a risk and their job is to generally
manage that risk effectively. If you have limited resources, spending
money on more Google ads that you know will drive traffic feels like a
better thing to do than spending money on more research or something a
design team think will have impact, but it wasn't tell you what the impact
might be or can't point you to previous situations where they've promoted
a feature and that feature kind of delivered on the goods.
As such, most businesses look to make a lot of small bets. Most of
those small bets will fail. But they end up doubling down on the ones that
succeed. And I think this is in stark contrast to most designers, who want
to de-risk products and projects by doing more research, exploring more
options, and validating each idea before launch. I'm not saying this is not
right, I think it is. But it's also not how businesses think, especially in
times of limited resources. As such, I think designers believe that they're
playing a game of chess, and in a game of chess you want to get every
single move right - that's really important because making the wrong
move is fatal. And also, in chess, the best player wins. And so there's a
focus on mastery. However, your business partners aren't playing a game
of chess, they're playing a game of poker. And a game of poker, you play
lots of small hands with the understanding that most of them will lose,
but if they can avoid losing too much by just playing fast and not betting
too much on each hand, and by that I mean moving quickly, getting
things out the door quickly, they may stick around long enough to get
lucky, pull the big hand and win.
And all of this comes down to budgeting, opportunity costs. Getting

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something out the door quickly allows you to start driving revenue
quickly. Most businesses see sales and marketing as the drivers for
revenue. In order tore design to be seen more as a cost to be managed,
we need to demonstrate how we can continuously be driving that
revenue.
This is one of the reasons why I have been fascinated by the field of
growth design of late. A community of designers who are very much
focused on understanding analytics, of making small changes, of
measuring the effects of those changes, and feeding those changes back.
While product designers tend to focus on much larger chunks of the
product and are responsible for delivering the features that deliver
long-term value, sadly, those features and that long-term value is often
unnoticed, it's often taken for granted. Whereas growth designers are
much more focused on delivering immediate, identifiable, and measurable
improvements.
So, what does this all mean for design? Well, first off, I think we
need to stop complaining about not being understood. I think we need to
stop finding excuses and blaming others, like sales, marketing, product
management. And instead, I think we need to take an active role in
raising the profile and impact of design. To do this, we need to stop
centring ourselves in the conversation, as this comes across as
self-centred, egotistical and needy. And I think we need to realise that
we're not the hero of our own journey, but are a supporting cast member,
at best. As Paul Adams rightly said, the next evolution of UX requires us
to understand where we sit in the organisation and the role that we really
play. The key to this is making sure that we're perceived as Kelleran Beq
rather than Jar Jar Binks, a super niche Star Wars reference, if ever there
was one! We also need to stop fixating over idealised processes or
worrying we're doing it wrong. But, rather, we need to accept the current

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reality and work within the constraints. It doesn't mean not pushing for
change. But it does mean not setting ourselves up for an impossibly high
level of expectation and then beating ourselves up whenever we can't
deliver. And ultimately we need to do a much better job of demonstrating
the value design can bring, by showing rather than telling. And this is
something that won't happen overnight. It requires a tonne of patience. It
requires a need to be comfortable shipping imperfect solutions. But if we
can do this, I believe we will finally be able to own our seats at the table,
and this won't be just us sitting in a high chair, playing with our crayons,
while the grown-ups speak. This will actually be driving things forward.
So, thank you very much for your indulgence this evening. And I'm open
to any questions the audience might have. (APPLAUSE)
STEVE BATY: We have a question from Kevin over here. Hang on, Andy,
we'll just run a microphone around.
ANDY BUDD: Sure thing.
KEVIN: Thanks, Andy, for getting up at 6am in the morning in London!
Today, we have been talking a lot about ethics and producing work that
matters. And this is probably another anxiety that designers are faced
with today. Do you have any advice about how designers can prioritise
their concerns and what to focus on most?
ANDY BUDD: This is a really interesting question. It's also a real struggle
for me. I actually wrote an article a few years ago on my blog about this
tension. I think it goes back to some of the things I was saying in my talk.
I think we are trained through university but also through the kind of
media we, sort of, consume, to believe that design is a naturally ethical

