Three questions to ask yourself if you’re facing a mid-career design crisis
How to make a mid-career design shift without leaving UX entirely
“I’m more interested in User Research than ever touching Design again.” My mentee said, telling me a story I’d heard a dozen times.
Unfortunately, not every UX Design job is ideal. Stubborn stakeholders, projects doomed to fail, or external factors resulting in layoffs might sour you on the field. As a result, there comes a time in every UX Designer’s career where introspection is required.
It may come after arguing over minute details in a meeting for the hundredth time or seeing that stakeholders won’t move forward with your suggestions. On the other hand, it might also just be a mid-career slump.
Eventually, you might find yourself asking, “Do I still want to do this?”
Tomer Sharon, Head of User Research at Goldman Sachs, created a UX maturity model which often highlights when you should fight for your users and when it’s time to leave the organization.
However, a much subtler shift happens as a follow-up: If I go somewhere else, should I still do UX Design? I only noticed this shift when I looked at Design colleagues who started simultaneously. Many of them didn’t have “UX Designer” in their job title anymore. A few left the field of UX entirely. Others took on roles as other team members, like Product Owners/Managers. But more often, they would shift to other related roles in UX, such as UX Researchers, Service Designers, or CX Designers.
This is what I’d call the mid-career shift in UX. It’s usually a natural extension of being in the field, and it happens after thinking about where you want to be in UX (if at all). This happens when the honeymoon period of UX Design is over, and multiple projects are looking to have the same workload and process. For some people, this is when UX Design gets stale. For others, this is when they begin to think about the larger picture. Having gone through this recently (and seeing my colleagues hit this point), I’d offer some advice to navigate this reflective time with three different viewpoints.
The specialist: Narrowing from UX Design into your specialty
You likely started as a “UX Designer,” or something very similar in name.
In many ways, it’s a general (and overused) term that encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. Some of the core requirements are the same: Designers do user research, build wireframes, mockups, and prototypes, and user test for iterative feedback.
However, under that general term might come several specific job responsibilities. For example:
Designers who know (or are familiar with) front-end languages like ReactJS or Angular
Designers who can communicate flawlessly with executives, lead workshops, and advocate for Voice of the Customer
Designers who are used to working with enterprise or legacy systems
Designers familiar with UX Strategy/Market Research
Designers who can create Design Systems, Patterns, and Style Guides
Designers who can conduct Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed-Methods User Research
Some of these responsibilities seem like they’d be for entirely different roles. But businesses often lump them into the “UX Designer” job title, either because they wanted more eyeballs on it or because they want the Designer to serve both roles. That means, as UX Designers, we may sample several different roles and responsibilities at our job. So if you’ve realized that perhaps being a Designer isn’t for you, this is where you should think about something else:
What aspects of the UX Process do I like?
While outdated, this chart by Jasper Stevenson highlights how introspection about the parts of the UX process that you like can lead to a better understanding of what roles you want.
You can also consider a somewhat newer dichotomy, the world of Design and Product. If you tend towards one side, this may provide some guidance.
Spending some time understanding which parts still interest you the most can help you find out what you want to focus on for your career.
The Empath: The desire to do something meaningful
It’s no secret that UX Designers tend to care a lot about what they do. Some of you may have gotten into UX because the field empathizes with users and cares about their needs. That sometimes puts us in conflict with other members of the team. They may also care about the users, but their daily responsibilities center around metrics, KPIs, and making profits.
Another struggle that might drive change a few years in is the feeling that you don’t do meaningful work. Teams might take your designs and bulleted user research findings, but video recordings of your user concerns, the struggles and frustrations, and user suggestions are all left on the table. This is only compounded by businesses pushing for more standardized design practices(i.e., the Mcdonaldization of UX). If you’re only allowed a limited set of design options and elements, and you standardize to only design things that test well instead for users, it’s not a surprise that you might find the field boring. This may lead to your desire to do meaningful work unfulfilled or feel like there are more significant, wicked problems that your Design could address (but doesn’t).
What helps here is to ask yourself one question:
Have you seen the impact you’ve made in your users’ lives?
As a project gets closer and closer to a public release, it’s natural for UX Designers to be less attached to it.
We research user needs, interview them, test with them, and advocate on their behalf early in the project. But as it becomes time for Developers to build it and Analysts to validate it, UX Designers might only be there if something goes wrong. In many cases, we’re assigned to another project, and we start the whole process all over again. However, if we never check in on the final product, it can be easy to get caught up in that little bubble of interaction and conflict.
Ask yourself how your presence has improved the product.
Sometimes, it’s not the big picture ideas of problems you’re trying to solve that give us meaning. It’s seeing a user cry in happiness at the improved interface that will replace a significant frustration source.
The leader: Making decisions and having control
The longer we stay in the Design field, the more we rack up successes and sometimes failures. Failures aren’t pretty to watch, but few things are more painful than watching something fail that we could have fixed. I’ve been explicitly told not to check up on specific projects, as “you won’t like what developers did with the mockups you gave them.” Or, businesses decided to implement a particular feature that you repeatedly said was problematic, and you now see them forming a new project to re-design that feature after poor customer feedback.
In any case, that feeling of not having control may drive others to want to take more active leadership roles. One of the most common ways is for UX Designers to transition into Product Management. Before you take that leap towards another field, you should ask yourself one question:
Do you want to advocate for users or make more significant decisions?
For the most part, UX Designers are shielded from many of the messy realities of running a project. These include stakeholder management, keeping time/resources on budget, and making product decisions that might lead to success or failure with incomplete data.
It’s said that Product Owners and UX Designers often run into conflicts due to similar responsibilities. However, Designers are still allowed to focus mainly on the users, while Product Owners (and other leadership roles) may have to tackle multiple types of responsibilities.
As a result, it’s best to know which of these goals you’re aiming towards.
For example, if you want to advocate for users more effectively, it may be more beneficial to learn design communication and other persuasion techniques that UX can offer. We may deal with stubborn stakeholders or slow-to-change organizations as a UX Designer, but there’s more to making this type of leap than you might realize.
Take a moment to consider these questions.
Ultimately, these are questions that you have to ask yourself.
UX, like all other fields, is not for everyone. If you entered the field expecting something different and are hating the entire process, it’s okay to change fields. However, a bit of introspection may often help you realize that you don’t want to jump ship entirely: there’s some aspect of UX that you still like, and you can shift towards working in that role.
Perhaps you love the process, but you’re constantly fighting combative stakeholders in an organization that doesn’t seem to care about UX. That might be your cue to find another position rather than leave the field entirely. In any case, this moment of introspection may rekindle your love of the field, but perhaps in a different role. Spend a few moments appreciating your work, and understand what you want moving forward.
It might involve a mid-career shift, and it might not. But these are the questions you should ask yourself to understand what’s right for you.
Kai Wong is a UX Specialist, Design Writer, and Data Visualization advocate. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.