Good Designer, Bad Designer

Picture your notion of the ideal designer. What do they value? What do they look like? What tools do they use? What is their online persona? How high is their black turtle neck? Really make it concrete. Now hold that image in your mind.

Good designers help customers make money, save time, or save money in a desirable way.

There are other, more slippery definitions of value that sometimes come into play. Things like social esteem, entertainment, connection, and affiliation.

But I think B2B software is fun and cool. So I like to start with dollars and cents.

Bad designers have a vague or unclear sense of how their work is creating customer value. This can happen because they delegate that responsibility to PMs or UX researchers.

It can also happen because they rely too heavily on quantitative data rather than using a combination of hard data and customer conversations to cultivate a rich mental model of a domain and a group of users that they can then leverage to create opinionated and intentional design work with a clear value thesis.

Good designers help the venture they work for make money, save time, or save money.

A soccer player who is averse to scoring goals is a bad soccer player. A designer who believes making money is a bad thing is a bad designer.

Good designers build strong relationships with those they work with, especially across disciplines. They seek to understand the motives and needs of their colleagues.

They hold their own solutions softly and try to make other people's ideas successful where possible.

They are ready to give and take because they understand the needs of others.

They build cycles of reciprocity and goodwill by advancing the motives of their peers.

They are then able to draw on that trust when it counts, so they can ship great design work.

Bad designers assume bad intentions among their cross-disciplinary counterparts.

They are impatient and don't spend the time to invest in relationships before asking for things. As a result, they enter downward spirals of credibility that compromises their ability to ship great work.

Good designers are tough. Or really I should say, good designers become tough over time. Most designers are highly sensitive by nature and do not start out this way.

Toughness can look like hard-nosed stoicism, or positivity and flexibility under demanding circumstances, or jocular camaraderie. It doesn't manifest in one particular way.

Toughness is required because designers live in high-pressure, ambiguous environments, doing highly sensitive, customer facing work with massive visibility. Everyone sees your work, everyone has an opinion, and your work directly affects customers in a very visceral way for good or for ill.

Try and recall your reaction the last time the UI for your favorite app changed for the worse. That's what I mean by visceral.

A key skill underlying this mental toughness is the ability to distinguish between things you want and things you must have. This skill lets you soften, adapt, and work within the constraints of the situation you are in.

Because you are effective, you are able to expand your constraints over time.

Bad designers become overwhelmed because they try to control things that are beyond their sphere of influence, have rigid demands that their design process must reach a platonic ideal, and ascribe blame to external factors rather than taking ownership of their situation.

Good designers strive to make the world a more beautiful place.

They do not hide behind notions of subjectivity to excuse poor execution or low-quality work.

They understand that beauty is of fundamental value.

While they are empathetic and respect non-design stakeholders who may not value beauty the same way, they are not swayed in their commitment to beauty.

They do not sacrifice customer value, enterprise value, relationships, or rationality for beauty.

But rarely need to, because these things are often complementary. Often, it's matter of giving a shit, holding yourself to a high standard, putting the time in, and possibly getting into the production codebase and shipping some design polish yourself.

Using a particular tool, being exceptionally original, being popular on Twitter, being fashionable, having a certain demographic or educational background, "design thinking," and much else is not on the list. That is intentional.

Do resonate with my definition of what makes a good designer? If not, you may not want to subscribe to my blog, attend my workshops, hire me, or provide me with venture capital. Life is too short to invest in people you don't resonate with.

But if you share the same vision, reach out and let's see what we can build together!