“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
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Dr. Seuss, The Lorax​
If you work in digital products or in UX, it can be easy to forget that this is a relatively new profession. This means that it is still being defined. Unfortunately this also means that there is no agreement in what roles in this profession mean. It also means that authority is also often undefined.
I entered this profession in part because of its promise to help people, which now in retrospect seems a bit naive. It seems naive now because of my experience in many companies, where design and product teams often get overruled by executives with different agendas. Consider, for example, how AI has been shoved into just about every digital product in a distracting way. Conflicts are pervasive in these working environments, and conflict resolution isn’t taught at design schools.
I witnessed designers react to conflict by withdrawing from any conflict whatsoever. In practice, this means designers transforming into pixel-pushers, doing whatever is asked of them and not sharing their valuable perspectives. This is such a loss, for the designers, their teammates, and the products that they work on.
​I recently wrote a book review for Careless People, the Facebook memoir from former executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. I posit that the author could be the most careless person of them all at Facebook. Reading this book made me think about Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil and how evil thrives when good people do nothing. In Facebook’s case, one of the most consequential evils was ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, which was in large part a result of no more than two people at Facebook with an understanding of the Burmese language. Errors and oversights digital products can also have other life and death consequences, for example products in the healthcare industry.
So what can one person do in the face of corporate oversights and intentional ignorance of a product’s users? You have to keepcaring.
In my case, caring meant learning new techniques to communicate with product teams so that they understood my perspectives. It started with making videos of users struggling with using the products our teams worked on. It was a relatively small thing to learn, but it had a great impact.
This led me to learn about facilitating workshops and conflict resolution. These were a bigger learning curve for me as a natural introvert. Even though I have been trained in giving and receiving critiques, for a lot of reasons I felt that critiques were personal attacks. Getting over that learning curve gave me a lot of freedom and relief. It has made collaborating much easier for me and my teams. By extension, it has made the products I have worked on much better.
This work is hard, but I’ve found that making products better involves much more than pushing pixels around.
This newsletter is a little different than ones I have written in the past. Let me know what you think, or learn more about how my process can help you here.
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