Designers recently have had the short end of the stick in the product world. But why?
Perceived impact is everything.
A lot of the work that designers do has started to feel like a commodity, not because it doesn’t churn out results, but because the outcomes are tough to track.
Ultimately, design outputs are ephemeral. They get lost after the thought-work and discussions drive a product to success.
One solution to “seeing impact” is designers now taking up the coding front, doing the building themselves. Cursor’s Visual Editor is a testament to the idea.
It’s the same sort of concept as unicorn engineers being part-time designers, but in the sense of “what if that could be flipped upside down”?
This turns the designer’s work into long-lived, or even permanent outputs that can be useful to the user themselves, thus moving the designer closer to the core value: closer to the user.
Of course, we cannot forget that Glare is another way for designers to move closer to perceived impact, probably more so than a piece of code. I’m honestly wondering if this “design to code” mindset is actually missing the big picture: a temporary filler that will end up not really doing anything other than reducing the overall quality of their product.
Curious, where should designers be moving towards? Are we really headed towards designers pushing up code themselves, or should they be putting their time into something else?