Lenny’s newsletter published a tech workers’ survey findings last week and it has a section on their burnout which show that designers’ burnout is on the top in the list. There have been lot of discussions on designers’ burnout in LinkedIn posts, design leaders’ blog posts, and in their own newsletters.
Andy Budd says—”That lack of agency is exhausting. It leaves us feeling like passengers instead of drivers. And it makes it harder to feel proud of the work we do.” Peter Merholz says—”As human-centered, empathetic, compassionate, evidence-based, craft-concerned professionals, UX/Design practitioners often operate within environments that conflict with every one of those values.”
Tom Scott’s LinkedIn post inspired a thoughtful discussion in the comments.
I feel that this is just glorifying our efforts.
An unwelcome positioning of design which can set a negative or even a dangerous precedent for the design practitioners and for the design buyers.
Design is about our spirit first—the pride, the entitlement of feeling the joy of being in our work. Unless we feel this spirit of design—inside us in our boards and questions and thoughts, the self-fulfillment of doing something meaningful and being fully aware of what design is and what design can do—we shall always be looking at the design systems’ dashboard for the directions or for the value.
This is such an anti-design way of working.
I do nor believe that designers can feel burnout—unless they are designing the same sign up form for the same product for six years.
I ran a short survey in another Slack that I am part of and the question was—”If you are feeling burnout in whatever intensity, do you think that you will feel the same intensity of burnout if you get a chance to move to another location—home, office, or both, with the workspace settings and the location of your choice?” Sixteen participants’ results are:
—7 out of 10 are definitely sure that the burnout will be reduced considerably
—4 say that they are not sure
—5 say that it will not make a difference
If we think burnout is because of the pressure—think about B2B sales. If you think burnout is about lack of agency, think of brand positioning and social media marketing—their constraints are unreal sometimes.
I have a feeling that in the last few months, there have been questionable positioning of our work and our sphere of influence—there is a certain negativity that we gains a lot of traction. Sometimes they say that design is hard whereas it is not hard at all, or taste is no role in design whereas taste is the most fundamental unit in building our design sense and product judgment, and now we take pride in the calls for burnout in design.
This is not design. I think we are too lost in finding the outcome and have lost the joy in the journey. There is something wrong in our positioning sense of design.
No other practice or profession gives so much of variety of things to do. Imagine how many varieties of dishes chefs get a chance to make. Or how many varieties of cars an engineer gets a chance to design or assemble. Or, how many types of buildings an architect gets a chance to model or design.
Compare these to the variety of work we get to do—so many screens, hundreds of use cases, variety of interactions, designing the message, the joy of designing service blueprints, the micro views on the dashboards, file upload restrictions, the error messages, and on the top of that—many flavors of different skills and sub-practices in our work—research, interactions, UI, design systems, prototypes, interviewing, workshopping, designing the structure, branding, and what not.
We need to frame designers’ burnout better.
PS: I read this post last year, and revisited it today. Burnout or boreout—and the author cites a research which says that burnout is about weariness, withdrawal, and worry.
