UX, Stop Believing The Gaslighters
UX practitioners are being gaslit by people inside and outside of UX. It’s time to recognize it, stop believing and internalizing it, stand up to it, and say something. Stop pressing like on it and sharing it to others.
Before we get to the gaslighting, can we agree that many CX and UX practitioners are in a bad place with their jobs, work, process, teams, and outcomes? UX is often disempowered, circumvented, overruled, excluded, and blocked. If you’re not sure, check your UX teammate or, if you work in UX, check yourself…
- Is UX allowed, if not encouraged, to do strategic work? UX Research should inform and influence strategies, priorities, and decisions at every level of our team and even our company.
- Who plans UX’s time and priorities? It should be UX, but it rarely is. We can’t get the time we need to do decent, let alone great, work. Others, including people with no experience doing our work, tell us what to do, how to do it, and how long it should take.
- Did we give UX access to the users or customers they need to research? Or did they get no access? Did we tell them this is someone else’s job? Sales, Product, Marketing, and Engineers can talk to target audiences, but UX can’t?
- Do we wait for UX’s work? Or are strategies, priorities, and decisions made even when we lack evidence, data, and knowledge? Does Engineering wait for designs, or do they start building whatever they think will be “good enough”?
- Are we “democratizing” other roles, or only UX? Other domains are specialized and build castle walls to ensure nobody else does their work or makes decisions in their domain. Yet we want UX work done by anybody and everybody, regardless of talent, skill, rigor, quality, or outcomes.
- Can a UX professional make a UX decision? Or are they overruled or excluded from that decision?
- If we’re using a trio, is UX part of it and truly empowered? A trio or triad comprised of one person each from Product, UX, and Engineering is supposed to empower at least those three people to create strategies and decisions together. Is it happening or is UX’s trio presence mostly theater?
- Is UX treated as the many specialties that it is? You interviewed people for weeks or months, gave them homework, and put them through rounds of scrutiny to make sure they had great skill. Is UX work then treated like a few tasks that are easy for anybody to do? Do we treat UX as if it’s not really a specialty or one person’s job? Do we let UX practitioners do the job that was in their job description?
- Are people held accountable for poor user and customer experiences? If nobody is held accountable, then we can do anything without consequences to us. Customers and the company will see consequences, but the workers and teams causing these problems will not. Without accountability, it’s easy get any or all of the above wrong, and nobody will care. Nothing will change, even after we bring it up in a retro or tell your Change Management Consultant about the problems.
Ask yourself: which role on my team or at my company has experiences like these?
Product? Engineers? Marketing? Data Scientists? Business Analysts? You might find that the answer is: nobody other than CX and UX has these experiences, or is this disempowered.
Since we don’t see this happening to others that much or at all, it’s easy for people without empathy, people who haven’t put the pieces together, people believing the gaslighting, and toxic people to point fingers at UX for their own problems.
UX is diluted, minimized, and disempowered. But we’re gaslit into believing it’s our fault, which adds to our disempowerment.
- “Good collaboration is when everybody works on research or design!”
- “Be a team player!”
- “Democratizing your work shows that you are pragmatic!”
- “You’re slow. Not Lean or Agile.”
- “Your job will go so much better when the Agile team is fluent in UX and does decent Design work.”
- “We value research so much that you need to teach what you do to everybody!”
- “Say yes more! Say it always, like in improv. Yes to everything!”
- “There is no real UX process. UX is just a few skills or tasks that just need to get done.”
- “You didn’t deliver value. You didn’t help the business strategize or make decisions.”
- “You want to do the wrong type of research. Just validate this with a survey.”
- “We don’t need to know the truth or the absolute truth. We just need to ask users what they want.”
- “Research is unnecessary because we know our users so well, and we know what they need and want.”
- “You aren’t speaking the business’ language. You need to learn business.”
- Or how about a book about product and process that never mentions UX in the entire book, as if UX doesn’t exist. The book mentions research and design, and blurs the lines of who does that work. If the book never mentions a UX team, it’s easy to imagine that this “research” and “design” work is done by some other role. When we say something about books like this one, we are treated as heretics who chose the wrong god.
We tell each other this harmful crap. We internalized it and made it real.
