Tiger: Make sand
Originally written by Daniel Burka
The original link: https://library.gv.com/everyone-is-a-designer-get-over-it-501cc9a2f434
This article is translated by the non-academic design translation team
Jared Spool’s recent article about how Netflix’s performance engineers are real designers caught my attention. It’s a provocative topic, but it makes sense. His argument is that everyone on your team, including performance engineers, can design products, not just those with a “designer” title.
From some of the responses, you’d think Jared might have robbed their child as a ritual offering. So what exactly did Jared write?
The team is made up of performance engineers. They organize the architecture, the programming, and the stability of a complex system. These jobs have taken up all their time and energy. There is nothing more important in systems engineering than these tasks.
But the moment Netflix users stop watching a video stream and a rotating animation appears, indicating that the player is loading data, the roles of these engineers change dramatically: they become user experience engineers.
I put that last sentence in bold because it’s really important. Many designers are uncomfortable with the idea that an engineer, a salesperson, or a CFO might also be a designer.
Some common reactions
Whether you like it or not, and whether you allow it or not, people outside the design team are involved in major design decisions that can have a significant impact on users. They design products. They’re all designers.
This is not a provocation, just a statement of fact. I work with a lot of startup teams every year, and it happens every day. A CFO’s change in price may affect the product experience; An engineer weighs the pros and cons of a product’s performance; A salesperson will write a script to talk to a customer. In my opinion, anyone who has an impact on the user experience can be called a “designer”.
If not, why would Jared and I say that? Again, I want designers to change the way they think about their characters and make better designs.
Consider how this shift is affecting the way you work.
Everyone should have a way of thinking about design
When you accept the fact that design decisions sometimes come from people outside the design team who don’t have the “designer” title, you’ll change your attitude toward your colleagues. Now they’re not just collaborators, they’re part of your design team.
Companies like Apple and Airbnb, with their great designs, have realized this. Alex Schleifer, VP of design at Airbnb, spoke to Wired about Why Companies shouldn’t be Design-driven:
Don’t overemphasize designers when solving problems in Airbnb. The point is not to create a “design-led culture,” because that often tells a non-designer that their aesthetic needs to be validated by a designer. It makes the whole organization need to respond to a view of privilege. Instead, Schleifer wants to broaden the audience’s perspective, which is usually reserved for designers.
Does everyone need to have all the skills of a designer? Of course not. But everyone needs to understand which of their tools influence their decisions to the extent that they affect the user experience.
When an engineer degrades performance in search of a shortcut, they need to understand how it hurts the user experience. Similarly, when the designer pushes the engineer to make design changes that affect performance, the engineer should help the designer make the best overall design decision, not overrule what the designer did. It’s this kind of respectful collaboration that leads to great design.
Work outside of your design team
When you accept that design exists almost everywhere in your organization, you must take responsibility for it. Your App is slow? Sit down with your engineers and work it out. Did your marketing team barely communicate with prospects? You’re better off working with them to face this problem.
Yes, it’s a lot of work to design with everyone in your company. But it’s essential if you want to be a truly great designer, otherwise you’re just going down the wrong path. For example, suppose your CEO has a complex pricing system for your product. You can use your interactive/visual skills to make the pricing page as clear as possible; More difficult, but more important, is finding the opportunity to work with your CEO to reprice the product so that it is clear to the customer and in line with the ultimate business goals.
Focusing on the core business separates actual product design from interaction design, and even user experience design. Basic product design is really hard and takes a lot of work, but that’s what experienced designers do — that’s why they do their job better than you do.
Work with non-designers to grow your design team
“UX Design Related Disciplines” by Dan Saffer and Thomas Glaser
Design is a challenging job. It takes a lot of skill (see the image above with so much circle knowledge from Dan Saffer) and years of practice to master it.
Maybe that’s why a lot of designers get offended when a lot of non-designers do design work and are called “designers” by Jared and I. You can be angry if you want, but the reality is that other people are making design decisions whether you’re there or not. Embrace them. They don’t make your work less worthwhile. They don’t make your work less meaningful.
Getting more people to design is icing on the cake, not competing with you. These designers make your team, your product, stronger because they contribute to the team from their own unique perspective. Please help them improve their skills and use their own expertise to optimize your product and company.
Let’s create a better future together
I met a Fortune 500 CEO a few years ago. Her eyes lit up when she suddenly found out I was a designer. “Wow, I love design!” “My team is working with the design team, and they’re doing a lot of creative work there,” she said.
I felt frustrated that the design team was right next to the CEO, but they didn’t work together. Instead, designers do extraordinary “creative work” in isolation behind soundproof glass walls.
The CEO makes decisions every day that affect every customer. She bears some of the blame for not communicating with the designer over there. But the main fault lay with the design team: a wasted opportunity to build consensus on the most important and challenging business.
