Design, tech, and capitalism

I love being a designer, but I hate working in tech. This is not an uncommon sentiment shared amongst my design peers and the industry at large. We love waking up every morning to design, but we absolutely despite being subjected to the limitations and demands of the tech world. At some level, we all innately believe that we’re capable of designing better than tech allows us to. At the root of all this runs the cancerous undertones of capitalism.

Consider this typical scenario: you’re a designer in a part of a product team at a tech company. The product is a photography app and your team in particular is responsible directly for engagement and retention. After intensive qualitative testing, the UX researchers discover an insight, namely that users often open your app to recall what they were doing at this time a year ago. They use it as a photobook style memory capsule. This in turn leads you to start scoping and designing the feature itself.

After several rounds of design iteration, you come up with a feature not dissimilar to Snapchat’s “Memories” or Instagram’s “1 year ago today” prompts. Before implementation, you specifically call out that your team will need to do some content filtering to ensure that you aren’t serving up the wrong memories. The PM and the Engineering Lead are curious to hear more. You present that there’s an extremely high probability of re-triggering negative emotions through this feature for users who went through traumatic or stressful experiences. You did not want to re-serve up those photographs of incidents such as a car accident, a brain tumor, a crime scene, etc. The UX researchers agree wholeheartedly and back you up on this.

After much back-and-forth on whether this is worth pursuing, the team starts leaning towards leaving it out for the MVP. Based on your past experience, you know that if it’s left out of the first version, it’s never getting built. You gather user quotes, do your own guerrilla user research, use your UX researchers to make a strong case, and ultimately persuade the PM to convince the engineering team to spend a few days exploring a few quick ways to address this issue. The engineers come back with a few ways to filter out these potentially harmful images, all of which they estimate will take anywhere between two months to two years to build.

The PM then makes a tradeoff decision because of all the pressure they’re in to deliver the feature on time. Despite acknowledging the very real problem that this feature could cause, they decide that it’s not worth investing even two months building the fastest and simplest filtering option into the feature. The PM is weighing the opportunity cost of not working on other, potentially more important things in those two months instead. The product team is also under pressure to deliver features faster so that the company can showcase hypergrowth and raise the next round of funding.

Meanwhile, you as a designer have moved on to a different feature and are starting the design iteration phase. A month later, the team launches the feature to muted praise. It’s met with the expected consumer reactions of “Yeah, I guess this is cool” and “Yeah, I’ve seen this on other social media apps.” A few weeks later, your team start seeing minor improvements to retention and time-in-app, which prompt the product leaders to shower the PM and their team in praise, throw a champagne party, and showcase the high-level numeric growth in a slide during the investor pitch for the next funding round.

A few weeks after that, reports start surfacing on social media about how a military vet had his PTSD re-triggered because the app resurfaced a memory of an explosive device that he had taken a picture of a year ago. He hadn’t thought about it since, but seeing the image caused him to lapse in his treatment. More users chime in with their experiences. Some parents mention that the app presented the picture of their child to them, a child who was tragically taken from this world too early in a school shooting. These users didn’t ask for these emotions to suddenly and uncomfortably resurface through a notification for a photography app, and yet here they were. This turns into a big social media backlash against the brand, and the company’s PR department quickly has to go into crisis mode.

Eventually, the product leads ask the PM about this. The PM presents that the designer did suggest filtering these images in the initial proposal, but that they decided that the tradeoff wasn’t worth it. The product leads agree with the earlier decision and say that it’s now time to re-prioritize it. The team then spends two months working on it, launches it, apologizes on social media, and the investors are sold on the fact that team can “take feedback from their users and improve their product,” which leads to even more funding and confidence in the team.

It took many users needing to be emotionally abused and manipulated by the feature to actually get the team to believe that it’s an important enough problem to be worked on. The designer foresaw this coming, knew it would happen, fought nail and tooth and tried their best to ensure that the team understood its importance, and yet it did not get built due to larger systemic issues of how product teams in tech work. This is what absolutely infuriates designers about working in tech. Why do we need to wait for it to become a problem before we decide to solve it? If we can see it coming, why can’t we build it right the first time? Why is it even the designer’s job to make a case for why we need to build the correct experience?

