“There was a whole theme a few years ago about 'everyone's a designer', and I think that did a disservice to the UX industry. I always counter with: everyone can do math, but not everyone's an accountant. Make design participatory, but don't give up the decision-making authority that UXers have.”
NN/G UX Podcast · User Experience · November 2026
Context
Asked what practitioners can do about 'UX theater' (user-centred work done for show), Tanya lists evangelizing, researching a few sprints ahead of developers and asking 'who says?'. She adds that collaboration shouldn't mean giving away design authority.
Transcript
…models, right? Like that's that's that's where it comes into play where you're relating to your different audiences by giving them something that they can relate to without necessarily having them fully understand everything that's involved in UX. So yeah, that's another good way to look at it.
Yeah. Now, okay, I imagine now that there are some people listening who are like, oh no, this is me. This is my team. I didn't realize we were doing this. Do you have any suggestions on what do you think is the best intervention? Is an intervention appropriate? I guess is a better question.
There's a lot of stuff that you can actually do no matter what level you're at. And I've written a whole bunch of articles because that was a question that I kept getting from everybody is: okay, but what can I do? You know, I'm a leader or I'm just a practitioner. And really, we have to, I don't know why it is, but UXers, for some reason, we're a profession that has to evangelize constantly in order to be able to have permission to do our jobs. It's a very weird thing, but it's a very real thing. And I don't know if it's because we're still kind of nascent, you know, that like general accounting practices have been around for decades and decades and decades, but like UX practices kind of evolve, especially when you throw AI into the mix or you throw, you know, the evolution even in my career from hand-coded HTML pages to, you know, modular design systems and reactive, interactive pages and applications. So I think evangelizing is definitely something, you know, constantly bringing people back to the fact that there is a process, we should be following it. This is what we've…
Yeah. I feel like that's even more true now than ever before because you have Claude and various AI tools that people are saying, does UX for you? And every time I see it, it's like, I can't watch because I already know there are so many decisions and assumptions that are being made because we can…
We have to be careful not to replace ourselves, intentionally replace ourselves with AI. You know, if you're going to do research and you're going to go in and collect all this data, why would you give the computer the ability to analyze that? Like, where's your learning going to happen? How are…
Yeah. And I mean, even thinking, even if you do use design thinking, right? Like the phrase empathize is literally the first step. And if there is no outsourcing, empathy. And as much as Claude might be, you know, start to reach the uncanny valley where it almost seems like it's empathizing and…
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