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).
Other interesting findings
Working with Claude, I developed a single "Health Index" score, which is simply the average of all the Likert responses. Across the 763 respondents, the Index is 3.28. This sets a baseline from which you can then compare specific environments.
I vibe-coded a Survey Explorer, and that, along with some dialogue with Claude, illuminated a number of interesting findings about which environments are best or worst for organizational health, which I expand on below:
- Levels from the CEO provides the strongest correlation of health
- There's a UX/Design org "sweet spot" of 30-100 people
- Engineering and Marketing are the worst department for UX/Design to report up through
- Professional services companies are where UX/Design is healthiest
- Senior practitioners feel things are the least healthiest
For those who want to elicit their own insights, you can review all details of the responses within Google Forms, or in Google Sheets. (I'd love to see what you find!)
Levels from the CEO provides the strongest correlation of health
When filtered on "number of levels from the CEO/GM", you see it steadily decline from quite positive (remember, 3.28 is the baseline) to quite negative:
- 1 level: 3.50
- 2 levels: 3.30
- 3 levels: 3.26
- 4 or more levels: 3.14
While expected, it's validating to see it play out in the data. The 'higher' the Design org is, the greater the respect and organizational commitment.
No other single factor (function, industry, etc.) had as strong a correlation.
The UX/Design Org Size "Sweet Spot": 30-100
Let me turn it over to Claude for this analysis on UX/Design org size:
Best Overall Performance:
- 61-100 people (n=71): Highest staffing adequacy (2.75), excellent skills coverage (3.11)
- 31-60 people (n=98): Peak collaboration scores (4.45), strongest career growth (2.63)
Scale Problems at Extremes:
- Very small teams (1-7) (n=194): Worst career growth (2.07-2.15), lowest collaboration for 1-2 person teams (3.44)
- Very large teams (151+) (n=98): Poor staffing (2.09-2.24), worst quality standards (2.06), coordination problems
The data suggests a "Goldilocks zone" where teams are large enough for specialization, resource allocation, and career paths, yet small enough for effective collaboration, clear communication, and agility.
Engineering and Marketing are the worst departments to report up through
As we saw earlier, the healthiest orgs report directly to the CEO or GM. But that's atypical—UX/Design usually reports through a department or function. And a long-standing question for UX/Design is "which department should it report up through?"
The data suggests that the least healthy departments are Marketing and Engineering. With Engineering, pretty much everything is worse across the board. With Marketing (admittedly a smaller sample size of just 25), some things are actually much stronger (sense of purpose; understanding of users), but then there are things are are disastrously worse (career development; tools and resources; operating at their level of expertise).
Surprising to me, Product Management scored below average across the board, though by relatively small amounts (this also likely has something to do with 40% of respondents report up through Product, by far the most in this category.)
Another surprise was that the healthiest department for UX/Design to report through was Digital. Scores were higher than average across the board, and were strongest in overcoming the overall worst performers: shipping quality experiences, providing a career growth path and support in career goals. These Digital departments 'get' UX/Design in a way that other functions just don't.
Professional Services is the healthiest industry for design
About 15 years ago, as design firms were getting acquired or going out of business, there emerged a question across industry: "Are design agencies dead?" And while they are much smaller relative to the size of the entire field, our survey respondents found "Professional Services" (design firm, product development firm, consulting, management consulting) to be the healthiest industry (minimum 10 respondents):
| Rank | Industry | # Resp | Health Index |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Professional services | 32 | 3.572 |
| 2 | Transportation, automotive | 23 | 3.468 |
| 3 | Education technology | 20 | 3.428 |
| 4 | Manufacturing | 18 | 3.416 |
| 5 | Energy and Utilities | 16 | 3.405 |
| 6 | Real Estate | 10 | 3.328 |
| 7 | Enterprise Software and Services | 156 | 3.303 |
| 8 | Financial Services, Insurance Services | 143 | 3.281 |
| 9 | Healthcare and pharmaceuticals | 80 | 3.271 |
| 10 | Retail (including e-commerce) | 69 | 3.259 |
| 11 | Government / public service | 28 | 3.254 |
| 12 | Entertainment and Media | 33 | 3.190 |
| 13 | Consumer Software and Services | 19 | 3.159 |
| 14 | Advertising, Marketing | 13 | 3.102 |
| 15 | Travel and Leisure (air, lodging, etc.) | 15 | 2.859 |
In particular, Professional Services was the only subgroup (across all criteria, not just industry) where there was a positive (greater than 3) response to the statements "Our staffing levels are sufficient to deliver on the work expected of us," and "I have the time and focus to do my work well."
This tracks with research that John Knight conducted that consulting designers have far greater job satisfaction and engagement than those who are in-house. Which makes sense—when you get to work in an environment dedicated to your practice, you'll likely be happier than those who work inside corporations where your practice is one of many, and often marginalized. It does suggest that more needs to be done to highlight consulting as a career path for UX/Design practitioners.
Senior practitioners feel things are the least healthiest
Even though they may be the most sought after role in most organizations (because they can self-manage and step in an start delivering), Senior practitioners feel things to be the least healthy. This suggests that instead of enabling these folks, our companies are taking advantage of them. What the data shows is that as you advance in your career, you find things to be healthier, but that is very likely a kind of survivorship bias. This negativity at the Senior level suggests many folks don't bother to advance, probably leaving UX/Design for other fields.
Conclusion (for now)
At the outset, we identified a paradox—people are largely individually satisfied, but recognize that they are subject to structural conditions that impact their team's health, and their individual ability to grow.
Selfishly, this result affirms my own practice—what UX/Design organizations need aren't better methodologies, greater attention to craft, or other things that are directly within individual's control. What they need is superior organizational effectiveness, a recognition of how the broader context in which they are operating sets them up for success.
I'd love to see what you all make of this, and I look forward to discussion here and elsewhere!
Assess your own organizational health
If you'd like to see how your UX/Design organization stacks up against these results, you can conduct your own internal survey with the tool found in the "UX/Design Org Health Assessment" chapter of Design Org Dimensions, my 'digital book' with my latest org design thinking. You will have to pay, (that chapter in particular took quite a while to develop), but when you do, you'll have access to same tool I use in my consulting.
