The Staffing Ratio is the biggest self-own in UX

The UX-to-Engineer ratio is creating bad products and burning out UX practitioners.

The UX-to-Engineer ratio is the benchmark when advocating for UX resources. It’s also the desperate salvo of a profession perpetually under-staffed (ironically, a problem exacerbated by the ratio itself) in organizations that often don’t understand UX beyond pixels and usability tests.

The thinking goes something like this:
“Engineering gets the staffing they need but UX continues to struggle. Let’s put design staffing in engineering terms by arguing that engineering will be blocked and/or product quality will suffer if we don’t have some number of designers for every engineer.” It’s also often pointed out that some of the most admired products in tech are staffed at very narrow ratios such as 1UX:4Eng.

But there’s a fundamental problem with the ratios approach. It assumes a correlation between implementation effort and design effort. That correlation simply doesn’t exist. A design might require one engineer or 10 engineers to implement, but the nature of the user problem that the design is meant to address does not change. Similarly, an implementation implemented by one engineer may require three UXers, while a 10 engineer implementation may require zero UX. Again, they are not correlated.

UX-to-Eng ratios are not only wrong, they are bad for product quality and the UX team.

Lower Product Quality

Ratios match UX resources to implementation teams. This artificially constrains user problems and design solutions to match team structures & capacity, resulting in fragmented experiences that don’t fit well together and often don’t effectively solve user problems.

Unhappy and Less Effective UX Teams

Ratios force UXers to thin-slice their work rather than solve fully realized user problems, handicapping their true organizational value and their primary source of job satisfaction. Ironically, as UX teams grow larger, the individuals and the team have less impact.

It’s not uncommon for a designer to spend an entire quarter working to ship (and overthink) a single button. Or to ship nothing for multiple quarters due to a design that solves the problem but crosses implementation boundaries. Burnout is common.

An Alternative to UX Ratios?

UX could instead be staffed against logical, durable user problems. Such problems can be owned by a relatively small, multidisciplinary UX squad that balances their capacity with the natural ebb and flow of implementation.

For example, imagine a large CRM application. Rather than staff UXers individually on notes, tasks and calendar features, a single UX squad might be responsible for “productivity tools,” encompassing all three features and matching the user’s experience, not the implementation, while also balancing the workload.

This approach does not imply a waterfall process. In fact, it may be best suited to Agile and iterative processes because fully-realized problems and their solutions can be broken down logically to deliver user value faster, with less experience fragmentation & debt. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to break a problem down if you don’t know the size and shape of that problem.

Ratios: more harm than good

UX ratios have done more harm than good because implementation effort and design effort are not correlated. UXers and products benefit from solving fully-realized user problems that aren’t artificially constrained by implementation details. Instead, we should consider staffing UX squads against logical, durable user problems for happier employees and better outcomes.