Dear Designers,

I’m not a writer, I’m not a blogger, I’m not a vlogger. I have never published anything on Medium, or any other social media channel that exceeded more than 20 words. But today, I’ve decided to share my thoughts with you. My name is Christoph. I'm a designer for digital products. More specifically, I design experiences for mobile devices.

I’m browsing plenty of design related sites, every single day, to get inspiration, ideas and sometimes, to just see what’s becoming a trend… One trend that I’m seeing more and more, on each and every single one of those design sites and communities is daunting and makes me sick:

More and more “designers” know their tools, but not their profession. They design animations without meaning. Beautiful, but meaningless candy for the eye. Hunting for likes and appreciation on several design communities. No problem-solving skills. No empathy for users and human interaction.

“Please, press “L” if you like it”

If you're smiling now, you know what I'm talking about.

If you’re the kind of designer that writes s**t like that, you probably also label yourself as a UI/UX designer — And you make my stomach turn itself whenever I see stuff like this on the web. I dare to claim, that you’re the kind of designer thats’s spending hours, if not days on beautiful animations without thinking of budgets, development constraints and implementation of your useless eye candy, but most importantly, you don’t think about your (potential) users. You’re designing for yourself. You’re mastering Sketch, Principle, Framer, Pixate, Photoshop, Illustrator and many other tools, but you have no clue what you’re actually doing and who you should actually design for. You could, of course, learn and change. But, you’re just not willing to do so, simply because you’re too sure about your “designs” being amazing and because you don’t want to analyze the problems that users have in their daily lives, you don’t want to understand the production cycle of a product, you don’t want to understand the semantics of what it means to work in an agile team. You probably don’t even want to be friends with developers. You don’t want to learn what it actually means to design digital products. You just want people to press “L”. You’re seeking attention from people alike yourself — Let me tell you, this won’t get you very far in your career.

Now that you think, “Who’s this prick who thinks he’s figured out everything?” Let me tell you, I haven’t figured it out, and I’m constantly learning to become a better designer. A better self that wants to help people getting things done, that wants to let them experience easy to use products. But in order to achieve this, I have to learn, every single day. About users, their behavior, their needs and problems. I have to learn about product constraints — No matter if it’s budget, time, manpower, politics, limitations given by an operating system. I constantly have to learn. And so do you.

Please, don’t get me wrong on this. I love beautiful animations and micro-interactions with meaning. Google’s Material Design language and its guidelines are one of the greatest examples for beautiful, meaningful and helpful transitions, animations and interface guidance. I also enjoy to just look at beautiful and smooth animations, but every aspect of useless animations in digital products, e.g. in view transitions, where every single component, icon, label, button, image is fading in from the left with a duration of 2 seconds, is undoubtably the worst thing a designer could do when people use a product frequently and want to use it for a reason. Any reason, actually. These animations don’t make sense. Never. Ever.

There are design communities out there, which are very helpful and they help designers to grow, to push forward and they help product design to evolve in ways that have never been possible in the past decades and even years. There are communities out there, that don’t allow for attention-seeking wannabes, and I’m thankful for the ones that let you share thoughts and patterns. The ones where designers help each other with problems and obstacles they face in developing great products.

One last thing: If you’re this kind of designer that this post is meant for… Let me tell you, the products and apps that enable us to do amazing things, would be much, much worse if they would only be designed by you. Yes, you!

Don’t let me bring you down though. Learn about your users, your profession and constraints. You’re a designer, you design experiences. You’re part of people’s everyday lifes. So make sure you’re designing for them, not for likes. Design for the better, not the worse.

Thank you,

Christoph