Shownotes Transcript
The quality of the experiences and the product is going down. So what should happen next on an optimistic note? We should fix that and
we are still well positioned to come in and fix the mess. And these companies, okay, they're saving money now. They're firing designers. They're letting business people make design decisions. They feel like they're saving money. They're launching quicker. But then when they're going to lose clients, they're going to lose engagement, usage. They're going to just lose money in the end. They're going to start needing designers to come in and fix that mess. So on an
On an optimistic note, I feel like even now we're not in our best moment in history and we don't feel appreciated and needed as we used to be. I feel that we're gonna see a comeback for design because it's the same thing. We're just putting a lot of broken products out there. It's just a matter of time until we will have to clean up that mess like we have been doing for a long time.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Honest UX Talks. My name is Anfisa, and today I'm joined by my lovely co-host, Ioana. And today we are going to talk about a very juicy topic, the UX leadership during the tech crisis. What does that even mean these days? I
I think we might have already recorded the episode on UX maturity in design organization or product organizations. But I think this time is going to be much more juicy because, you know, we're still in the tech crisis. The jobs are still not so much to be found. To be very honest, the reason we wanted to talk about this topic today is because we
We started noticing that something is changing in the product organizations, especially when it comes to UX maturity. If you start paying attention, you might have noticed that many companies started to sort of not hire actively design leadership. Design leadership roles started to be kind of disappearing in the market. I also see a lot of companies are getting rid of design leadership, to be very brutally honest.
I'm seeing sometimes that companies either opt in to not have design leadership or to merge roles, sometimes with design and product, or sometimes as it was before with design and marketing, wherever, right? You go figure. But the idea is that we notice today that on the market, UX design maturity is starting to look slightly different.
And I think it's a good idea to now look into what's happening in the market, check in and see what can we observe today and what does it mean for UX maturity. So basically, what does UX maturity mean in 2025 and onwards, especially with the AI on the horizon right now and how it's shaping our industry.
But before we get started, I just want to take a moment to talk about responsiveness. If you're in the business of building websites or you're working with clients or working in an agency or doing freelancing, you probably know by now that designing responsive websites can be quite challenging.
And yeah, every web creator wants to deliver the flawless user experience, whether on desktop, tablet, or mobile. But achieving that seamless responsiveness can feel overwhelming. For me, at least, it was always such a hurdle. Manually tweaking layouts and elements for different screen sizes often creates inefficiencies and version control chaos. And that's exactly where Wix Studio steps in, offering different layers of control to make your life easier. So it starts simple and intuitive, but it lets you dive deeper
into this pixel perfect precision whenever you need it. So first you can just do your design and then they automatically scale proportionally across screens. So there's no extra effort and mess. But say you have more complex design scenarios, Wix Studio's responsive packages lets you create intricate relationships between elements. So it allows for more sophisticated behaviors that adapt smoothly across devices. If you're dealing with truly complex sections,
Whether let's say each breakpoint demands a unique layout, Wix Studio's responsive AI becomes your best friend. It automatically handles responsiveness with just a single click and it saves you tons of time. And of course, you still retain full freedom to tweak and perfect the design to exactly to match your vision. But yeah, for me, responsiveness has always been very tough and I'm very happy to see tools taking away the parts that we do not enjoy doing as designers.
Before diving in today's episode with this huge intro, I also want to catch up with you, Ioana, and ask you how have you been in the last few weeks? You have been traveling, so I'm really excited to hear how was your trip to Japan? Hello, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Yes, you're right. I was out to Japan for almost 10 days. It was a very intense experience because Tokyo is, for most parts, overwhelming. For once, it's huge. It's just enormous. It's the biggest city in the world.
I didn't even know that before I went there. But then I felt it and I fact-checked it and it turned out to be true. It felt like the biggest city in the world. It's very different culturally from Europe. And I think Europe and US are closer together. Japan is very different. And you get that, kind of, you feel a bit odd.
the strange one out and then you get to really enjoy the rituals and culture and way of living and working and it's just captivating, fascinating, very beautiful. They're nice people I was totally in love with. The vibe, they're just nice.
