5 Things You Need to Unlearn to Become a Better Designer
There’s plenty of advice about things you need to learn, it's been what most of my posts so far on Medium have been about.
But in reality, the process of unlearning can be more powerful than learning. Habits, mindsets, and expectations that you’ve set can hamstring you as you try to progress.
I learned this lesson as I started life as a Digital Nomad. Travelling across the world and seeing new things constantly rewired my brain, but it wasn’t an easy process. The process of rewiring can be slow and you’ll have to let go of what you knew before to grow into what you’re going to become in the future.
So, here are 5 things you need to let go of and unlearn as a Designer, to become even better than you already are.
Let’s go.
1. Fighting for every feature
We’re starting with what might be an unexpected and counterintuitive unlearning here, but read on and you’ll understand.
Picking your battles is a powerful skill in professional settings.
Designers are constantly challenged while building products. They’re challenged by business stakeholders, engineers, and of course our beloved PMs. The challenges we face vary in terms of the ultimate impact on the end user.
I used to have an unwavering belief that I should always prioritize the ideal UX for any challenge that was presented. This would mean schooling stakeholders on Heuristics 101, best-practice, or whatever other research/rationale I could find to back up my view, no matter the size or impact of the challenge.
It would build up my reputation as a stickler for ‘great design’, whatever that meant. And while I thought it had a positive impact in getting my way, the long-term impact was more detrimental, and the long-term always wins out. Stakeholder management is the most important skill you will hone as a Designer, and being a hard-ass early, can impact the way you’re viewed later on, and that could mean being skipped out on key product decisions, or not being consulted on certain things because it's just easier for them to not have to deal with the hard-ass.
Over time, you’ll understand that some battles aren’t worth the effort, and when you let people have their way, it can give you some longer-term benefits on the scoreboard. Those can be vital to making bigger, more impactful experience decisions down the line.
Just be sure to make them work for it though 😉
2. Believing visual design is what you get judged on
Ah, what a world it would be if people just understood everything that went into our designs and could easily interpret the UI that is ultimately produced.
Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.
The people you present your work to aren’t going to be privy to every design decision you made, and nor should they be. You have been tasked with using your expertise to come up with what the best experience should be, and so you need to communicate how you got there.
You’re going to get judged by how effectively you can convey your rationale and tell the story of your designs. Storytelling, is ultimately what people judge you on, even if they don’t consciously realize it.
Don’t let great design be ruined by poor storytelling —
Oana Bradulet, Product Director @ Faculty.ai
Once you understand that the UI can be used as the cherry on top, you can start to leverage it. Whether you dangle the carrot or build it to a finale, your visual design can be used in many powerful ways beyond what you might currently imagine.
3. Hating the PM
Every PM sucks because they’re not doing something the way you would. Reality check, they are different human beings to you.
We have to accept that each PM will have their own style, and empathize with them to get the best out of the relationship, eventually creating that all-important dynamic duo. I wrote about how to do this in a previous article, check out Point 4:
The battle with a PM is expected and more importantly necessary in order to build the right product for users. So get used to being challenged and challenging each other, and understand that the balance of each of your goals is what is going to ultimately drive success for the business and your users.
4. Designing from scratch
I used to do this a lot. I look back and am dumbfounded it went on for so long and that I was even a hireable designer while I behaved like this.
It was pure ego.
Designing with a blank canvas is hard, and not even the best designers start out that way. Take inspiration, iterate it, sprinkle in your style, and voila you will have something amazing.
A very popular book on this topic is ‘Steal like an Artist’:
David Johnson ⓓⓙ’s philosophy in Design inspired me in mine, as he regularly takes the stance of ‘not reinventing the wheel’. I’ve now iterated on both of these to create my own style:
This is from a previous article I wrote about 5 skills you need to become a Senior Designer. You should also check out an incredible resource for researching products, to help you think less:
Skip the part you start from zero.
5. Waiting for the right moment to post content
When you do something for the first time, you will suck.
This is normal.
It is literally what happens every time someone does something for the first time.
So instead of waiting on the right moment to share something you learned as a designer, or an opinion you had, or a scenario you dealt with… just release it.
What makes us better and more professional is not the amount of time we spend on it, but the number of iterations we go through with it. This was a key learning from the book Thinking Fast and Slow. Iterations > Hours.
My first ever piece of content on Medium was posted in Spring 2021, and garnered this much attention:
This is what my stats look like today, 37 articles and 16 months later:
Many of those thoughts I had, could've been shared much earlier.
The sooner you start, the more iterations you can get through, and the faster you’re going to get better.
Post it, now.
Sakky B
Co-founder, ZeroToDesign
