Have You Experienced The Designer’s Dilemma?

At some point, most designers in tech will confront an existential dilemma around what, exactly, their role should be.

The dilemma has a number of recognizable symptoms:

• Pangs of anxiety about the scope of design, manifesting as the perceived presence or lack of a seat at the table.
• Haunting process angst, manifesting as confusion about how to best collaborate with product managers and engineers. Often something about Agile + UX.
• Reflexive and often hilarious attempts to understand designer job titles.

The dilemma stems from the chasm that exists between the designer’s aspirational pursuit — to improve lives through the thoughtful creation of things — and the apparent limits of their role at work, which is to compose and style user interfaces. The goal is grand and strategic, the role can seem narrow and subordinate.

The dilemma is the source of most burnout and frustration that I see in designers and design teams. If you’ve pursued a career in design then you’ve heard, expressed or felt the following lamentation: “Design isn’t just making things pretty.” Most (not all) designers want to do more than that. And there are plenty of effective designers out there who can do much more than that.

Are Designers Special?

Everyone, regardless of role, can be frustrated by the desire to have more impact and influence. Many people want make the world a better place. But people who are titled as designers—or people who have made the question and the pursuit of design their professional focus—do have a unique dilemma, one that is definitional to their role.

To illustrate, here’s a workable definition of design:

Design is shaping something for use.

• Shaping: To design is to work towards a clear overarching goal, and involves a number of different underlying activities, like communicating, engineering, testing, drawing, researching, etc.
• Something: The thing being designed could be an object, or a plan, or even a concept
• For use: Design is not arbitrary. It is intentional and directional. It is the willful manipulation of material in order to help one or many people accomplish some goal. Design is thus mindful of the user’s needs, environment, goals, ergonomics, and economics.

Everyone does Design

To do design is to be human. To act as a designer is to pursue fundamental and purposeful desires. Every one of us — designers, salespeople, waiters, assembly line workers — does design, on one scale or another, to varying degrees of success, in our personal lives and in our professional ones.

For example, if you work on a SaaS product then every member of your team is doing design.

Figure 1. Some of The Different Design Activities that go into shaping a SaaS Product

This is neither a complete nor an exhaustive list. Yet notice that “designers” are halfway down the list — there are a whole bunch of other people doing really important design work. And actually, if you have the word designer in your job title, then you probably don’t own the most impactful design activities.

“Wait, what? So who owns the most impactful design activities?”

That would probably be the engineers who are developing the something, and the businessfolk who are deciding the broad brushstrokes of what will be built and how to pay for it.

“But wait, no. I’m the designer. It’s my job to make sure we build the right thing!”

You’re not wrong. And, I get it. You wanted to make the world a better place, and meanwhile people just keep telling you how they think the UI should look. It can get pretty frustrating. Take a step back. If you’re a designer working on tech, here’s what you actually do get:

1. A good paycheck. And benefits and all that. Or at least a decent hourly rate. This enables your survival.
2. Direct ownership of 1 of the 9 design activities: UI composition. This gives you a secure base from which to operate.
3. An inchoate yet crucial mission to improve your user’s experience. This gives you a ton of opportunity, if you choose to pursue it. The only way to improve the user experience is to influence the design activities performed by other people (who have skills you do not possess,) a pursuit also known as leadership.

And so things aren’t actually all that bad. If you have the word designer in your job title, then you probably don’t own the most impactful design activities — but you have the opportunity to influence those who do.

How To Influence Design Outcomes

What you won’t get is entitlement or any positional authority to make #3 happen. That has to be earned through hard work, trust, and results. Once achieved, this mission is what ultimately differentiates professional designers from everyday designers: their ability to compel an organization of people to shape something for optimal and healthy use.

As such, it may be useful to think about specific points of leverage that you can cultivate in order to grow your influence:

• Focus your energy on the cross-functional team of peers that you work with every day. Be less worried about impressing your manager or higher-ups; your work and results will speak for themselves. You must identify your own challenges and impediments; your manager will then help resolve them.
• Get to know people. Take some interest in your teammate’s domains and also try to get a sense of how they relate to their work. Are they team-focused, product-focused, self-focused, or some mix? Empathize with your collaborators to identity strategies you can leverage to positively influence them.
• Storytelling. Constantly be crafting, sharing, and refining a story about the positive user outcomes that your team needs to collaborate to create. Fold the views of your teammates into this story. Their views improve the story and your inclusive approach will help everyone feel shared ownership of the story and the outcomes it compels.
• Get data to back up the portions of the story that you feel are most crucial or controversial. Recruit the help of peers who can help you get and understand the data. Learn as you go.
• Build collaborative relationships with engineers and product managers. Help product managers write user stories or requirements and accept their ideas about your UI compositions. Try to become as technically proficient as possible, actively contribute to implementation when you can. Proactively and informally spend time with engineers to share UI compositions early on, while you are working on them. Recognize that technical approaches (and assumptions) often get set very early in the lifespan of a project. You want to infuse your ideas into planning conversations proactively, rather than challenge plans with ideas that are new to others.
• Actively support and take part in QA efforts; you must be invested in quality throughout the implementation process. Quality user experiences are always shaped, refined, and optimized over time.

This is Part I of a two-part perspective on the designer’s dilemma. Part II addresses design managers and offers advice on how they can help designers navigate the dilemma.