By Jay Harlow

“They need us for who we are. So be yourself, only better.” —Oppenheimer (2023)

Freakout or Phase Shift?

Call it what you like—UX, UI, UI/UX, UXD, XD, or (Digital) Product Design—software designers are freaking out.

Tech companies are recovering from a wave of overspending, overcorrecting to test just how far the proposition “doing more with less” can go. Industry-wide layoffs are hitting a generation of designers who have never known a world in which design was seen as optional, and reactions have ranged from feeling gaslit to nihilistic (it really is all about us, you see).

Or perhaps, as Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett put it recently, we are simply in a “phase shift” between how the practice has operated and something new.

Services & Surfaces

This shift isn’t unique to design—it’s happening across all of technology. Once upon a time, software shipped in a box. Process was simple. We designed, built, tested, and shipped.

When the web arrived, it split software in two. Content (data) could live on the server, decoupled from its interface onscreen. Mobile phones shrunk applications into apps, reducing the literal and figurative surface area of software. In tandem, engineers began decomposing monolith architecture into microservices, atomizing software into individualized functions. These parallel evolutions enabled unitary software products to be reconfigured into complex systems of component parts, serving multiple actors across many interface surfaces.

We call this business model Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but it would be better described the other way around, as service-as-software.

Consider a ride-sharing app. The most visible interface surface is the app you use to request the ride. The app connects you, through the service, with another, more complex, app used by the driver. Behind the scenes, support and operations teams access even more complex information dashboards to ensure you and your driver meet, all of which are powered by even more complex algorithms to optimize service delivery. But the “product” here isn’t all that software, it’s the ride. It is a transportation service, delivered, optimized, and monetized through software.

This flip is at the heart of the phase shift: technology isn’t just for tech companies anymore. It’s a necessary, integral part of every business, including those that provide services in the real world. The “products” these businesses deliver are whole services that live across systems of interconnected interface surfaces.

Boxes and Siloes

Businesses love to slice themselves up into accounting lines. Product Management thinks in products to manage and market. Engineers need to write code in one stack or another.

Software development organizations are organized in these siloes. They are formed when the business needs to deliver on some strategic objective. But while siloes promise the ability for teams to execute quickly and predictably, they also wall their teams off from other teams.

This creates a catch-22 many technology organizations find themselves wrestling with when delivering service-as-software: how to create a cohesive experience while building it in independently-delivered pieces.

The Double Dilemma

In “resource-constrained environments” (read: layoffs), execution is paramount.

On the right-hand side of the double diamond, Product/UI/Visual Designers, tasked with delivering finished “designs,” are getting nervous. Given the standardization of UI, the ready availability of off-the-shelf design systems, and the emergence of AI-based layout tools, design is starting to feel like a replaceable commodity. It’s a reasonable fear—if you believe that “design” is nothing more than the delivery of pixel-perfect layouts.

Over in the left diamond, “UXers” avoid the word “design” altogether, retitling ourselves in a constant struggle to be taken seriously. Grandly reducing Design to Thinking, this side of the practice declared that “everyone was a designer,” and, well, everyone realized they didn’t really need designers anymore. Turns out we aren’t the only ones who can run a workshop.

Of course, workshopping isn’t design anymore than pushing pixels around in Figma is. But put them together, and you’ve got something.

Nobody needs another definition of design, but for the sake of clarity, when I say “design,” I mean the iterative articulation of form to solve a problem. The thinking is in the making. The making is the thinking. The magic is in the interplay.

When it happens, it creates a kind of human, intrinsic value that doesn’t require ROI calculation. It makes things make sense. It makes making decisions easy. And that has value, to even the most cost-conscious business.

But to show that value through design requires not only practicing design, but positioning design to deliver its value. And here, the shift to services-as-software presents a tremendous opportunity for designers to stop freaking out.

Design as Fabric

Where other functions in business struggle with siloes, designers see connections. Where Product sees the ability to deliver features for revenue, designers see the journeys that traverse those features. Where Engineering decomposes monoliths into microservices, designers see holistic systems.

When designers organize around those connections, we start to create a kind of fabric that binds an organization together. We synthesize ideas and render them into artifacts that can clarify intent and build shared understanding. These artifacts can then travel to other discussions, which can in turn reconcile those ideas with the whole experience. Designers become honeybees, moving from team to team, pollinating ideas.

This working model fills a gap that most organizations struggle with: the space between well-defined near-term roadmaps and abstract, long-range business strategies. Design is unique among business functions in that it operates within this space, where the edge of the known horizon starts to peel away from our ability to visualize it.

Positioned in the middle horizon, design becomes capable of rendering a cohesive working model of the future experience the business hopes to deliver. This experience model is an ever-changing thing, constantly moving ahead of the organization, like a probe sent ahead of a spacecraft, sending back information and helping the ship adjust course.

Such a model gives product development teams a tangible north star, a shared sense of direction that enables them to move independently toward a shared goal with a common sense of destination. It allows finance and operations teams to better estimate time and resourcing with reasonable confidence. It provides executives with a clear and compelling vision to present to boards and investors. In short, it visibly aligns the organization on what it is we are trying to do. And that is valuable.

Life is Recognizable in its Expression

Technology isn’t going to stop changing. With AI rising and UI receding, software will continue to shrink, baking itself further and further into our lives. For the working designer, the job is transforming: from designing interfaces to designing surfaces; designing products to designing services; from designing software to designing experiences.

The question is what we, as a discipline, do in response. Design may be a tough thing to define, but it is intrinsically valuable—if we don’t lose sight of that value ourselves. The practice of design will continue to change. Form ever follows function. But the value of design is still design. As Denise Gonzales Crisp would say, “The thing is the thing.”

The rise of technology-enabled services is a transformational moment that is uniquely suited to reclaiming that value. The tremendous opportunity it presents for designers is to end the separation of Design Thinking and production-level doing.

It is to be the thread that binds teams and products, surfaces and services, customers and businesses. It is to be the architects of never-ending change, through the whole practice of design.