People write shitty articles telling you how you did the wrong research, weren’t strategic enough, and failed to deliver real business value… as if you were empowered and encouraged to do this at your job, but you failed. As if your job treats you like a valued, equal, and strategic partner with all the resources we needed to do high-value work, but nope, we didn’t bother doing high-value work.
We press like, share those articles, and tell ourselves and each other that we had so many opportunities to influence business strategies, priorities, and decisions, and — it’s not that we’re blocked or disempowered — we didn’t take all those opportunities we had.
We know now that saying yes to questionable methods, trainers, and models didn’t improve our jobs, give us more autonomy, or sell the value of Design.
We know now that what we were sold on doing hasn’t ended up right for anybody. Our jobs suck, teamwork sucks, power struggles at work suck, products and services suck, customer experiences suck, Customer Support tries to clean up our messes, we ignore complaints and problems, and we put important things in the backlog or icebox for some other month or year.
We pretend this process and approach work, but we’re barely fooling ourselves. And customers know we suck.
UX has little or no power to do the job description they were hired to do. But they’re gaslit and told it’s their fault.
The implication is that if UX had just done something differently, everything would be fine! They caused their own problem and didn’t fix their own problem.
It’s also amazing how we sometimes don’t hear these things until our jobs are ending. Where were our Managers or teammates to tell us, while we were still employed, that we didn’t deliver enough value, and here’s how to change your work so that you are delivering more value? Why didn’t our Manager notice we were doing so much wrong, empower us to do better, and help us deliver that amazing value everybody now complains we didn’t deliver?
It’s gaslighting, it’s abusive, and it’s harmful. And most importantly, it’s not true.
It’s exponentially worse when we hear this from someone who should be “our own,” one of us.
I could name names but I don’t have to. No matter who says this, it’s time to stop believing the gaslighting.
- UXers who told you you didn’t deliver enough value without understanding how you were blocked, belittled, and blamed.
- UXers who told you you did the “wrong research” without having empathy for how you tried to do the right research, but were told you were too slow, not Agile, or that was a Product Manager’s job.
- UXers who sold your company on UX’s disempowerment, offering to train Engineers to design better or Product Managers to do better research.
- UXers who told you you could teach yourself UX, or fake it until you make it, which sends dangerous “UX is easy for anybody to quickly learn and do” signals to everybody else at our company.
- UXers who sold you on webinars, memberships, coaching, and other information that made it sound like your layoffs were your fault. If only you had used their methods! If only you had followed their easy guide to being layoff-proof or forever employable.
- UXers who brought in books, trainers, and workshops around methods that want UX to be as small and fast as possible. Quality isn’t important. We’ll all pretend everything is good enough, and we’ll fix it later.
I no longer see these people as “one of us.”
They might have some UX work in their LinkedIn. Some of them have done real UX work recently. Some haven’t done UX work since 2012 or 1999. But if they are gaslighting you or me, they’re not one of us. If they are selling us out, they are not one of us.
They are not someone I want to listen to. I don’t care how famous you (or they) think they are.
You have permission to stop following them on social media. Don’t press like. Don’t share. Don’t comment. Let them sink to the bottom of the algorithm ocean. If you disagree, saying nothing is the most powerful thing you can do.
If this is happening in your job, saying nothing adds to the problem. We must speak up and push back. Use critical thinking. Ask questions.
Recognize the gaslighting, and take its power away.
Too many UX practitioners are right now thinking that they caused their own layoff. Or they cause their own poor work situation. If they can’t do the job as it was described in the job description, it must be their fault.
It’s just not true. Don’t treat these lies as true. Don’t internalize them. Don’t gaslight others. And please stop sharing this crap on social media. Stop hiring people with these messages to train your teammates.
When others disempower UX, especially if they are claiming there is a trio, say something. Speak up. Push back.
Remember that you didn’t cause these problems. But we sometimes make these problems worse when we internalize the lies and start repeating or believing them.
We’re often the victims of the problems, and our struggles are the symptoms, not the causes.
Connect with us or learn more:
- CustomerCentricity.com — our website
- youtube.com/@cx-cc — YouTube channel
- patreon.com/cxcc — online community and free mailing list
- Articles on Medium or LinkedIn
- cxcc.to/ckys — “Customers Know You Suck,” my recent book on improving customer adoption, satisfaction, and retention
