UX design is dying in big organizations – here is the recipe for a revival

By Bettina Høiler & Martin Ibsen

User Experience Design is withering in the big Danish enterprise companies, and the UX designers are having trouble unfolding their true potential. That is the reason for this call to action, so we can have a revival for the comprehensive and important UX role.
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In this blog post, we will challenge the current User Experience (UX) design role, and how it is handled in many Danish enterprise companies. This post has been written in a collaboration between Bettina Høiler, who works as a UX and Service Designer in Alm. Brand Group and Martin Ibsen, a Product Coach in Syndicate who helps companies put UX to optimal use.
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Our post has been inspired by different articles written by prominent people within UX and agile product development, such as Marty Cagan, a big proponent of the use of UX designers to create better product (cf. An Open Letter to The Design Community).
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This post is our shared call to action, and an invitation for a new dialogue about the UX role. It is especially meant for you who are a UX designer in a big Danish company, you who work with digital product development, or you who are a leader for several UX designers – and are open to expand the boundaries for what a UX designer can contribute to your product and development process.
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There are several issues with the current UX role, and it is those that we want to address in this post.
Before delving into those issues, first we would like to define UX. Thereby, we will have the same foundation when we discuss UX design.
For this, we will use Nielsen Norman Group’s definition:

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"User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

What is the problem?

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When our products and services are functioning optimally, and put a smile on our customers’ faces, we have successfully made a good user experience. That means that we have made a good User Experience Design (UXD). You know it and can probably remember good experiences with a product or service that you recently used. If not, then you can definitely remember when the opposite was the case – i.e., having had a bad experience.

That is why a sharp UXD focus is also an important (perhaps the most important) element when you are making new products and services. And that is exactly why we need to talk about the state of UXD in Danish organizations. As the word ’design’ in User Experience Design indicates, the user experience is not a coincidence, but a consciously designed experience. At least, that is how it should be.
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We experience several overarching problems, both from an organizational perspective, where leadership and organization do not necessarily support the best UXD conditions, but also from the UX designers’ perspective. Let’s look at the problems first. Afterwards, we will come up with a few possible solutions, so hang tight.  
Let’s start by looking at the problems from the point of view of the UX designer.

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Problem 1 – The UX role – an unfulfilled competency

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There are a lot of really frustrated UX designers in Denmark. Maybe you are one of them? Too often, the UX role is an overlooked and unrealized competence. In many, especially bigger organization, they don’t get the most out of the employed UX designers - and those designers are only used for a fraction of what they are good at and passionate about.

There is often a misconception in organizations that UX designers are solely responsible for creating beautiful visual interfaces for the company's digital solutions, which is actually the responsibility of a User Interface (UI) designer.
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Sure enough, Prototyping and working with Digital Touchpoints is a part of a UX designers’ responsibility, but it is not, and should not, be the only thing they do.
This misconception is also experienced by Marty Cagan:
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“at many companies, when I first start working with the execs, they don’t understand the difference between the types of designers. Often, they just have one person (usually a visual designer) in the role, and they complain to me about the effectiveness of the design (...) people tend to think of UX as usability, but usability is typically the easy part, and, for example, calling it 'usability testing' understates the importance and role. You’re responsible for much more”, he writes referring to the area of responsibility of the UX designer.
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In our view, many UX professionals themselves contribute to this misconception because they often have a digital design background and enjoy prototype and visual design work more than some of the other tasks that a UX professional is also responsible for, such as user research, analysis work, and stakeholder management - activities that are essential in ensuring that we build 'The right thing' and not just 'the thing right'.
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For that same reason, Alm. Brand have begun a bigger undertaking of defining the difference between the various design profiles – including what the different design profiles are responsible for, and what competences the company expects them to have.
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Because the UX designers are, and have to be, responsible for much more than Usability and Prototyping, as Cagan writes, if they are here to “improve and strengthen the users’ overall experience when they interact with a company’s products and solutions across all channels”.
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The way the UX role is handled in many Danish companies needs a wake-up call. The use of the UX role must be reimagined to be a much more significant part of the development process than it is today, which leads us to the next problem.

