This past summer, I asked folks to fill out a survey on their UX/Design organization's health (you can review the survey here.) 763 people responded, painting an appropriately broad picture of the state of our profession. Before getting into the details, here are some top takeaways.
Top Line: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
The heart of the survey were a series of statements with Likert responses. Here's the legend for how they're visualized:
You can review all the Likert responses on a separate page. Below I highlight those items that were significant departures (at least a standard deviation) from the mean for the responses, first positive, and then negative.
The Good — Feeling like I can do good work
Respondents were most positive about their individual ability to do good work.
The Bad — Career development support
The survey posed three questions about career and professional development, two of which had the lowest answers across the board
Simply put: companies are not investing in their employees' development.
The Ugly — Shipping good work
The other area of poor performance addressed the quality of work that teams shipped, and staffing and focus to do good work.
While this might appear to conflict with "The Good", my read is that, for the things people have control over, they feel pretty good. For things that are out of their control, which are systemic or organizational, they do not.
My guess is that if we surveyed people outside of UX/Design, we'd get similar responses to questions about staffing and time and focus. This is likely endemic to teams building software (and perhaps teams operating in business).
