I am tired of Design
There, I’ve said it. Or wrote it.
Previous notice: my tone for this text is a mix of sarcasm with criticism, I hope it passes the message in the same way I played it in my mind: it was both meant to shake waters and also for my future self to be reminded.
Not a click bait, but let me explain the idea here:
I open my LinkedIn (the only social network I use regularly these days) and I see the same conversations over and over and over and again. Having a researcher mindset, I even started a file to have a rough count+avg on the recurrent themes and topics being discussed about Design. Here is a top 5, listed by order:
- Design layoffs and design careers
- Lack of Exec Leadership support / understanding of Design as the most important discipline
- The ROI (or lack of) of everything Design related (research, service design, information architecture, product design, interaction design, design systems, accessibility, inclusion, AI and yadayadayada)
- People selling Design Coaching, Training, Workshops, consultancy services on Design Processes & Operations, Miraculous recipes and. paid Portfolios reviews
- A lot of people sharing Figma tutorials and related hacks / tools / plugins, whatever.
(and some recent Jacob Nielsen AI nonsense also…)
I am tired of these conversations. Why? Because they make me think most designers still 1) live in a bubble and 2) are disconnected from the business, from the company goals and from reality.
Here is what I think Design(ers) could be reminding themselves of:
- We are not the customers, we are not their voices, we are not speaking on their behalf. We are company employees who seek to help a business strive AND at the same time solve a real problem (or shape behaviours). Let the customers speak for themselves! Listen and learn from them and share that knowledge within the company in order to make whatever you are building, work.
- We are not the deciders of the best experience, the users are. How many times have I seen beautiful, yet complex design solutions? Functional, beautiful and easy to use is a hard combination, but if you know the jobs your users will perform, it’s easier to achieve that. If you need to shape behaviors, go learn about what people do, observe them in real contexts and build something simple, useful and beautiful on top of that.
- We are not at the core of the company, money is. Customers bring the money in, not Design. Design is a cost, as every other discipline building things is. Know about what drives customers to spend money on the company and support the company build for that – that’s how you center design on the conversation at the business table.
- We are not doing great because we have a well refined working process, so stop attaching success to process metrics or Maturity ladders! We are doing great when the things we ship are being successfully used by the customers, they see value on what was delivered to them and, as a consequence, they pay more to use or buy more of what we produce. I have seen companies deliver great products that didn’t follow a diamond, loop, line, stair, ladder, whatever, fancy process or model you think it’s trendy.
- We should be able to rely on our brain more than on the tools on the market – being a tool expert does not make anyone into a designer, I am sorry.
- Having that said, sadly most companies don’t need Designers. They need figma masters that are able to translate the ideas of the most vocal people in the room into designs. Then they also need code monkeys to develop the idea faster and ship it without testing. Then translate them into failed companies, then write books about it. (Sarcasm was too obvious on this one? 😅)
- Design(ers) should not be working as a tribe: people over processes only works if designers are part of the team – trust happens when people share. Not when people go to an isolated corner, work their magic alone and then show a final magic trick to everyone, in order to collect applauses – and be disappointed if people don’t believe in magic!
- It’s not the job of Design to solve users problems. Most users know how to solve their problems, so let them guide the narrative, not you. We should design for the users and for their actions, their goals and their jobs, not for strict predefined paths we assume to be brilliant solutions for all the things they didn’t asked/needed in the first place.
- We should have not been taught that user’s data should always backup business decisions regarding experience. The amount of friction designers create in assumptions based companies because they are not able to understand what drives decisions is overwhelming. Not to mention how frustrated designers feel when not being able to backup their own decisions with data.
- All businesses should have a designer seated at The Table from time to time. I have no idea about what would happen to the business, but I think it would be good for Design, in general, if more designers could learn about how the business works and learn how they can play their part in a way that provides *real* impact.
After writing all this I made a 2 days pause.
I wanted to make a retrospective about why I felt so frustrated (almost a mix of disappointment with angry) about most design discussions. I wished to deeply understand why it was so difficult for people to take a zoom out, to have a perspective on the orchestration and interconnections of design with customers, users, companies and the world. I also wished to understand what was triggering me to be so mad at Design(ers) conversations. I got to this conclusion:
You know the world is broken when people need to pick processes, frameworks and tools to learn how to work together, in order to make ideas work. You know the world is broken when designers spend more time talking about their problems, than they spend solving them. That is what really triggers me the most: designers never ending complaining, but so many define external locus of control and I see so little done by designers to solve the problems they say the world has. So many recipes to have Executive Leaders to listen, but so little recipes telling Designers how to read!
- «Educate the non designers», say the designers, who are not able to read a room filled with executives, nor learn about the business in the first place.
I miss reading about the times when a group of people, from different disciplines would come together and start contributing to something they believed to be a great idea. Small teams, focused individuals, giving their best, for the sake of making something work. No fancy titles, no perfect processes, the only success metric being: does it work?
The discussion everyone should be having on LinkedIn about Design and Product and Engineering is:
Who is really benefiting from the way products are being built today? Really, who is? Not designers, not the users, not the world.