And I don't know, in a way, Europeans are friendly as well, US people as well. But like in Japan, you feel this kindness everywhere. Maybe I was in the right places, maybe, I don't know. But it really felt like this very kind and civilized society and organized.
if i wouldn't have felt so much as an intruder in this very almost mystical space i would have moved there but i really felt too different from this world for a designer it's just a fascinating experience i think japan is a design book like you go there and it's like a course it's like a university of design just being on the streets because they put
in so much effort in making design decisions for everyday life from the toilet design to supermarket the goods to processes in the urban movement right dynamics and so they really are designers the japanese society is based on good design in a way that other societies western societies i haven't seen that so visiting japan is just a design master class it was really just
thinking about design thinking and the way they unpacked the problem like at every step of my journey. Things were very thought through in a level of detail that felt mind-boggling and I can also give examples maybe we should talk about it in a future episode like how Japan influenced my design philosophy. It was really interesting, educational, really inspired now. So as cheesy as it sounds, maybe not life-changing but
Definitely, it helped me regain my love for design in a way that I haven't experienced it for a long time. Like we're all in a bad place in the design industry. This also ties into our episode of today. But Japan kind of gave me that enthusiasm and like, oh my God, this feels so good. This is so well designed and thinking about everything that went on in the background. So yeah, that was Japan. What have you been doing while I was out?
Wow, this is so inspiring. First of all, I also dream to go to Japan. If somebody asks me, like, you can never go anywhere else in the world, just pick one, I would also say Japan. I'm so looking forward to go there. And I'm really hoping for Gregory to grow up soon and we can go there.
I don't know. I'm just hoping that one day I'll also go there. But it's so inspiring to hear, especially I knew that you were a little bit down on the design industry. And when last time we talked, you felt like, oh my God, we're all doomed. Something is not working, whatever. And it's refreshing to hear you coming back and feeling more inspired. And maybe Japan could be a little UX therapy per se. It's very cool to hear.
On my side, nothing actually too crazy. Nobody's sick at the moment. That is exciting and I feel energetic and I feel finally on kind of top of my game. So I'm finally able to be productive at work, at community, producing events, planning everything. We had a bunch of guests this month in March at the community, so that's exciting.
We also just started the portfolio challenge where designers submit their portfolios and the whole community evaluates the first impression on the portfolio. And we already know that, you know, most of the hiring managers don't have time to read the portfolio. So you only have about 20, 30 seconds to make a strong impression. So we are actually doing this challenge and quantitatively trying to get this overall impression on the industry. So that's like a challenge I'm doing every half a year. Now it's the submission period and I'm very looking forward to get the insights for the community members and their first impression on the portfolios.
And as per usual, we still have a new co-host who is now joining Portfolio Reviews. So things are moving, things are going well. I'm also thinking, kind of trying to get myself into this new wave of going back with the content. I haven't been posting for a very long time. Honestly, I feel like it's been two years, even though there were occasional posts. But I felt reflexive in the last month or so because of the...
whole craziness that's going on in the world. And that makes me realize that we need to start being more proactive with like sharing our stakes and stance clearly and be very honest and be very like, how can we navigate through all the madness that's going on? That made me sort of wonder if I should go back and start posting and reflect a little bit more. It's like a gross mindset. When you post something, you learn, you think, you reflect,
You shape your position and you grow. And I really want to go back to that habit. But we'll see how much I can stick with this because you never know. Today, we're not sick, but who knows? Gregory goes back to kindergarten every week. So you never know what to expect. Now, let's talk about the actual episode. So UX maturity in design or product organizations in 2025 and onwards.
What does it even mean? Let's maybe start high level from general question, trying to understand what is actually UX maturity? What are we talking about? How has the definition of UX maturity evolved in the past few years and especially now arriving at the point of tech crisis? Well, I have a lot of thoughts about that and they're going to be harsh.
Well, my experience, I'm talking to my design peers and design leaders in the industry and being very active in the public space. I have a lot of chats. I observe a lot of things because I consume a lot of content. So I consider myself pretty up to date with what's going on. So I have not just my biased experience, but also I'm adding content.
external perspectives all the time and one of them was the state of UX in 2025 report from UX Collective that kind of shed light on the same themes. Jacob Nielsen also had a bunch of comments even when he was invited in our podcast if you want to go give it a listen. It's a very interesting episode about what's going on in tech and AI and the future of the design role. But
Most of the leaders and the people who are immersed in the tech space have the same observation. So I speak from a place of personal experience, but also like a group opinion that I'm seeing. Design maturity is going down, unfortunately. And this is caused by a couple of factors. It's not just one. So it's not just because of AI, but it's also because of recession. It's also because the political situation is not doing great. And unfortunately,
It's because we went through a lot of big, difficult pandemics and war, and it was just a hard time. And now I feel that there's a drain and a need to accelerate back, which is also informed by this AI race. So the AI race is fueling this desperate need to be in front of everyone, ahead of the AI race, ahead of your competitors. And because of this rush, maturity is going down.
