What Happens When Interaction Design Becomes a Commodity?

Over the past two decades, software development has evolved into a formalized, industrialized practice. Organizations have learned how to form large teams that churn out large amounts of software. While quality varies widely, the result is a structured development pipeline: Requirements go in one side and shipping code comes out the other side.

It is hardly a well-oiled machine, but it is often sufficient, and the players know their parts. Business needs are loaded into a ticketing system, an engineer selects a ticket and does their work, and their small piece is integrated into a larger whole. It is a modern-day Henry Ford assembly line, albeit with significantly greater complexity and more room for error.

Design has changed to support this operationalized model, and design tools have emerged that dramatically speed up (although don’t necessarily improve) the design-as-production workflow. Photoshop introduced Smart Objects as rudimentary components. Sketch formalized and extended the concept of reusable elements, and Figma’s components, instances, variables, libraries, tokens, and auto layouts have made it extremely easy for someone to quickly assemble a user interface. This means that design can contribute to the launch process easily and without slowing anything down. It also means that when a design system has been established, it takes little creative talent to use it. That is intentional: The goal of the system is to ensure consistency and adherence to rules, and a “good” set of components serves to limit exploration that deviates from that norm.

This operationalization comes at a cost.

Designers Are Forgetting How to Think of Systems

Module-based work naturally and purposefully shifts thinking from a sense of the whole to a sense of a piece. In a large software production effort, the goal of a working team (scrum or otherwise) is to ship end-to-end features. A best practice in Agile is that a given story should be completable in a two-week sprint, and a discrete task should take no more than a day. This means that a feature has to be small in order to be completed on time. There is a hope that all of these small features add up to a larger strategy, but the reality is often invisible to members of the team.

Design supports the development of these tiny features, but any one designer then struggles to know the whole. Systems such as pace layers have emerged as ways of saying, “You can’t control this system, so don’t even try”. Clark, J. Ship faster by building design systems slower. Big Medium, Oct. 23, 2023. As a result, only a few people in a giant company or project may ever actually know the inner workings of the machine.

Creative Talent Is Eroding

Arranging modules on a Figma canvas is a highly constrained creative effort. It’s a wonderful way for a junior designer to learn how to design. A strict sense of right, wrong, and componentry adds so many constraints that expression is almost nonexistent, which is very freeing for someone who is still struggling to establish the basics of craft. Many print designers have learned a similar constrained creative approach when they study typography, through layout exercises where they can use only a single font, font face, and type size.

In school, these are exercises for learning the basics of design. They aren’t intended to be ends in themselves, and they aren’t supposed to dictate the way a profession should function. If talent starts and ends at moving Legos around, interaction design has become a commodity profession, and designers deserve to be paid accordingly.

We’ve Seen This Happen Before

The shift of interaction design from a craft-based activity, through an exercise in liberal arts and culture forming, and into an industrialized and impersonal machine is a disciplinary change with clear precedent from its cousins—graphic and industrial design. Graphic design transformed into commercial arts and then into the templated business of annual reports and letterhead. Industrial design shifted from a largely bespoke activity to streamlined manufacturing and assembly processes. It’s generally accepted that these practices are now commodity services and are supported by low-cost tools that don’t require talent (Canva for visual design, off-the-shelf OEM objects for new physical product design), as well as extraordinarily inexpensive labor to do the work itself, via tools like Fiverr, a freelance service marketplace, which currently lists 19,441 graphic design providers who offer services for $5 and do very competent work.

These historic changes give us a preview to some real problems that interaction designers will face in the immediate future. The most obvious one is compensation. While graphic design jobs continue to exist, the median salary of a graphic designer has stagnated at $49,000, and the median industrial design salary is $64,000. Most would agree that those are inappropriately low, particularly when compared to the median UX designer salary of $90,000Coroflot. Design salary guide.