In an ideal world, the designer would present the best possible solution to the problem and it would get built. In reality, this almost never happens. Worse, it’s always up to the designer to fight for the user experience. They cannot simply hand it off and expect the PM and developers to build it right. There will be issues in the build stage, there will be compromises that need to be made, and there will be major design decisions made in the late stages of development. The PM will always prioritize speediness and the engineers will always prioritize the technical aspects of reliability and stability. The experience, which is always prioritized by the designer, is often made worse at the expense of the other two things.

Even at companies with strong design cultures, this is an issue. The strongest regarded companies in tech when it comes to design culture currently are Apple, Airbnb, Lyft, and Slack. I currently work at one of these companies. I must say, there is a very strong design culture permeating across the entire organization. Everyone understands the value of design and, unlike in previous smaller startups, I don’t have to argue or make a case for why something is important. But even here, despite everyone comprehending why a certain thing needs to be built a certain way, they’re not optimizing for the experience. They’re optimizing for their stock price.

Once a company goes public, only one thing matters. The stock price. Keep that number up and you’ll get investors. Keep that number up and your investors will keep getting dividends. Keep that number up no matter what the cost. This ultimately ends up being the downfall of most tech giants. The user need that they once specialized in meeting is now being met much more easily by a different young startup that actually prioritizes the user experience instead of leaving out essential pieces of features. They understand their customers better and build better products. They celebrate at their holiday parties and brag about how they were able to do so much with a small team. It’s only a matter of time until they grow to be encumbered by the same problems as that tech giant.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s possible to be “satisfied” working in tech if tech itself is subjected to the inherently ruthless forces of unchecked, free-market capitalism. The “growth at all costs” mantra does not work if you want to build well-designed products. Even Apple, the most well-regarded company in the world when it comes to design culture, suffers from this. It helps that their leadership shares the same design values and consumer expectations from any new Apple product are always sky-high.

I wish that there were tech companies that weren’t obsessed with infinite growth. You literally cannot have infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and limited carrying capacity. Pinterest is taking a unique approach here where they’re intentionally growing extremely slowly and are taking meticulous care to ensure that every product feature is designing thoroughly and thoughtfully. I’ve heard good things about the designers working there, but they too mention similar qualms about how the company is being pressured to innovate and grow faster to keep up with the competition.

I don’t really know how to solve this problem without breaking free from the chains of capitalism. By nature, designers try to solve the root cause of a problem, and the deeper you go into this issue of tech companies intentionally harming their own users through unintentionally deceitful product design, the clearer it becomes that unchecked capitalism is at the core of the problem. And this is something that no single designer can solve by themselves.

There used to be a time where I would try extremely hard to get things built correctly. I was the lead designer at my first design job (at an agency) and we were contracting with a large Fortune 500 company. I would set up 1-on-1s with their Product Leads, Lead Designers, Heads of UX, Engineering Managers, and literally everyone to try and sell everyone on the importance of building things correctly and with intent. I would work late into the night sending emails and creating slide decks to ensure that the product is as good as it can possibly be. Despite all that, it never happened. One of their VPs straight up told me, to my face: “I really appreciate what you’re doing and all the effort your firm has put into this, but we’re ultimately the ones who have to put this on our balance sheet.”

And so I stopped. I stopped trying so hard to fight these forces and just control what I could. I would never be able to convince a CEO of a company to correctly design a tiny feature of password recovery in some buried Settings page because it’s apparently too much to ask engineers to invest an extra few weeks to build unsafe password detection the right way. It’s too much lost time that we could be spending implementing more ads or something. If you can’t justify a ROI on a design feature, it won’t get built.

Today, I just try my best to make the design as great as it can be, fully knowing that it will get de-scoped. I then diligently follow-up with the engineers who I’ve built strong relationships with and try to convince them to build out the second or third version as fast-follows. I often chat with my PM about the importance of building features correctly and fixing the issues when we can foresee them instead of waiting for a catastrophic event to happen. I have a solid team right now that understands all of this, and we’re doing our best in the environment that we’re in.

I hope this doesn’t come off as a hopeless cry for help to any wannabe designers reading this. I still wake up every morning loving the fact that I get paid to do design work. This is a life I only could’ve dreamed of fifteen years ago. There are many trappings to working as a designer in tech, but these are such larger systemic forces that it’s no use worrying about them. There was a time when I would try to fight them, but I’ve now accepted to just live with it for the time being. No amount of mental stress and burnout is worth going up against this incredibly broken system we’ve created. For now, I don’t know how to escape it, so I’ll use what I’ve learned to best live within it until that day comes.