Problem 2 - UX... That’s something about drawing some sketches, right?

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By (way too) many people, UX is considered a phase that either happens before the real product development start, or as something that happens in the end of development, where the UX designer can sprinkle some glitter on the solution. It is a shame, and a waste of competences, because you lose the value that a UX designer can actually contribute to a product.
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And let’s get one thing straight: If you are looking for a design profile, to sprinkle glitter on something and make it look sharp (which is a competence that should not be undervalued!), you need a UI designer. Because UX is a cross-functional discipline, that is largely based on user research – collecting user insights, doing analysis and forming iterative learning. That is why many UX designers also have a wide variety of qualitative and quantitative methods for exactly that purpose.
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If one looks historically at the way services have been produced throughout history, there was a shift towards 'division of work' or 'division of labor' during the transition to mass production under Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford.

This involved breaking down processes into sub-processes or tasks, so employees became responsible for specific parts of a process rather than the entire process. This was done with the aim of increasing productivity and ensuring quality.

This not only resulted in specialization but also in a perception that only a select few in an organization were responsible for certain aspects, such as quality assurance of the customer experience (UX). Unfortunately, this perception is still prevalent in many organizations today.

In addition, only very few organizations and UX professionals have a systemic perspective and a holistic approach to the customer experience. Many organizations tend to believe that the customer experience is solely a result of the digital customer experience, where digital interfaces play a significant role.

We forget that the customer experience is equally (and perhaps even more) influenced by factors like how quickly the service center answers your phone call or how the physical environment in which a service is delivered is perceived by the customer. Therefore, it is not solely the responsibility of UX professionals to 'create the good customer experience.' It extends far beyond that.
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It is, therefore, essential to remember that if one truly wants to enhance the user experience (UX), it is not just a task for the UX professional in the corner but a task for the entire organization. Business processes, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and SLAs (Service Level Agreements), just to give some examples, must also support the work with UX.

Problem 3 – UX designers are not good enough to transform, promote and facilitate (so stop whining and get out there)

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The good user and customer experience is therefore not just the job of the UX designer. But exactly that message, is the UX designer’s job to make the organization understand. Unfortunately, it is our perception that UX designers are not good enough at transforming, promoting and facilitating.
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As described in Norman Nielsen’s definition of UX, the work of UX encompasses ALL aspects of the user’s experience with a company’s products and solutions across all channels.  

Therefore, one of the most important tasks for a UX professional should not only be 'doing UX' themselves but, to a greater extent, to transform the organization they are a part of, so there is a focus on the good customer experience. Everyone working on a product or service has a responsibility to deliver the best experience to the company's customers. UX designers should have the tools to educate, coach, and facilitate colleagues in understanding why it is essential to work with customer experiences, how to work with customer experiences, and what can influence a customer experience in a positive or negative direction.

Let's provide a concrete example here. A UX designer will always work towards testing their solutions on real customers. They should spread this simple idea and make their colleagues understand both why it is important and how to do it. In this way, all employees become conscious of the work that should underpin creating solutions that bring a smile to the customers' faces. It is not just the UX designer who tests everything in phase 1 so that a development team can subsequently create solutions without being aware of the customer experience (on what they spend the majority of their waking hours developing).

What a lot of whining – but what is the solution then?

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1. Agile vs. UX, an unresolved love story

These days, a lot of companies are focusing on agile transformation. Many are engaged in agile transformation and are well aware that it makes sense to move away from the plan-driven, phased approach towards a more flexible and agile organization.

It makes sense when you have to create successful products in a more and more complex reality. When we mention agile transformations, we are not just talking about establishing frameworks, like Scrum, Kanban or SAFe. We are talking about a greater cultural transformation of the company, and that change in organizational thinking, that agile in its purest form comes with.

A transformation can mean introducing new tools and new practices, but to get the optimal out of an agile transformation, a change in values and mindset are even more important.

