Member-only story
UX Design: A thankless profession?
We are trees falling in forests with no one to hear our fall
Have you ever had one of those sprint demos where it seems everyone is congratulated for their efforts except for the design team? Let me take a guess. Pretty much all of them, right?
You wait anxiously through the meeting for that point that always seems to come near the end where a generous helping of praise is distributed. But the distribution never quite feels equal or makes it around to the design team. Developers get applauded, leadership gets a nod and a few product managers might get a pat on the back. But your team leaves the meeting feeling a bit out of the circle.
That describes most of the demos and release meetings I’ve attended over the years. There was one exception, one project, where our design team actually received applause. It was a customer demo and the applause came from our customers — not our leadership.
I’ll admit that felt good. Applause from our customers and users meant more than any kind words given by internal employees. But it was a single, rare instance in my career — occurring over 7 years ago.
I can assure you I haven’t been sitting around expecting that to happen again.
Not too long ago, I came out of a demo where a colleague expressed this very sentiment, “You ever notice everyone always congratulates and thanks development and never says a thing about us.”
I smirked and then quipped, “You’re in a thankless profession, my friend. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can come to peace with yourself as a designer.”
We both laughed and then proceeded to talk through everything that had to happen for that product to become a reality. There were conversations with our users, research to analyze, negotiations with the client, workflows to map out and countless iterations of designs to get a working model. We literally went through months of work before the first line of code could be written.
People rarely see that.
I thought about what my colleague said for a number of weeks after our conversation. I realized it wasn’t necessarily a thank you that he wanted. He just wanted our work to be recognized…