Because to be mature as an industry, you need time. You need to carve out that time. You need leadership. You need to think through your decisions. You need to do research. And companies are not affording. This is quote unquote affording.
They can't afford this taking the time to make meaningful design investments. There's also, of course, the massive layoffs. So a lot of talented people that were contributing to raising the design maturity in those companies have been let go and
The companies were kind of reorienting in how can we replace this person maybe with I don't know what AI tool or how can a junior designer take up the work of senior designers that we couldn't pay anymore and we had to let them go and now let a junior designer do that work. And so it's also internally in companies maturities going down as an industry.
Everybody's rushing to put out products out there that are half-baked. There's more experimentation, which on one hand is great, but at the same time, it leads to lower quality in the products we're seeing launched. And also the economic rush, this competition that's more driven not by quality, but by demand.
like speed of delivery is making things much more in the hands of business and connected to growth metrics or I don't know what the engagement metrics and everybody's kind of making design decisions that are not in the favor of the user but they're in favor of showing investors their numbers so they can get the next round and so everybody now is going for the wrong reasons it's
rushing towards the wrong metrics and direction and that perpetually lowers the design maturity in companies, in the industry. Stakeholders are more involved than ever. Somehow designers lost trust or they just are being a bit pushed at the end of the process. Like engineers are given more power because of this technological explosion, right? So
We see that as well, like engineers are doing design again. It's like back to the early days of Internet, back to the early days of mobile first. Engineers are making design decisions because they have to be fast when they deliver the AI stuff. And so nobody has time to kind of involve a designer in this process. So now a lot of companies decide.
working in the AI space don't even have designers. Engineers are the designers and that's why we see the rise of the design engineer as a role. We were making a lot of progress as an industry. We got to a place where we could have
frameworks and systems to analyze the maturity in a company, I think those are obsolete at this point, right? So we don't even know how to evaluate if a company is mature or not because the world is different now. It's just we're talking about different elements. Sorry, I said a lot of things and I think we should maybe repeat it.
some of them because I think it's I wish that our listener would go home with a list of what caused the fall of design maturity and how to avoid it moving forward. But yeah, these are some of my thoughts and I'm excited to hear yours. What are your thoughts about the mess that's going on in the design industry? No, all very good points. Honestly, I would love to keep hearing you rumble on this topic.
Let's start from the beginning. What is actually UX maturity and why are we even talking about this? I think that the idea of UX maturity, in my experience, first arrived from an NGO group. And so today I'm very strongly associating it with an NGO group.
UX maturity, I think if you look into this in the book level sort of description, it says UX maturity measures an organization desire and ability to successfully deliver user-centered design. Sounds nerdy, but the question is really how integrated is user-centered design in the organization or company or product practices, right? Previously, an energy group defined UX.
six levels of UX maturity. And I personally was looking into this graph pretty often, honestly, because when I was looking for a job, I would try to analyze and evaluate the company UX maturity based on some questions. And there are a lot of questions you could ask, but things you need to know is that they defined six levels of maturity where the company could go from absent, very typically correlated with like startups or
lower UX maturity spaces where there is no organization, no structure, no processes. It's all kind of very scattered and nobody really cares. From absent to limited when it's uneven, when it's practiced, but like by individuals to then emergent when sometimes functions exist, but it's really occasional. Then structured when it becomes more systematic.
to then integrate it when it's already comprehensive and pervasive. And then to user-driven, which is like kind of unicorn in the world of design, where pretty much the whole company operates based on the user needs and like being lovable products, et cetera, et cetera. Today, if you think about the market,
I would see that the best you can get to is this level three or four, which is like emergent or structured because integrated and user-driven, user-driven, it needs to have design organization. It needs to have design leadership. It needs to get design power. It needs to be not only design mature in terms of like design leadership, but also it needs to be in the minds of everyone in the organization. So engineers, and then for example, product or marketing or sales, everybody should care about user-centered and that sort of thing. The problem is that
Today, what we see on the market is that many companies are actually cutting the design leadership. Design per se is the industry that is not dominant in the product world.
you would see much more engineers. When you think about the product engineers to design ratio, you would always see much more engineers than designers. It used to be like five to one, five to ten, whatever. Like the ratio was from one designer to hundred to sometimes the best case scenario, one designer to five engineers. And now we could see the critical mass is shrinking, especially without the leadership.
the power and the leverage that you could use is shrinking as well. And that means that as the design organization, it's already small and it has less and less resource to be in a way evangelizing the user needs. And when I say design, I don't mean the design process needs. I'm actually talking about user needs or, for example, quality of the product, right? Basic things.
