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, …