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industry, and that we should all be doing, you know, good in the world.
And I get that. I'm not saying that is not a good thing to do. But I think
what ends up happening is this sets up expectations that are really, really
hard to deliver. I see a lot of people that get up on stage, like, "Hey, I
worked at Uber for 15, 20 years and I made several million pounds." I
wondered, "Hmm, am I doing good stuff?" I am going to do six months
working for a company that designs solutions for starving people or
medical conditions in Africa. I think there's a real kind of, like, sort of
hubris often around, "Hey, I'm gonna now go off and do this good thing
because I've done an awful lot of less-good things. And also I'm in a
position of security in my career that I can do that." And that's great. If
you have been working at Uber for 15 years, cashed out, multimillionaire,
you can do what you want. If you have moral issues you need to cleanse
by doing good stuff, do it. But what I think of is I think of that designer
who's three or four years into their career, who is struggling to put
together enough money to get a mortgage, who's seeing all of this stuff,
who is seeing all these amazing case studies from IDEO about solving all
of these major problems. Seeing people get up on stage and berate them
for why are they not helping the world?! And I think that's a huge amount
of pressure to be putting onto individuals. I'm not saying you shouldn't do
it, if you're in a position to do it. But I wish we would stop making people
feel bad because they are not solving world hunger. Like, we have built
this idea that design is somehow at the centre of everything, and that
design can solve all these issues. But I think that's a fallacy. I'm not
saying that we can't help. I'm not saying we can't have a role to play. But
I think this is another example of setting ourselves up far too high
standards, often, that then creates this kind of real sort of moral problem,
which then leads to us having these midlife crises. "Why haven't I gone
and solved these big issues?" So, I think we need to be a little bit more

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balanced. I think it's almost like the aspirational magazines. I remember
flicking through a partner's Vogue. You get to the back page of Vogue and
there's somebody who is a parent, who has a day job as a model, and in
the evening they go and they run an animal sanctuary, sort of, you know,
helping animals recover from horrible situations. You're like, "Well, that's
brilliant." But there's nothing in my life, there's nothing in my kind of
context that would allow me to do that. And all I'm doing now is reading
these things and feeling really bad about myself. And so I think we need
to try and step away from this kind of feeling bad. There aren't a huge
number of roles out there that allow this. Like, most people are just trying
to kind of, you know, get enough money together to get a mortgage, like
you say, and I think what we can do is we can make small, baby steps.
We can try and use some of the ethical frameworks to kind of improve
work. We can have good conversations with our peers around why using
deceptive patterns is not a good idea. But I think if we set ourselves up
with this unrealistic expectation, we'll always fail. I think that's why we're
in this challenging situation we are at the moment. I would like to see a
few more practical, grounded tools, and a few less talks setting us up for
this gap, which I think is really, really tough to fill.
STEVE BATY: Question over here.
MATT: Thank you, Andy. Firstly, thank you for a wonderful talk. It's an
excellent way to wrap up UX Australia. Secondly, congratulations on
saying "no" and not travelling over here based on your ethics. There's
been a lot of discussion about that throughout UX Australia this year and
previous years. I'm just interested to hear a little bit more around the role
of a designer as a facilitator when it comes to this theme of being in our
midlife crisis? If you could talk to that a little bit more, that would be

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great.
ANDY BUDD: Again, another really interesting question. I think one of the
reasons we're in a bit of a crisis is because I think a lot of design's
traditional role as a facilitator has been removed. I don't think it's been
deliberate, I don't think it's been malicious. But I think, when I look at
kind of modern-day product teams, I see engineering leads and engineers
who are delivering code. I see designers who are shipping interface. And I
see product managers who are not doing, sort of, that kind of IC work.
They don't have a big, long list of tasks that they're going through to ship
interface or ship code. So, that means that a lot of product managers
have time and space. Also, product manager's role is often to
facilitate - maybe lower-case f, facilitate - the transaction that happens
between businesses and product teams, and facilitate the sharing of
information and knowledge. And so I come from a UX arena, a UX world,
an agency world, where designers were the prime facilitators. If we start
a project, we go in, run workshops, we do design games, we do research.
We end up facilitating. And one of the reasons I think we like this as
designers is that Saarinen quote, is it provides you with this important
context. Now, I think product management have come in, and because
they have more time and resources, they are the ones now often doing
discovery. They are the ones now having the meetings and the workshops
with our decision-makers. And they are not necessarily inviting us into
those conversations, not because they are mean and evil, but because
they know that we're already really, really overworked, and actually
inviting us to every single meeting would be a really, really poor use of
our time. And so I actually think that the role of designers as facilitators is
slowly being diminished. Like I say, I don't think it's deliberate, I don't
think it's malicious, but I think if we want to carry on having that role,