We think it's basic, but for a whole organization, there are always different priorities. In every organization, there are conflicts of priorities. Somebody needs to be more efficient, structured. Somebody needs to be sailing, et cetera. People are chasing different things and numbers. And so for design, I think what we talk about, we usually start from, you know, the user and customer needs as well as quality of the product.
And not always the quality per se is the priority in this kind of ecosystem or landscape that we are living in today, what Ioana was talking about, right? When the priorities are shifting and the dynamics is shifting and now we need to be chasing money and investments and whatever. And if not investment, then the numbers need to make sense.
Right. There is a lot of metrics that companies are going after today. For example, in my company, I know that we are focusing on the revenue per employee. It needs to grow in order for the company to be sustainable. And so like there are metrics that companies are going for. Right. And it's important because we are still living in a capitalistic world and company still wants to go IPO and become public. Or actually, sometimes now I see more companies going back to private. So I don't know.
what's going on in the world. But that's just to establish that we do indeed work or live today in a very capitalistic world with the whole social political situation changing and shifting the energy and dynamics. This also impacts a lot how we work.
And that impacts whether design as an industry and discipline is important, to be honest. And so it is not great. And I sometimes now thinking that those six stages of UX maturity that Norman Nelson group defined might need to be redesigned already, or we need to think about this.
What does it even mean? Especially when you as a design org working in the product environment and suddenly your organization is deciding to do their structuring and maybe getting rid of design leadership. Now you as the designer maybe report to different discipline, either product or marketing or sometimes the worst case scenario sales. And now what does it mean for you? Nobody is now evangelizing the design quality or user-centered approaches. And so...
That leaves us in a very unclear space. We don't know what to expect now, right? When you don't have leadership, you don't know who to go for to talk about things that you want to push forward. Just to close off on this topic on where we stand, and I feel like we're rambling here. There's a lot of emotion in this topic today for us. But honestly, I agreed with you, and I noted a lot when you said that
Good design needs time. It's a basic principle to be able to do good work, do good design, you need time. Also, good design needs good principles, good people, empathy, inclusion, all that stuff, right? And if you've seen what's happening today in the world, you could notice that Trump orders to end federal support on DI programs, diversion and inclusivity programs, and boom, all the tech world collapsed.
companies start like cutting it off easily. Like they were just waiting for the opportunity. Amazon Meta, McDonald's, Disney, Target, they all cut it off the next days after Trump decided to cut off the support of the DI programs. It's a big, big sign for us that we are not in the same place. We are not in a very good place for us to be effective and grow the X maturity. We passed that moment right now in the market. Now, I hate to be so passive and so pessimistic and so negative.
So I'm curious to hear your point of view would be very interesting, especially understanding your background with working with AI. What do you think is coming up for the design industry? How do we move forward with this situation when it's very unclear, unpredictable, the shift on user centricity as well as quality is quite clear? Where does it take us? How does the AI plays a role possibly? Is it in our favor or is it not? What are you thinking? Yeah.
