May 8, 2025

Fallen off the face of Design Earth

Hello friend,

When I started as a user interface writer at Wolfram Research in 2012, I was coming from a small startup/agency shop where the designer used Adobe Illustrator, the developer had a desk that resembled a fighter jet cockpit, and I mostly used TextEdit and Sharpies. We played a lot of Mario Kart, had a lot of parties, and made damn good software, most of it for the Wild West of iPhone and Android apps in that era. If I had to make my own wireframes, I'd find some freebie app (Mockingbird, was that a thing?) or draw boxes and arrows on the whiteboard.

With that startup having been my first employer in UX, my second, Wolfram, was a bit of culture shock. Their UX designers, nearly all of whom I shall always be fond of, showed up to work by 9am (what?!), worked 8+ hours every day (what?!?), ate lunch at their desk (nooooo), and were very into a prototyping tool called Axure.

Oh, you haven't heard of Axure? It's okay, none of my interaction design students at SVA had heard of it, either. Nor have most of the people who take my online courses and workshops. That Axure — which seems to still exist?? — will have effectively fallen off the face of Design Earth by 2025 would be surprising to Wolfram's designers in 2012, who spent nearly all of their 8+ hours a day using Axure to design or present their work.

I'm sure it's possible, maybe even likely, that if I had dug in and learned Axure as deeply as the designers that I might have been a more effective collaborator. But I also had a sense that not knowing the tool might be the thing, because the dozen (less? more? the memories fade) UX designers I was supporting as the sole UX writer initially really would have preferred that I pop open the .rp file and fill in the words for them. That would have done us both a disservice, so I chose a different way to work.

I took a consultative approach, keeping tabs on everyone's projects, and checking in anywhere from twice-a-day to every few weeks, depending on how fast their projects were moving.

What precisely does this button do? If that's what it does, does this seem like the right word? No, I don't think so either. What might it say instead? Hey, that sounds great. Are you comfortable going through and asking yourself that for the rest of these? Awesome. Hit me up if you get stuck.

When I share with today’s content designers that I once supported a dozen-ish UX designers and it was absolutely fine, some of them are shocked, or even angry. “GIVE ME ONE CONTENT DESIGNER FOR EVERY UX DESIGNER OR GIVE ME DEATH!” It was fine, though, because I wasn't filling in words; I was mentoring.

I sometimes ask frustrated content designers who, exactly, is telling them to sit down, shut up, and fill in the words. They often can't tell me. We were lucky to have great leadership over the Wolfram UX team that mostly protected us from the otherwise horrid executive layer, and those UX leaders had input on my approach from time to time. But I never thought to ask permission to work the way that I did because I was doing my job. If they wanted someone who did it differently they should have hired them instead, as far as I was concerned. It's really not any more complicated than that.

Anyway, I'm reflecting on Axure today because a big software event seems to be happening. I'm not following but I'm happy for everyone. That stuff is fun. I love software. I love design. I love hanging with people at conferences.

I hope the people in attendance know that the human connections they're making are so much more important than the software that the conference is about. The software is really sophisticated and popular, yes. It's also a mere blip in the design timeline, and will soon be lost to history, perhaps even in our lifetimes. No one is advertising Axure courses anymore (nor Invision, nor many other dead and gone tools). There will always be some new, trendy, and hopefully better way to render intent. Here, I can already predict all of the plot points:

• The big popular design tool becomes bloated with features and dependencies.
• The big popular tool becomes costlier and costlier in order to satisfy shareholders and employ people to support all of the many features and dependencies.
• A promising startup’s young design team decides to use a different, simpler, less-costly tool.
• The promising startup is a hit. They become a juggernaut; they're moving so fast that product teams couldn't possibly slow down and consider new tooling.
• The promising startup finds cash and starts HIRING, baby!
• Designers who want to work for this cash-flush juggernaut “must be comfortable with” the new tool. The flaws and merits of this new tool do not matter, because it's what ~they~ use.
• Bootcamps and courses pop up by the dozen to teach this new tool that everyone simply MUST learn in order to be competitive in today's marketplace.
• The old tool starts to prioritize massive enterprise customers, relying on the steady revenue of companies that move so slowly they also couldn't contemplate changing tooling, not any time soon, anyway. Things get dark and weird and as they prioritize corporate surveillance and the needs of managers over designers.
• The new tool is catching on so much that the company that makes it becomes, itself, a hot place to work. They start a conference. They become the establishment. It all repeats.

Er, more or less. I really don't know anything about Figma — is that what Config is, Figma? I am assuming. I have no specific opinions about it because it has never been interesting to me, because I can see what kind of thing it is, and the kind of thing it is doesn't help me think, and therefore does not help me write or design. Perhaps I'm being defensive. 🤷🏻‍♂️ But I don't find most software hard to learn unless it is quite bad. I know how to do many things in many apps you've never heard of, but I don't know much about Figma because...I've never needed to, I guess? A bajillion people know how to use it, so if Figma-ing needed to happen, there's always been someone to do it.

Mastering Axure in 2012 would not have helped me to co-lead a complete overhaul of the behemoth Wolfram website's information architecture and navigation. Mastering Axure would not have helped me instantiate a content strategy practice, nor would it have helped me write the job description for our second-ever content strategist, nor successfully lobby to hire one. Mastering Axure would not have helped me introduce design studios and other workshop-based approaches to collaborative design into the practices of many of our designers. I could go on.

I never did learn Axure, but I've learned a great many design methods since — thinky things, not techy things — and a great many of them can be facilitated with sticky notes. As I've said before, Figma-ing is not a design activity. Knowing how to use a particular software tool well can make you more competitive for jobs where they make regular use of that tool, at least over people with less experience. But for how long? And to what end?

You only get so many hours in the day, and only so many things you’ll be able to learn and get really good at, even if you eat lunch at your desk. Be sure not to confuse becoming a better software user with becoming a better designer.

Until next time,
Scott

P.S. I know, I know, nothing forever and then two emails in one week?! The character limit on LinkedIn is too short and the tone of these don’t really fit the blog, so here we are. Anyway, I posted a new video to YouTube that you might like, or perhaps rather might like to share with someone you know who still doesn’t quite “get” content strategy.