Have you ever had one of those sprint demos where it seems everyone is congratulated for their efforts except for the design team? Let me take a guess. Pretty much all of them, right?

You wait anxiously through the meeting for that point that always seems to come near the end where a generous helping of praise is distributed. But the distribution never quite feels equal or makes it around to the design team. Developers get applauded, leadership gets a nod and a few product managers might get a pat on the back. But your team leaves the meeting feeling a bit out of the circle.

That describes most of the demos and release meetings I’ve attended over the years. There was one exception, one project, where our design team actually received applause. It was a customer demo and the applause came from our customers — not our leadership.

I’ll admit that felt good. Applause from our customers and users meant more than any kind words given by internal employees. But it was a single, rare instance in my career — occurring over 7 years ago.

I can assure you I haven’t been sitting around expecting that to happen again.

Not too long ago, I came out of a demo where a colleague expressed this very sentiment, “You ever notice everyone always congratulates and thanks development and never says a thing about us.”

I smirked and then quipped, “You’re in a thankless profession, my friend. The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can come to peace with yourself as a designer.”

We both laughed and then proceeded to talk through everything that had to happen for that product to become a reality. There were conversations with our users, research to analyze, negotiations with the client, workflows to map out and countless iterations of designs to get a working model. We literally went through months of work before the first line of code could be written.

People rarely see that.

I thought about what my colleague said for a number of weeks after our conversation. I realized it wasn’t necessarily a thank you that he wanted. He just wanted our work to be recognized. But it is more than just mere recognition we seek. It’s beyond ego. We all want to know that our work made an impact — that our efforts had a purpose.

Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, lists 3 tenets that motivate employees. One of them is purpose or knowing that our work has had or will have an impact that is meaningful to us. (The other 2 tenets are mastery and autonomy.) I would venture a bet that needing to have a purpose extends beyond employees or employment. It’s something we need as humans — to know our limited time on this planet means something.

We need to know that we mean something.

To refer to UX design (or any profession) as thankless may not be completely accurate. Perhaps a better word in English would be unrecognized. That is, if we weren’t there to design, the problems would be evident, noticed and recognized. But when we do our jobs right, there are no pain points (or relatively few of them) and our work becomes less noticeable — less obvious and unrecognized.

That led me to think of trees falling in forests and other unsung professions.

When is the last time you put on your shoes and thought about all of the hands involved in making those shoes? Probably when a sole came off the week after you purchased them. How many hands did it take to put each part of that shoe together? And in what conditions did those hands work?

When is the last time you thought about public works or appreciated their contributions to our daily lives? Probably when a traffic light was out or the grid went down. How many men and women, whose lives we know nothing of, work to keep our cities safe?

We are surrounded by these examples each and every day. The automobile you drive to work and all the hands that put it together. The house or apartment you live in and the labor it took (and takes) to make it habitable. The phone in your pocket.

The hero we most often recognize for the birth of the iPhone is Steve Jobs. But that recognition ignores hundreds and perhaps thousands of other people who contributed to that single product. Jobs didn’t write a line of code, push a single pixel to create the interface or really develop much of the technology that went into the device.

How many hundreds or thousands of human hands work so that we can enjoy and use the products that fuel our daily lives? We live in a designed world with unseen faces and lives working to keep it all together. And yet it is rare that most of us stop to appreciate, recognize or even think much about it.

These people, these humans, are like trees falling in forests with no one there to hear them fall or appreciate their beauty while they stand.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? It’s a philosophical inquiry attributed to the work of George Berkeley (though there is scant evidence that Berkeley ever proposed this exact question). Often uttered as a joke, it’s really an inquiry into whether reality is created through perception or can exist without a perceiving mind.

This would be a good place to discuss Schrödinger’s cat, quantum mechanics and quantum superposition. But such a digression would put me out on a proverbial intellectual limb and is far beyond the scope of this article. It’s enough to say that if a tree fell in the woods, it would create vibrations through the air. But if there is no ear to translate those vibrations into sound in a human or animal brain, then does it really make a sound?

If our work is not seen, perceived or appreciated, does it fail to have substance? Does it have any meaning?

We are humans — social creatures. Nearly all of our activities are steeped in our social structure. We do the things we do and feel the way we feel largely as a result of our interactions with others. Would the artist paint if there were no humans to appreciate it? Would the writer write for no readers?

Perhaps they would. Perhaps if they were the last human on earth, a painter might paint for themselves. But I posit there would be far less meaning in their work and far less motivation for them to continue their efforts at such work.

Years ago, I worked for a hospital in rural Indiana. It was a special hospital — a Baldridge Award finalist at one point. They were committed to providing the best service and care for their patients. Every hospital makes this claim. But Columbus Regional Hospital followed through on that claim and a large part of their success could be founded in the culture they created.