Well, I feel it's still not decided. For some parts, it's definitely not in our favor, but we can still turn the tide in our favor. I think in a way, it will organically have to be solved. So this is similar to what Jacob Nielsen was sharing, that he saw this happen in the tech
industry multiple times right so the internet revolution was also led by engineers and then they were left with all these websites that were unusable unnavigable people didn't understand how to achieve their tasks there was just so much mess horrible experiences everywhere and then it took like
20 years to fix the internet and make it a usable and pleasant place, right? And during those 20 years, design was increasingly more appreciated and seen and needed and absolutely necessary to fix all that mess. And I think we might see something similar now. So we're making poor decisions, we're rushing, we're launching half-baked things, we're running experiments that fail, but then they are just, I don't know, ruining good experiences and good products
We're seeing conversations about Apple postponing their Siri AI because it's kind of not a good experience. And I've seen many products that have altered the experience and the quality of their product by adding some useless AI or just this gimmick that doesn't bring any value, doesn't solve any problem. It's just there to show investors that they have AI. So we've seen it in the industry. The quality of the experiences and the product is going down. So what should happen next on an optimistic note? We should fix that and
And we are well positioned, still well positioned to come in and fix the mess. And these companies, okay, they're saving money now. They're firing designers. They're letting business people make design decisions. They're letting engineers make design decisions. And
they feel like they're saving money. They feel like they're more agile. They're moving faster. They're getting somewhere. They're launching quicker. Right? But then when they're going to lose clients, they're going to lose engagement usage. They're going to just lose money in the end. They're going to start needing designers to come in and fix that mess. So on an
optimistic note, I feel like even now we're not in our best moment in history and we don't feel appreciated and needed as we used to be. I feel that we're gonna see a comeback for design because it's the same thing. We're just putting a lot of broken products out there, broken experiences, frustrating things are all over the place. It's just a matter of time until we will have to clean up that mess and designers will be there to clean the mess up like we
have been doing for a long time, right? Just fixing bad experiences. This is what we do most of the time. We're designing new experiences that aren't horrible. But yeah, most of the times we fix poor experiences. And so there will be a lot of poor experiences to fix. Now, when it comes to AI, sure, that will also kind of impact what's needed from a designer in the future. So companies will not need UI production as much as
They need it, but they will still need critical thinking and the capacity to put together the pieces and understand why is that experience bad. And sure, an AI could have an opinion, but it's probably not a very accurate opinion or they might just
be very good at accessibility and again, UI production and so on. So generating design. But at least in the next 10 years, I don't see that fundamental reliance on AI systems to make design decisions. And yeah, maybe we will co-create with AI at best, which we're already doing, but we will still be needed to
do the thinking, right? So even if we're not doing the production work, we will be doing the thinking. And fixing a mess up is a lot of thinking. It's more thinking than making something new from scratch in a good way, right? I think it's not as bad as we feel right now. I also feel like there might be new opportunities. We've been talking about it in a recent episode. We're seeing new roles emerging. And so there's going to be model designers and
design engineers and design motion architects and so on so we will see a lot of new things like with every tech revolution some roles are getting replaced but also maybe not at the same rate unfortunately but we will see new roles being created and i think we will be able to transition into interesting directions as well on a personal level so it's not all bad
But we're gonna have to pay for the mess we're currently in, right? So the tech industry will pay. And it will pay in money and poor experiences. And it's just a matter of time, I think, until this needs to end.
but probably won't end this year. I feel like the AI race is still very hot out there and everybody's still rushing. But I mean, most of the AI startups will close within a couple of years and we will see some companies that succeed. But most of these open AI API companies will probably not be very sustainable. We'll see, but it's not all bad. At some point, everybody will come back and apologize to designers. Look, we wronged you, right?
We were not nice to you. You deserved more support and more power and more autonomy and more center role in this revolution. And we need you now. And so, yeah, I'm just waiting for the apologies.
What's your thinking about the future? I'm also waiting for reparation from Russia and for the apologies, but I don't know if I'll survive to that moment. Okay, let's not talk about the bad stuff only. I think overall, I agree with you that it does sound bad. It's important that we realize all those signals and what's happening. It's important to acknowledge that. It's important to notice them and not ignore them, swipe them under the rug.
as if nothing is happening because it will hit you. You need to know what's going on in the market. You need to be aware and you need to know how to prepare yourself for the future that wants to come. And so again, when it comes to design maturity of organizations, we're not in the best place. However, it's important
that we need to understand, okay, if the market today is so capitalistic, let's put it this bluntly this way, and it is chasing money, it is chasing better profits, it is chasing certain metrics, how do we as design industry keep pushing for what we used to push for, but in a more relevant for this kind of climate today way, right? So I think overall, if you think about this, UX maturity will need to be redefined. I think especially it will need to take into account the AI and how we co-create together with the AI. What does that
mean for us. I think the, you know, things that are put on paper that we make some sort of frameworks is still yet to be done or defined. And I'm hoping maybe the Nielsen will do this. I don't know. We'll see what's going to come up. Maybe this will be the community exercise that we start talking more and more online. We will see this. But overall, I think as of right now, for us to continue pushing for the quality and user centricity, it's not enough to be just user centric. That was the status quo for a
Up until now, now we need to start thinking a little bit more business, honestly. And I think that for design discipline to survive and to continue being evolving, we need to start thinking more as the business people, entrepreneurs, if you want, even PMs, if you want, because we need to understand the resources that companies have. We need to understand the investments that companies do and how can design be a part of that. Otherwise, just good design, just user centricity, products quality is not going to make a cut.
