Market ruined because of low entry barrier in UX Design? 🤔
Looking at the sad state of UX market in India makes me think about the scene few years back. In 2018-19 many folks who found coding or other roles a little difficult switched to UX.
UX design was glorified even more by few design influenzaaas as if its the only coolest job left in IT.
Most of the experienced designers we see today are earning good but shit in their pants when asked to do good visuals. They are good at talking, use lot of UX jargons and give gyaan on Linkedin comments and constantly ridicule designers who are good at visuals to sound intellectual.
We don’t see talented illustrators, motion designers, vfx folks get the appreciation they deserve. Also these skills are difficult and takes hell lot of practice to master and has a high entry barrier as well.
After interviewing 100+ design candidates and managing a team of 10+ designers, these are my takeaways
A) Designers are the most disconnected from business compared to PMs, engineers.
b) They suck at problem solving as well. Most of them expect PMs to come up with a solution for a design problem which is a disaster.
c) They don’t take any accountability. They think their job ends with designing a screen
d) Very few have the skills to talk to a user, understand and define the problem, find the best solution, test it and launch it. Any designer doing less than this is a glorified painter
After working with PMs from IITs and best of the IIMs, I’ve had a very contrasting experience:
- They don’t know how to write PRDs
- If you ask questions, they have only one answer “my boss (head/VP of products) wants it like this
- They are the least empathetic towards their users and only care about business metrics.
- Etc. etc.
I’m writing after working closely with principal PMs, Head of Product, VP of Product, business heads.
*I’ve 10 years of design experience.
Absolutely agree with you. The design industry had a strength that no one cares about your education background, but in recent years that has become its weakness as well.
People do those “cohort/crash course”, create a template based case study and call themselves a designer.
Moreover they become a “mentor” after they graduate from the cohort 😭
It has been mostly ruined these courses and Influencers who think learning figma will make them a designer
Just remember that these influencers don’t have real industry experience. The likes of Puneet Chawla can’t even get past screening…UX Anudeep works on internal amazon tools that don’t even require strong design skills. They know they’ve no meat hence the show.
But the saddest part is that design leaders themselves take these clowns seriously and prioritise candidates referred or mentored by these asses.
Puneet chawla is worst of all. Met him during a dribbble meetup in 2018, was continuously boasting about his design and made an impression on us. I checked his dribbble later and literally facepalmed. Also heard from few colleagues that he is literally pain in ass to work with and had been fired from his previous orgs.
Design knowledge vo kya hoti hai ? Ye le bhai “15 best fonts to enhance your next design project”
He was interviewed by my junior at Times Internet. He was really bad at problem solving.
The UX market, my friend, is not ruined, it is evolving. 'Joh dikhta hai, woh bikta hai' was the old mantra. Now it's 'Joh samajhta hai, woh bikta hai'.
This gives me hope . Any tips for people transitioning from middlware to ux engineering?