In these agile transformations, UX designers are, however, losing a golden opportunity to jump on the agile bandwagon and, at the same time, elevate UX much higher up on the agenda. The big secret that few see is that agile development and UX have a significant overlap when it comes to values and mindset.
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If we look at the agile values - such as 'customer collaboration over contract negotiation' and 'responding to change over following a plan', there are clear overlaps with a design approach. A value that agile shares with a design-driven approach to problem-solving, which UX professionals are and should be champions of. If we delve deeper into the values, both agile and UX work based on a principle of satisfying customer needs as quickly as possible through incremental development and a simple solution design.

Additionally, both agile and a design approach advocate for collaboration with the customer. In short, UX and the agile approach have an unresolved love affair - even though there are countless compelling arguments for a committed relationship.

Some of the best Product Owners you meet, are old UX designers, and if you engage in a conversation about the agile mindset with a UX designer, they will get it faster than most people can say ‘The Agile Onion’… There is great potential in UX designers throwing in their lot with Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters and Product Owners, in order to promote common interests, and turbo-charge an empirical work process. If you are a UX designer, I would recommend that you invite your agile colleagues to a talk as soon as possible.

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2. Stop phases, and silos, and start working in cross-functional teams

It is a mystery why most Danish companies still have IT department separated from what they call “the business”. If you had a dollar everytime someone said “the business have these demands” or “It’s the business that decided how the solution should be”, it would quickly become – well – pretty good business.

The problem is, however, that the division of these departments also leads to a division of our work into phases. As mentioned above, this is probably a remnant of the approach of good old Taylor, but it really ruins a lot for our products and services.

Our work becomes phase-divided, and especially UX ends up either as a dreamer in phase 0, where anything is possible (but everything will still change when developers get started) or as an afterthought in phases 3-4, where they just need to fix some good design at the end. Neither of these approaches work, neither for the product nor for the UX designer’s motivation. Instead, we should work in cross-functional teams in short sprints.
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Allen Holub has said it this simply:
“Build something small.
Talk to your users.
Get feedback.
Improve it.  There. That’s agile.”

And we could add: “That’s a great UXD process”.
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Magic happens when you put a business specialist, a developer, a Product Owner, and a UX designer together to solve a problem. Give your team problems to solve and give them the freedom to solve them.

Drop the phases and requirements specifications. To address the challenge of IT vs. business requirements, Alm. Brand has merged the two business units into one called 'Business Development and Technology'.

In Business Development and Technology, they work in small cross-functional and autonomous squads, consisting of front-end and back-end developers, a business developer, a UX designer, a Product Owner, and a Scrum Master.

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3. Dear UX designer – become transformation leaders and good facilitators (this is your superpower)

Most UX designers you meet are well-educated and know how you work with quality UX. But maybe they need something else than their educational background. That is, understanding of change transformation leadership and facilitation.

There aren't many UX designers you come across who actually see themselves as transformation leaders or facilitators. As previously mentioned, it should be a significant part of UX professionals' tasks to promote and educate the rest of the organization about what good UX design entails.

This requires an understanding of change and facilitation skills. It is not productive to sit and wait for tasks to come to you and for your colleagues to understand what you can do and what your role involves.

As a UX designer, you need to see your role more as a facilitator and transformation leader than one who makes wireframes, interviews and prototypes. That would benefit the entire organization and create even more focus on the good customer experience.

In fact, UX professionals are some of the individuals who can take the C-level's vision of 'customer focus' and make it tangible in the development work, so it doesn't just end up on posters, mugs, PowerPoints, and speeches but becomes something that is actually prioritized by all employees - and therefore results in real outcomes for the customer.

If you are a UX professional, you should seek knowledge, take courses, read books, etc., and learn as much as you can about facilitation and change management. It may very well become your new superpower.

It might sound simple, but getting UX on the agenda and creating better products does not come about on its own.

Less wireframe-drawing – more preaching, please

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A good start is to pick up the hammer and knock down the old, cemented silos and UX roles. Afterward, you rise from the dust, brush off, and then find new paths, and most importantly, a new self-image.
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Turn down the wireframe-drawing a bit and turn up the preaching. Because everyone likes to listen to sermons that can create more quality, value, and joy at work.
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Ready, set, go! 🚀

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