Of course, there are still some extremely well-paying graphic design jobs and industrial design jobs. There are just fewer of them. There also seems to be a split between a small number of jobs in which designers do creative work and get paid a lot, and a larger number of jobs in which designers do operational or production work and get paid less. We’re about to see the same split in interaction design, where user experience professionals will find themselves operating design systems, and interaction designers will do exploratory and exciting design work. In both cases, there will be fewer jobs (one due to commoditization, the other due to exclusivity).

The Profession Isn’t Fun Anymore

I recently spoke with a hiring manager at Microsoft. He was advertising for a midlevel design position. He received about 500 applications. He subsequently short-listed fewer than 20, because the other 95 percent of the portfolios showed no magic. I’ve had the same experience when reviewing candidates. Each portfolio is the same, following a methodology that lacks imagination. In some ways, it’s exactly how it should be in an industrialized approach to software design—there shouldn’t be imagination, just execution. But that’s not the profession many of us signed up for.

I want to offer several ways of reclaiming some of the magic of interaction design, shifting the pendulum back toward a more creative design pursuit.

Tell (and show) stories that challenge the existing system

A North Star vision does more than just align and excite teams; it purposefully breaks out of existing constraints to shift perspectives. The intent is to paint a picture of what is possible, and this extends far beyond modules and components. Find ways to visualize mini North Stars, including within the context of shipping product by breaking out of the established constraints, even if just for the moment of exploration.

Move slower

There’s a false sense of urgency that underpins many of the changes I’ve described—that software has to be built as quickly as possible. But unlike an assembly line of cars, there’s no inventory of software, and so production speed has no bearing on the number of people who can use a product. Deadlines may feel immutable, because they are stated by leadership with confidence, so it is easy to forget that road maps and timelines are entirely fictional. Force your teams to move slower so that new ideas have time to be explored, discussed, and challenged.

Take risks

Prebaked modules and components feel safe, because they rest on an assumption that whoever created them already eliminated risk. They are approved for use, as if a safety inspector put them through their paces before making them generally accessible.

Innovation comes with risk: It’s impossible to know the positive or negative impact of something that doesn’t yet exist. Explore that innovation. Make things that don’t fit together, things that erode the system, things that force fundamental rethinking of established norms.

Revisit the basics.

Toss your books on UX and return to the fundamentals of the profession: drawing, the history of graphic and industrial design, the various movements like modernism V&A. What was Modernism? and Memphis, Hommés Studio. What is Memphis design style and why it is back? and grounding design theory from Richard Buchanan Buchanan, R. Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues 8, 2 (1992), 5–21 and Nigel Cross. Gillick, A. A is for Architecture. Nigel Cross: How designers think. Aug. 28, 2024

Most importantly, get out of Figma

Figma, the de facto tool for designing software, has enabled homogenized, commoditized software design. The features that are constantly being added are used to streamline development. Figma markets the tool as having everything: “Bring design and dev together. Easily translate designs into code with a workflow built for developers.” Figma is hardly everything we need to design. And while it started as a creative canvas, it’s become a tool for software production. Close the software and use the tools that formed our discipline: paper, pen, and an understanding of behavior.

These recommendations will blow up a functioning software production process and will be met by resistance. If you take these actions, you may even get fired. But this form of anarchist thinking about process is necessary for the profession to avoid commoditization and, in the long term, for each of us to actually find a meaningful and well-paid job. If we want to remain relevant, we need to pick a path instead of accepting one we didn’t choose. For the sake of the profession, I hope many of us select creativity over operation.

References and Works Cited

1. Clark, J. Ship faster by building design systems slower. Big Medium, Oct. 23, 2023
2. Coroflot. Design salary guide; link, link, and link
3. V&A. What was Modernism?
4. Hommés Studio. What is Memphis design style and why it is back. Mar. 20, 2025
5. Buchanan, R. Wicked problems in design thinking. Design Issues 8, 2 (1992), 5–21
6. Gillick, A. A is for Architecture. Nigel Cross: How designers think. Aug. 28, 2024