And so for us, it means that we need to start understanding how can we align design with business outcomes to justify their value. UX will need to prove direct revenue to retention and impact to the companies. And that's where I'm seeing right now we're moving towards. If before, for example, this like sixth level of UX maturity defined by NNG group was saying that, you know, basically you need to be user-centered to be UX mature. I think today, moving forward, I guess,
It's not going to be enough to be just user-centered, and the UX maturity will not be defined by just user-centricity. It will need to be defined on how the lovability, if you will, or whatever is the word, quality, and the relevance of your work that you're producing. How tight are those design decisions to the business revenue in a way?
I don't know if it makes sense, but that's what I'm thinking. I also think that research and strategy will become a very important skills for every designer. It's a core of the UX maturity, if you will, because without understanding user from the research, as well as understanding the strategy and the business product where it goes, it is impossible for you to make a case, to make a pitch.
and to get that investment and to also make it sustainable for the business, right? It's not going to be just like, let's redesign randomly all the products we have. No, it needs to make sense. It needs to align with the business and strategy. It needs to cost sufficient in a way. It doesn't need to go crazy. So it is important for us to almost become the business owners so that we could still pitch the good design decisions.
Maybe thinking a little bit ahead, I also believe that UX maturity could move beyond digital products. I think not only we need to start thinking about other spaces, for example, I don't know, spatial design or multimodal experiences, voices, interfaces, etc. This could also become a part of us becoming a bit more holistic. So the systems thinking that Ioana mentioned earlier, it's part of that, I think. We need to think not only as of today, we have phones, great, but maybe in the future, it's not going to be the biggest thing we're designing for. We need to start thinking bigger outside of the box.
as they say. And in a way that could impact the way we are defining the UX maturity and where it is going. Maybe the next question that I will have for you, Ioana, do you think we will need to start measuring UX maturity in a different way? What other factors do you think will be definitive for the UX maturity? If previously it was customer centricity, what's next? With all those things and factors we just discussed, where do we go? How are we going to measure UX maturity moving forward?
What do you think? It's a very good question. And to be honest, I haven't reflected very deeply at it, but I feel that I have something that's been baking in the back of my mind and it's ready to come out. I feel that what will define the UX maturity is what are
your objectives, your goals? What's your mission? I feel that companies, especially in the political system, we see this and it also translates in the business environment. Nobody cares even about pretending that they're good people, that they won well in the world.
Right. And companies are assholes these days. Like we've seen these internal even Mark going on and saying that he's going to fire low performers. And then 4000 people are now labeled as low performers. And it's just like very bad. We're not nice people.
people anymore and this is because there's a how do I call it I think it's we're being brutally honest about the darkness that's behind these companies and the obsession for power and money and so it's just out there now we don't have to like interpret it or wonder is this driven by money they
tell you yes it's driven by money yes we want power we don't care about people so it's very overtly horrible and so I feel what will be the new level of maturity is does this company have values internally or principles or ethical backbones
Or do they care about metrics only, making more money from ads and just keeping people attached to their phones and in this endless loop of consuming content? And like, is this what this company wants? Or does this company want to actually do good in the world and have AI that doesn't harm people and doesn't manipulate people and is just a good experience of technology? Like, I feel that what we felt was implicit before, like five years ago, it was implicit.
What is design? It's just wanting to do good in people's lives. I want to be a designer because I want to improve a person's life, right? That's what we were doing. Tech was kind of, for many parts, it seems faking it, but at least on a surface level, we all wanted
to do good in the world. And now it's very much, everything goes against that. Like politically, economically, tech, everybody doesn't care about the good of and well-being of people. They just care about more money, more power. And so getting back to the point, ending this,
Maturity will come from how much ethics, how much value you actually put into your company in delivering experiences that are not just about money. So I'm not naive. I understand that capitalism is about making money, being profitable, making a company that's successful, that doesn't go bankrupt,
one year because it's just want to be ethical this is all we do here we're ethical right we want to make products that are profitable but we can't have one without the other right so we're destroying the planet if we don't care about other things other than money this is what maturity will be like just having a nice decent leadership and
A nice, decent set of objectives and the things you're chasing or backbone framework of, OK, we want money, but what are the things that we're not open to doing, the harmful things that we just refuse to do in chasing this money?