Occasionally, I would receive a thank you card from a nurse or physician. In the card, I would often find a wooden token. These tokens would allow you to purchase food in the cafeteria or use it towards a purchase in the gift shop. They were a big deal with the employees, which I never understood given the quality of the cafeteria food was so-so and the gift shop sold overpriced imports that amounted to junk.

It was the thank you, the recognition, I valued. That was part of the culture. And leadership was careful to stress that the thank you note should not be ambiguous. It should be specific.

I would receive thank you notes that told me exactly how my work had helped a particular employee and their patient. I might receive a note indicating my research had changed how nursing was practiced on a ward. The note would often go on to state how this practice had provided better or safer care for a patient.

It was enough to keep me going through my stack of endless research requests.

These days, I don’t get applauded (and I’m thankful to be spared the embarrassment). But I do get a bone thrown to me once in a blue moon. I might get a comment on how an interface looks — the UI looks great. To me, this is the equivalent of telling the chef that the plating was excellent and the dessert looked delicious. And then stopping cold — no comment on how it tasted or the texture or…anything really.

I often wonder if this is simply the result of user experience design still being a misunderstood field of endeavor. It’s the make-it-pretty mentality without understanding the underlying functionality or thought or research that is inherent in good design.

But they don’t really need to know how we do what we do (or what we do to do what we do) to appreciate what we do, do they? After all, I don’t understand the work that goes into ensuring I have potable water every day. But I do appreciate being able to safely shower and cook.

I wonder if developers experience the same issues. After all, code can be beautiful. But who, beyond developers, ever looks under the hood to see the code? And how many of us could appreciate beautiful code if we saw it? Development almost always receives recognition in demos. But the recognition usually comes in the form of great work or good job or looks great.

From that perspective, the UI looks great is about as much recognition as I guess I should expect. Maybe that’s all my colleague wanted — just a quick nod to the people who created the UI without understanding all the work that went into it. Not even a thank you but rather a single statement indicating our team’s work is recognized.

Me, I gave up on these notions years ago. I admit the designer’s ravenous ego grasps hold of me occasionally and I think the same thing my colleague said. It would be nice if someone recognized us every once in a while.

Then, just as I’m about to dive into a juicy round of self-pity, I think back to my service with the Marine Corps where a thank you to your superior was often met with a terse, the Marine Corps thanks me twice a month! The message was clear. We were all paid and if the honor of wearing the uniform wasn’t enough, a paycheck was all the thanks or recognition we were entitled to.

Indeed, I am paid for my services to any organization I choose to provide services to. But this is a stoic perspective to adopt in relation to our work, any recognition of said work and, ultimately, any purpose we find in our work. It’s simply…well, too transactional.

But to move in the other direction and assume each and every person should be recognized for their contribution to a product or service seems egomaniacal. Stagehands, after all, are not rockstars. But where would the rockstars be were it not for the stagehands, mixing artists, media relations personnel and all of the people who make the rockstar a rockstar?

There are benefits in the felled tree no one hears. The human brain needs simplification. Just as our brains need generalizations, assumptions and discreet categories to function in a complex world, it needs to simplify the complexities involved in how a product was created.

Your brain doesn’t need to know how a car works or who put it together or its specifications in order to drive from point A to point B. Unless it doesn’t make it to point B. And you’re in a deserted location.

Still, I wonder if the anonymous automobile designer gets a secret twinge of satisfaction each time they see one of the vehicles they designed cruising down the expressway. I wonder if, when they sit in a demo for a new vehicle, the engineers get all the credit. I kind of doubt it since the design of a vehicle is so integral to success in sales.

Automobiles are not analogous to software though. People are unlikely to purchase software based on how it looks. The user experience is not always a tangible product (unless it’s terrible or terribly great). It is also rarely prioritized by organizations (the exception being those organizations with a high level of design maturity).

In that sense, aren’t we a bit more like stagehands than automobile designers?

That, I suppose, is just the world we live in — the world as it is rather than as it should or could be. When there is a problem with the UI or the user experience is lacking, those problems usually find their way to our desks quickly. But when there is recognition to be given, we aren’t likely to find too many heads turning our way.

A thankless or unrecognized profession? I don’t know and maybe it doesn’t matter so much to me these days. I take the most comfort in knowing the designs and projects I work on change a small part of the world we live in — hopefully for the better.

If no one else sees or knows that, I do. I know it.

Besides, if people don’t really know or understand the work we do, the work that goes into a great product, any recognition received is really empty, isn’t it?

We’ve just moved from spring to summer where I live. Out of my writing window, I can see the beauty of life springing up around me. Trees bear fruit, flowers bloom and plants bring forth vegetables we consume for our daily sustenance. They don’t need recognition or thanks or any gratification.

They just are. They do what they do, needing very little in return. Often, I envy them. But most days, I admire them.

We live in a designed world. I’m a designer. That is enough. That has to be enough.