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and if we want to carry on having those conversations in order to inform
our - improve our design process, we need to sort of push for that. But
we need to push for it in a friendly, supportive, meaningful way, rather
than antagonistic way. And this is fundamentally why I'm seeing a lot of
designers, as I said in the talk, move into product management. It's not
because they dream of being product managers, it's not because they
want to be writing tickets and managing backlogs and that kind of stuff.
It's because they feel that the strategic element of design - you know, I'm
sure you're all aware of Buchanan's Orders of Design. I think at the
moment most designers, at least in tech company product teams, are
focusing on that first and second order. I think UX designers operate on
the third and fourth order, but that third and fourth order has been taken
over by the business function. And so I think the desire to carry on doing
the strategic, long-term, interaction design, UX design, service design
thinking, the only space we can do that, unless we're working for a really,
really design-forward company like Airbnb, is to be moving into that
product role. And so it's a shame. You know, it's a shame. And I've
written extensively around how I do think the higher levels of UX design
are slowly disappearing and being subsumed into product. And I wish that
wasn't the case, but I think it is the case. Like I say, it's no point fighting
against a system when I think we've already, you know, we've already
conceded that control. I can totally understand designers' desire to move
into product, to still keep doing design but just under a different name
and under a different guise.
MATT: Thank you.
STEVE BATY: Do we have another question for Andy? We have one at the
back.

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>> Hey, Andy. Thanks for your talk. It was awesome. Weirdly, I think you
could potentially replace the designer role with product manager, and the
talk would resonate to PMs as well. Have you seen, I guess, anyone that's
facilitating the relationship between designers and PMs to kind of start
sharing their qualms? Because I think they have more in common than
they realise. Have you seen that done well?
ANDY BUDD: I think you're absolutely right. I hadn't really thought about
that. But we're talking about kind of, you know, not flying over to
Australia to manage my carbon footprint, and maybe there's a circular
economy element to my talk here and maybe I should start giving product
management talks and kind of rebrand it and retitle it, and that would be
incredibly economically efficient. (LAUGHTER) I think you're right. I feel
comfortable talking about the designers' perspective because I come from
a design background and I've spent a lot of time speaking with designers.
But when I speak to product managers, they are having all the same
questions and these same problems. And actually, as I said in the slide, I
think it's actually even harder for product managers because they don't
have necessarily the influence we think they have. They are stuck
between these warring factions. And a lot of product managers are having
a sense of ennui and conversations about the impact they're having on
the world, et cetera. I completely agree. The one difference is that
product managers tend to be a little bit higher up in the decision chain,
and I think the one thing that product managers have going for them is
product managers often report to head of product, and the head of
product is the same person designers are reporting to, or the head of
design. So, you'll quite often have a situation where you might have a
very large company that have got six or seven product teams, and the

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head of product, the CPO, is managing six or seven PMs, maybe more, 10
or 12, and one design leader. And so you get an imbalance, where you've
got six or seven people telling you one thing, and one person telling you
another. Most CPOs come from a product management background and
so they are much more attuned to listening to the concerns and
understanding of the concerns that their PM reports have than designers.
So, I do think there is a power imbalance and I think the only way around
that, personally, is to see chief design officers as well as chief product
officers. And we are starting to see a few CPOs and CDOs working. So, I
think one way around this is balance. I also think the idea of a product
triumvirate. You'll see tech companies, they'll have an idea of the product
team will be led by a product manager, an engineering manager and a
design lead. That can create some kind of balance there. But in terms of
coaching and support, not really. I mean, you know, I am a coach, I
coach designers, mostly. But probably about a third or quarter of the
people I coach are product managers, product leaders. Often, when I
coach people, I might coach the designer and the product person in that
relationship. Usually a head of design and a product leader or CPO or
whatever, VP of product. And off the reason that they bring me in is
partly because that CPO doesn't understand the culture of design, and
really, really struggles to have those meaningful conversations. So, I
always come in and, when I'm coaching the designers, I encourage them
to think about business. When I'm coaching the product people, I'm
encouraging them to think about design. And so that's also the role I take
in, kind of, VC. I'm not going into companies and drawing Y frames and
doing the design work. I'm actually being a bridge between the thought of
business and the thought of design. And so people are doing this. And I
think the more designers that move into the product role, the more
designers will be able to be that bridge. But I think it's kind of rare. And

