In the late 2000s and early 2010s, consulting firms played a dominant role in shaping how UX was perceived by many organizations and aspiring practitioners.
While these firms helped establish the importance of design, they also introduced certain expectations that, over time, resulted in a misalignment between how design is taught (both in higher education and through consulting) and the real-world application of design in companies. This gap exists between the idealistic and exciting activity-driven view of design, and how it’s actually done in the day-to-day grind of product teams, where iteration, compromise, constraints, and collaboration are key to the process.
The consulting boom
During the 2000s and 2010s, consulting firms were the primary evangelists of UX (think consulting firms like NN Group, and all the ones who sponsored your local UX conferences) . They sold their design process as a transformative force that could drive innovation and business success, exciting businesses with the opportunity to develop the same tools and knowledge that fuelled Apple’s turnaround story with the iPod and iPhone. However, consulting engagements often had an element of performance to them—workshops with hundreds of sticky notes, branded processes that were similar-but-different to the major players (derivatives of Design Thinking or the Double-Diamond), high-fidelity mockups that made executives feel like they were seeing the future, and polished presentations that framed UX as a visionary practice rather than an iterative, deeply embedded, and sometimes repetitive process.
Using workshops and presentations, consulting firms thrived on painting a rosy, idealistic, and theatrical version of design. Thought leaders and organizations proposed gold-standard solutions that, while theoretically sound, were often impractical for small-to-medium sized companies that need move fast, have no budget, and operate under tight constraints.
Given the immense reach the thought leaders had, many UX practitioners yearned to adopt the same version of UX presented to the world by consultants. People who believed in empathy, understanding, and designing the right thing for their users yearned for journey maps, affinity mapping, workshops, and sticky notes. The day-long sessions with colorful sticky notes covering an entire wall, meticulously charting every touchpoint of a customer’s interaction were what we wanted We wanted the theatrics and the fun we heard consultants do in their day-to-day.
These methodologies – journey maps, workshops, whiteboarding, affinity mapping, field studies – they became synonymous with “doing UX”. They were the deliverables, the tangible proof of expertise, often presented in beautifully bound reports and visually stunning diagrams. And they are undeniably valuable tools, when applied thoughtfully, with the right context, and with sufficient time. However, they aren’t the only way to uncover deep insights, and nudge a company in a more human-centered direction.
However, the reality of UX work within a product company often looks quite different. The day-to-day isn’t always filled with elaborate workshops and perfectly crafted journey maps. Instead, it’s often a more pragmatic affair. There are deadlines looming, features to ship, and a constant balancing act between ideal user experiences and the constraints of time, budget, and technical feasibility. For example, a designer might spend a significant portion of their week in stand-up meetings, sprint planning sessions, and design critique meetings, offering feedback on in-progress work. And when they finally get heads-down time, it’s often spent meticulously crafting components and flows in Figma, documenting interactions, and ensuring consistency across the product.
And when there is time for a field study, UX can sometimes be reduced to theatrics, masquerading as research. For example, leadership may be taken on-site for a day to help empathize with users and inform decisions, but without enough meaningful and repeatable data to work from, this can enforce assumptions that aren’t generalizable. While these activities may make people feel energized and excited, they risk reinforcing preconceived notions rather than uncovering genuine insights.
The truth is, while those consultant-led methodologies have their place in establishing strategy, most of the UX work at a product company can be surprisingly straightforward. It might involve a quick usability test with a handful of users recruited internally, spending an hour analyzing user feedback gleaned from support tickets or app store reviews, or even chatting with an AI to get similar assumptions, ideas, and risks that you’d draw out from a 2 hour workshop with 4 people. There often isn’t the luxury or need for week-long Design Sprint workshop involving multiple stakeholders or the time to create a perfectly polished, multi-layered journey map for every single user scenario.
For the in-house UXers and students who got hooked on the theatrics and activities, this led to unrealistic expectations. UX is not always a grand strategic undertaking involving these specific, time-intensive processes. It’s sometimes less exciting. And it’s sometimes just work – rewarding as it is.
The shift toward specialization
The next hurdle in-house UXers and junior designers faced is that as UX became more embedded in companies, the field began to specialize. Interaction design, research, content design, and service design became distinct roles. The massive amount of work to modernize companies and build better products meant that specialization was a natural progression, but it also created a divide between those focused on creating what’ll be used by people (product designers in Figma) and those who will most deeply understand them (the researchers and product managers).
