Roundup: The design year in review (2022)
Issue 5: The year in review from designers across the web.
It’s December, and designers are rounding out the year by working through their reflections on 2022, crunching data, and making predictions about the future.
2022 Design Tools Survey
The folks over at UX Tools have released their annual 2022 Design Tools Survey Results (you should absolutely subscribe to their newsletter). These surveys have been run for a number of years now, and have a large enough response base that I find them an invaluable resource when trying to advocate for tools during budget conversations, or discover up-and-coming tools to try out. They’re only part of the picture, but a good chart showing the meteoric rise of Figma and the precipitous decline of Sketch can be a compelling force for change within an organization.
It’s still actually quite shocking for me to see Sketch and Adobe XD at the same level (Adobe XD edges Sketch out very slightly in other charts), as well as a frankly inexplicable slow but steady rise of Adobe Illustrator for UI design since 2019.
I can’t explain that.
Sketch is still hands-down an absolutely excellent tool for UI design, it’s just clear from the data that it’s not the tool people need.
Zooming out a little, the lessons I take from this Sketch/Figma time line are:
You should never assume product-market fit is a constant state.
Once you’ve ‘achieved’ it, you need to keep evaluating. The market constantly moves and changes, as do the needs of your users. Sometimes, this happens fast.Never under-estimate your competition.
The leadership team over at Sketch clearly dug-in to the narrative that Native Mac apps were superior to web apps and used this as their primary differentiator. It’s a narrative they’re still sticking to this as of September this year. When Figma proved that, in the grand scheme of things, this didn’t actually matter to getting the outputs and outcomes you needed, Sketch were and are so entrenched into a particular technical decision that pivoting would be far too costly, and undermine their narrative. Lack of cross-platform editing quickly became a weakness in the eyes of many, who wanted to collaborate with their colleagues across platforms and disciplines more effectively, not just via comments or handoff.
Figma need to keep on their toes and ensure this massive success doesn’t lead them to similar blind-spots over the next few years.
Another interesting data point is the question around Research Repository tools.
We use Dovetail at Onfido (I think it’s great), but it’s really interesting to see that it’s the only purpose-built research repository in the top five tools people use. Purpose-built tools are great in times when budgets are plentiful and teams are growing at all costs, but when the purse-strings are being tightened, people look towards apps that can serve more than one purpose, or apps the company is already paying for. Google Workspace and Atlassian tools are embedded in so many companies already, that using these is a no-brainer. Notion is reasonably cheap, and kind of good at a lot of things, and a lot of designers just love to use it.
Research tools possibly need to differentiate themselves with more discipline-specific features, and enough of them to become essential tools compared to other swiss-army-knife tools.
A vibe shift is coming
Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga from UX Collective have put together a fantastic forward-looking editorial piece on The State of UX in 2023.
They’re fantastic writers, and it’s a beautiful piece of editorial design as well. It touches on the effects of the current economic landscape on design careers, the rise of AI, algorithms changing influencer culture, design tooling, burnout and more.
A few parts stood out:
Thought leadership has been a divisive topic in design: while some designers find in it a way to share knowledge and build reputation, others think influencers are abandoning the craft in pursuit of fame.
As someone who’s started writing a lot more recently (and has started a newsletter along with 3 million other designers in the last few months), this resonates. There are absolutely designers on Twitter (who I won’t name) who I’ve unfollowed/muted who have huge reach, but mostly just lean into posting design memes or constant self-promotion.
Speaking personally, there are few things I want less than “fame”. It’s not what I’m chasing, and I suspect the value I’d get from fame would be a double-edged sword. I see newsletters with around 10k-20k subscribers, and publications on Medium like UX Collective with 500k+ followers. There’s a sweet spot I’m aiming for that’s well below either of those numbers, but that should allow me to generate enough income to make the effort sustainable, and to use that small platform to highlight the amazing work and insight of others as well.
AI is getting closer and closer to doing the work we do every day—although designers are still divided between embracing it or trying to keep it at bay.
AI as it relates to design is a topic I’m keeping a close eye on, and will be exploring in more depth in future editions of Clip Content. Broadly my thoughts on AI in creative fields could be summed up as “exciting and wildly problematic”.
As a designer, I fluctuate between being excited by shiny things, and seeing problems that still need to be solved. The nature of authorship, credit, copyright, censorship, and ethical training data are all nuanced conversations that need to be had, but are currently too divisive and with many polarized opinions by people who are rightfully scared for their jobs, and people who don’t give a f#*k about ethics.
Things here are moving fast. We need to take a step back, and listen to each other more and come up with solutions to the very real problems that exist right now.
Elsewhere
Leadership Conversation Prompts
The team over at Ourspace have come up with a selection of interesting prompts to help leaders within a product organization discuss topics that are important, but rarely urgent. It’s beautifully designed also, which is a nice bonus.