Are you in a teflon-coated UX role?

Maybe you’re a UX researcher, passing choice insights into the product development machine. If what comes out the other side doesn’t seem right, you feel free to bitch and moan. “Didn’t they listen to the findings I gave them?”

Maybe you’re a UX designer who works at the early stages of the design process, doing the discovery phase, running workshops, producing concepts, sketches and setting the vision. Again, it’s so easy to pass the buck and feel vindicated when the quality at the end of the process is low.

Sometimes it feels like you’re a doctor advising a sick patient to give up smoking. If the patient keeps at it and eventually dies, it’s not your fault, right? Working agency-side makes this point of view even easier. You often don’t even see the end result – your agency gets paid and you move on.

Being teflon-coated feels safe, but in reality it’s quite the opposite. You’ll stop improving your skills and sooner or later people will realise you are delivering no value. UX people already have a bad reputation for delivering formulaic rhetoric and not delivering the goods. It’s bad for you, and it’s bad for our industry as a whole.

Fight to make yourself more accountable. Critique, don’t complain. Work out how to fix the process. Remember, design isn’t just UI. Organisations are designed. Workflow processes are designed. You already have the analytical skills needed to make change happen, you just need to step up to the plate.

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