This has resulted in a whole generation of designers—even senior designers—who are skilled in visual and interaction design but have likely spent fewer than a hundred hours talking to and learning from someone who uses their product over the course of their entire careers.
This lack of exposure to real-world problems, behaviours, and sentiments weakens the practice of design itself. Design isn’t the theatrics of output, like a pretty screen or a well-bundled report; it’s about solving real problems, and without direct engagement with people, designers risk going down a path where their primary role is just to work in Figma.
The issue extends to new graduates: they may know the tools, but they have little to no experience conducting interviews or usability tests, and even less understanding of how companies work. They know the theatre, they’ve done a journey map based on a case study they were assigned in class, but they don’t know how to interpret data, or use the most efficient and effective approach to solve a problem — because the temptation to use the same methods presented over the course of the 2010s is strong and attractive. This gap leads to a shallow understanding of people, and how design decisions impact business, technology, and ultimately, the experience itself.
Moving forward
One of the lingering effects of this history is that UX is often treated as flashy output—something to be “delivered”—rather than a continuous, outcome-focused process that involves doing the hard, sometimes bland work of research without a flashy report, iterating on designs during a 1% rollout of feature, and engaging deeply with users to ensure solutions meet real needs. Often going months without workshops, sticky notes, and all the fun workshop activities that we were presented as the catch-all solutions to innovation and success.
To correct these misconceptions, UX teams and educators need to actively reshape how their work is perceived and taught. This means:
- Re-emphasizing user research for designers: At some companies, designers are brought into research secondhand—relying on insights from reports, watching highlight reels from usability studies, or working from summaries provided by researchers or product managers. At others, dedicated researchers focus on more strategic problems, but designers get by without conducting tactical research and testing their assumptions. By making research a core part of a designer’s responsibilities, we help shift the focus from polish to problem-solving. Instead of asking themselves, “How can I make this clearer?” and spending hours upon hours in Figma iterating, designers could be asking, “How can I quickly test this design?” and getting fresh perspectives from real people who use the product.
- Improving data literacy: Designers should be very comfortable interpreting and using quantitative data to inform their decisions. This means understanding how to analyze behavioral analytics and product metrics—not just usability studies or feedback from user interviews. Too often, designers hesitate to engage with data, because it’s not within reach of their go-to toolkit. But by building data literacy, UX teams can make more informed, objective, and defensible decisions that align design efforts with real-world impact.
- Prioritizing efficiency and effectiveness over flash: I’ve seen designers and researchers spend days and sometimes weeks preparing reports after the analysis was already done so they could share something flashy with their colleagues to prove their worth. I’ve seen documents written to justify design decisions to product managers instead of soliciting feedback and new perspectives. Dieter Rams said it — good design doesn’t draw attention to itself. And I believe good work doesn’t need to draw attention to itself either. Designers need to focus on efficiently delivery outcomes for the people who use their products over flashy outputs only available to their peers.
- Understanding how to work with constraints and make trade-offs: The most important skill designers will grow over the course of their careers is judgement. Experienced judgement helps someone detect risks, identify usability issues, make informed decisions on what features or functionality to prioritize, navigate technical limitations, and make trade-offs so design to fit within the scope and timeline. It’s developed over time by launching features and observing people use what you’ve made, and it requires the ability to understand people, data, and business goals. To help kickstart this, schools should teach product management, so designers can learn how to collaborate effectively as part of a team, balancing user needs with business goals and technical feasibility.
The legacy of consulting played a crucial role in bringing UX into the mainstream, but it also left behind a theatrical, output and activity-driven perception of what doing design is like. Today’s professionals must evaluate their deliverables and reorient their work toward what truly matters—understanding users, making informed trade-offs, and delivering practical, effective solutions. Quickly.
This also means redefining what doing a good day’s work as a designer looks like. It’s not always about running a workshop, producing a polished artifact, or following a formalized process. Sometimes, it’s reading through support tickets to uncover patterns, digging into a research report, or getting a fresh perspective from an engineer. These quieter, often invisible tasks are just as critical to good design as the more visible outputs.
By redefining UX, we can set up new designers and those still trying adopt UX into their organizations for success instead of promoting a method of working that’s meant for consulting—one that’s not focused on theatrics, but finding the more resourceful and efficient ways to achieve great outcomes for people.