As I reach 25 years of doing design for enterprise software, I am wondering where all the designers are redesigning the way to do design.
I have seen many approaches come and go but lately there seems to be a groupthink seeping in. I see a lot of motion, doing UX and using the same tools, hoping for pretty goodness. Design ideas and innovation has given way to a tool driven convenience and mediocrity.
Do we really need so many design specialists? Do we really need product managers and designers? They are specialists on specialists. Why? Because software developers were leaving out the appropriate inputs from the business, market and users so specialists were brought in.
So in the ideal world we could gather all the user data, business data and present it in a way that was consumable for developers. Would they do better than product managers and designers today?
Why wouldn’t it be better to have the whole design with the engineers if they had all the information they needed in a way they could consume it?
So is the goal to have a better design or to have a role where you get to noodle on your craft? Let’s challenge this constraint and redesign for better design.