Looking at the current hiring trend in the UX market, it seems as if there is an increased demand for UX services. This seems to be true with ISVs and consultancies alike. What could be some of the reasons for such a trend?
Fact: It takes fewer UX resources than developers on any given project.
My Guess: Vendors are selling UX services that cost less as compared to development. A UX ‘job’ can be used to improve the design of existing apps to get productivity gains.
Fact: Due to the recession, customers have smaller IT budgets and have had to postpone large development projects.
My Guess: Vendors are trying to pitch UX projects as the best use of the available funds.
Vendors are selling design as a high-impact, low budget service to customers.
My Big Question: What will happen when the market recovers and customers get budget approvals for their larger postponed projects?
Probable Scenarios:
- The customers who used UX services, agree to UX resources being added to their large projects, having seen the value in terms of increased productivity, better product adoption, lower training costs and all that good stuff we like to talk about.
- The customers who did not use UX services continue as planned earlier, with a development focus, considering design to be an add-on.
- Vendors don’t show such prospective customers case studies of how UX helped other customers as this might mean, especially in the SMB/SME market that they will still go for UX v/s development projects? More bang for the buck is a good thing in any market, right?
- The UX success stories just get discarded or presented as add-on/marginal impact for fear of losing the bigger budget projects. This reduces the demand for the (now) newly hired UX resources.
- Will this mean that UX (through Sales/Marketing teams) will have finally shown quantifiable ROI in a bad economy (willingly) leading to its own marginalization in a good economy?
- I also wonder if this will this lead to the retrenched (and enterprising) designers spawning independent consultancies trying to tap the new opportunity!
These are my thoughts arising from this podcast which is a discussion b/w Don Norman and Peter Merholz where Peter is against ROI for UX, but Don is adamant that unless designers show quantifiable value, businessmen (CXOs) will not listen to them, or consider their work as ‘real’ work.
Isn’t this the UX community’s biggest complaint?
