Is design dying?

I was meeting with the head of a successful agency the other day and he said something quite illuminating — “customers don’t buy your code”.

This is a pretty simple explanation for why design is so important. If you asked most lay people to talk about their favorite apps or software, their answers will not be surprising. While they might struggle to put it into words, outside of mentioning bugs, their responses will focus almost exclusively on the design and the emotional components to their experience.

Yet one could argue that for the past half a decade the role of design has been diminishing in importance across most major companies. For instance, for much of the 2010s a common ratio of design to development was around 1 designer to 5 developers. These days you can see ratios as high as 1 designer to 100 developers or more https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/designer-to-developer-ratio/.

But the truth still remains: your dev team can create the most fluid, robust code, your marketing team could be filled with rockstars, your PM processes might be hyper efficient, but if your product isn’t well designed, if it’s an eyesore or frustrating to use, your customers will leave and your business will suffer.

So if design is critical to the customer, but it’s losing influence and importance in companies, something must be going on at a fundamental level. 

Either:

• Design is so mature that anybody can produce outstanding product design, including developers, PMs, and LLMs, and thus design is less important

— or — 

• Companies aren’t creating a culture or a process that allows design to flourish as a driver of product, and designers are not taking opportunities to expand their influence into product

If we’re being honest with ourselves, design (at least for software companies) is very mature. At this point many UI designers role’s amount to copying elements from a design system and pushing them around into a cohesive final product, sort of like stickers in a scrap book book. And even if you’re working at an ultra small startup without a design system, you’re often able to work off industry best practices from competitive products, copying or modifying similar designs that work to your own needs.

Same with UX — best practices for most features are extremely well established, tested, and validated, and there are infinite examples from talented designers from across the globe at your fingertips. If I asked you to imagine an input, a checkout form, or a sandwich menu there’s a good chance you can picture those elements pretty accurately in your head.

Additionally there are a preponderance of tools to help designers design more consistently, faster, than ever before. Tools like Figma represent a quantum leap from the early days of design drawing boxes and shapes in Photoshop. That’s not to mention cheap or even free UI kits and pre-made designs, improved frameworks, and asset plugins, all helping designers design faster with less effort, and helping developers or PMs create beautiful software without the need for a designer.

These days the truth is there is very little actual of what I call “creative design” where designers are creating something brand new, never seen before from scratch (without a pre-existing design system or assets). To me, creative design is design that challenges the status quo, that shakes up convention, and creates products that are unique, defensible, and ultimately the best experience for the customer. The amount of design work that fits this category is maybe 1–10% of what it used to be even 5 years ago.

That is not to mention the 60 ton elephant in the room — the looming threat of AI being able to generate designs in seconds without the management and cost of traditional product designers.

So we can establish that maturation of design as a discipline is part of the problem.

However, are we, as designers, doing it to ourselves? Are we too content to push pixels around on a screen, instead of involving ourselves in the elements of product that actually moves the needle for the business and it’s customers?

I come back to the same solution that Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, arrives at — that is, design and product are most effective when not siloed as separate disciplines, but combined under the same umbrella. This means, in order to recapture it’s influence in an organization, design as a discipline needs to grow. Luckily, we’ve made design much more efficient, so we can now execute on multiple functions instead staying siloed in a design program pushing pixels.

In the future the best and most influential designers will be product people; they will understand the customer on a deep level and the business case for why they’re designing something. They should understand not only the financial and UX impact of their designs but also the impact on other teams in terms of allocation of development or support resources. Further, designers should be able to align stakeholders around a vision for the product, and have a deep understanding of key metrics and numbers around what they’re trying to accomplish.

The ideal future designer will be somewhat of a generalist — able to simultaneously wield the vision and strategy of a PM with the aesthetic and psychological chops of a designer.

There is still room for the most creative among us to be pure designers spending the majority of their time in a design program, creating immense value for their companies by pushing boundaries in software design and defining the future standards and best practices, however there will be fewer and fewer creative design roles as software continues to mature.

For the rest of us, if we want design to continue to remain relevant, designers must embrace a shift away from pushing pixels and towards becoming rounded product champions, towards becoming ICs who make decisions backed by data, who cultivate the business sense and the empathy for the customer to prioritize, influence, and drive product vision.