Interaction Design Foundation reviews

It’s not a disadvantage per se, but it’s worth noting that IxDF is a smaller company, which means you work very closely with your teammates and leadership. If you’re not self-motivated, proactive, and enthusiastic about your work, it will show. Everyone here is highly driven, so if you prefer a more laid-back environment or need a lot of external structure, this might not be the best fit.

I deliberated for a long time whether to write this review. Firstly, I currently work at IxDF, but I have put a different location and job title to the one I actually have. This is because I, like many of us, am afraid to truly voice my opinion. IxDF claims to have a culture of constructive criticism, but the reality is that the founders can only take some constructive criticism on good days for simple things, and it's a gamble that few can afford to take. Secondly, I am writing this as I am exhausted at all the periods of instability, petty drama, and lack of real movement of our product. Since I have been here, there seems to be a vicious cycle: founders get excited about someone/something --> force everyone to drop what they are doing and work on that thing (that is often not backed by user research, ironically) --> thing fails/stalls --> founders scapegoat 1-2 people and treat them terribly and/or fire them under horrendous conditions --> founders have "post-cleanse" high where they regain energy, assure everyone that the poison is removed, hyper-fixate on new thing for the company --> cycle repeats. So I have a proposition: at the moment, working here is a 2/5. If IxDF goes 3 months without any severe drama, I will update my review to 3/5. If it goes 6 months with no severe drama (obviously I understand some things are out of the founders' hands, I'll give grace to anything that is genuinely not their fault, but most is) and 3 features launched from the backlogged list of features, I'll update my score to 5/5. I would be excited to see the founders rise to the occasion, not start a manhunt to find who wrote this, and to get to work, as well as allow the rest of us to work in an environment not full of stupid interruptions. I love the actual work when I can do it properly.