And then it's also how much they invest in design in general. So if you see a company that's hiring their first designer because they've been led by engineers, that's going to be a long time before it's a mature company. So what have they been doing in the past couple of years? I think that maturity will also be tied with how they approach this AI revolution. So the companies that involved designers, right, they build AI design teams, they build design AI leadership roles, right?
So at least they were considering, okay, we want to do this. We have to do it. Everybody talks about it. We have to have it. But they're bringing in someone to lead that or they're bringing in, they're making roles to kind of take care of that. That's a good experience. So these are indicators. For how long have they been thinking about these problems and how honest are they?
Were they thinking like, do we have AI roles just so we can say we have AI? Or do we have AI roles because we genuinely care that this experience ends up in a good place? And so, yeah, it's going to be like how we behaved during this couple of years is going to be a metric in how we measure maturity. Like, what have you been doing here really? Can you imagine?
Show me what you've been doing. And then if it's a bag full of darkness, then that's not good. Yeah. So I think companies will be judged. So my last answer was everybody owes designers an apology. Now it's like tech will pay. And I think I'm right. Yeah. So what do you think? That was a lot. And it was great. Honestly, I felt sad and almost like rebel while you were talking. Yeah.
So thank you for saying all of that. At some point I wanted to shed a tear and then, yeah. I don't even know what to say at this point. I agree with you. Honestly, I truly, truly agree with you. I think at the end of the day, we are in a very weird place today in the world. And it's not only tech world. It's not only companies we work with today. It's just...
how we live today and it touches society mostly. It's not just tech world or whatever. It's really how we shape the society and how we move forward. What is the paradigm today? It is right now shaking and we are not even sure what's going to happen in 10 years from now. I'm every day thinking like,
Are we all going to die? Are we all doomed now? And it's not a question of will my job survive? Honestly, it's the same questions that apply to society today in different parts of the world, as well as these are also microclimate questions applying to a specific company or companies. And I agree with you that there are multiple levels here. One is the level of really pushing for companies to have any ethical norms, like ethical
Choosing the companies as the users, as the consumers, as people who are paying money, choosing the companies with ethical norms and choices. Those companies that don't cut DI, for example, as the budget, right? Companies with norms and values and principles, supporting those companies because at the end of the day, it's still a war. It's a war and we are choosing the society we want to shape around us. Money is just a way to vote.
I really like that you mentioned that point. And I think that on us locally, like specifically to the company you're working at today or applying to today, for us, it's really also about shaping those principles and always pushing for, again, the good things that you just mentioned. I don't want to even repeat this because it is on so many different levels. The choices, the quality, the collaboration, the awareness, the accessibility.
All the things that we usually care about, the empathy, whatever, like all the things we care about, we need to keep pushing for them in our local environments, in whatever company you're working at, in whatever organization, no matter how big it is. We just need to try to be impactful and talk about it and don't sit back and be on the backseat and see where it's driving. No, you really need to start taking the charge and trying to change it. Be opinionated in a way. Exactly.
You need to speak up. I could only say that I can see this in two multiple levels, right? One level is us as consumers, we need to select the companies that we believe have principles because that's the way for us to support those companies moving forward. But also us as designers in our local companies, we also have to try to be as vocal as possible. It's not a time anymore to just sit back and hope that companies will do good. They're not. Right.
It's like Ioana's solution is just not going to happen. So we need to be vocal. We need to be opinionated. We need to speak about this. If we see things are not working out and if things are not going well and not aligned with your values, then we sometimes need to think what to do next. Like Ioana, for example, Ioana just started her own agency. It's one way to go about it, right?
Take charge of your career. Use your skills for the good. I will probably stop at this note. I think there was a lot of things said in this episode. I don't know if it was juicy enough for anybody who's listening. For me, it was very juicy. And I hope you guys learned something, thought about something. And yeah, if you found it useful or helpful.
Please rate us on any podcast platform of your choice. We look forward to hear from you if you have any questions or topics you think we should be discussing. As you could notice, we are getting more emotional but more brutally honest in those episodes. If you think we need to speak about something else, please let us know. We're always looking for new episode topics. And other than that, go ahead and check out that episode that Ioana mentioned, The Future of AI in Design. So go ahead and check it out. I think it was indeed a brilliant episode. Thank you again for listening to us today. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.
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