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so I think I'd like to see more people taking that kind of bridging role. And
I would like to see more organisations - I mean, I would see this as
self-serving - but I would like to see more organisations hiring coaches
like me to coach design leaders and product leaders to kind of bring
everyone to the table and have that balance. And so, yeah, that's my
thinking there.
STEVE BATY: I don't think there's another question from the floor, Andy.
Hang on. I'm curious about, like, what is it about the tech industry and
about technology that design struggles in that context in a way that it just
doesn't seem to struggle in, say, architecture or industrial design and the
making of physical products? There's a very expected and central role of
an architect in the design of a building. There's a very central role for an
industrial designer in, say, the design of a motor vehicle. And yet when it
comes to technology, we seem to keep getting shunted to the side by the
marketing team or the sales team or the engineering team, or now
product management. Why?
ANDY BUDD: I think there's a bunch of reasons. I think, first of all, you
know, digital product management on the web, particularly, maybe has
only been around for 20, 30 years. Architecture has been around for
several thousand years. And so I think the architectural world has a lot
more history and time, you know. Architects were originally
head stonemasons. The term is a term that means, kind of, "user of
stone". And I think if you go back to the Greek and Roman times, the
architects maybe weren't held in quite as much esteem as they are today.
So, I think time. But, unfortunately, I think time also has to kind of come
with creating space. I think one of the reasons we've kind of... I hate to
say lost this battle, because it sounds defeatist. But I think one of the

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reasons we have lost this battle is because for the last 20 years, we as an
industry have been having very, very insular, circular conversations that
haven't necessarily positioned ourselves in a good light. You know, we are
still having debates around UX versus UI. You know, we are still arguing,
"Oh, well, design thinking isn't particularly useful." And when we do that,
actually, we cede control to other people. When we're talking about
design thinking not being useful, the MBAs, the business graduates, are
running design thinking workshops with our bosses. While we're sitting
around saying, you know, "What exactly is UX and who gets to do it, and
how is that different from interaction design or other forms of design?"
The product managers are saying, "Well, we don't care. We're just gonna
prototype stuff." We debate the nuances of user research and how
research should be done perfectly, while at the same time product
managers are now kind of doing product discovery. Like, we argue about
language, which is really ironic. Like, we argue about language but also
we dismiss the power of language in a way that product managers go,
"Yep, we'll just call this thing product discovery. We know you've been
calling it user research or design research, but we can't use it..." We get
into annoying design Twitter-type arguments. And the product managers
are like, "Hold my beer. I'm actually gonna do stuff that's valuable to
companies." So, I think we are our own worst enemies and one of the
reasons why I wanted to give this talk is to give us a shake-up and say,
"Let's stop having these circular conversations. No-one cares. Let's start
demonstrating value." I think one of the big differences is just the cost.
First of all, I think it's really easy to laud architects. I think so often visual
designers, UX designers, interaction designers, digital designers laud
architects. I have been to plenty of conferences like this one, like
interactions like the IxDA, where architects are kind of held in some kind
of awe. When you've actually worked with architects, they are often the

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least user-centred you can imagine. Like, they will produce these
beautiful visualisations that are completely impractical, they will create
experiences in the manoeuvring around of buildings, but not consider how
these buildings are actually used and utilised. You know, I remember
going to seeing one of Frank Gehry's buildings once, where the power
plugs for the janitor sockets were 3m high. You needed a ladder to climb
up the ladder to plug the power in because it looked nicer. So, let's not
confuse ourselves that the architects - I mean, Gehry is a particular
instance there. But let's not confuse ourselves that architects are perfect
by any construction of the imagination. But they are building things that
you have to get right first time around. You can't iterate on a building. I
mean, if you're looking at the kind of whole layer thing, you can iterate on
the shelves, on the skins. But you're building a thing that's likely to be
there for 10, a hundred, 500 years, and the cost of doing this is really,
really expensive. The same with product. If you're delivering a product, if
you're shipping a product, you've gotta iterate - you know, Dyson
creating thousands and thousands of his first vacuum cleaner before
putting it into production. Once it's in production, if a defect comes, that
can take your whole company down. Digital realm. We don't have that.
We don't need to worry as much about getting it right first time. If it's
broken, we have engineers on site, we can fix it. If something isn't
working, we can look at the stats, we can improve it. Like, I try to kind of
redesign my bathroom recently, and I found it a terrifying experience.
Because once I'd chosen the tiles and they were stuck on the wall, there
was nothing I could do about it. Once I was choosing the paintwork and
the bath fittings, it was there forever, for 10 or 20 years because I
couldn't afford to do it again. It was paralysing. I think the flexibility of
our medium invites a different process. But the heroes that we follow and
the models that we follow that come from product design do not set us up

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well for the flexibility we need for this medium. I think we need to
disentangle ourselves and disengage ourselves from those industries
rather than setting themselves up as targets, because they do not serve
our needs. And we actually need to define our own path and our own
future.
STEVE BATY: And on that note, thank you very much, Andy. Thank you.

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UXA2023 Andy Budd - Design’s Mid-Life Crisis

UXA2023 Andy Budd - Design’s Mid-Life Crisis

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UXA2023 Andy Budd - Design’s Mid-Life Crisis

UXA2023 Andy Budd - Design’s Mid-Life Crisis

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