Qualifications for designers
We do not measure our team members based on any fixed number of quantifiable parameters. Our design practice is holistic and requires quality. There is more than one way to be good at it.
Nevertheless, there are qualities we are looking for in a designer when we hire. We use exactly the same criteria for promoting designers.
Qualities
Empathy
Design practice starts with empathy, an ability to see the world as a specific other in a particular situation without being lost emotionally. This skill is usually trained naturally through providing emotional support when you are with someone in trouble and being able to hear and acknowledge them without getting lost.
A person with an untreated history of developmental trauma may feel uncomfortable providing emotional support to others or receiving it.
Designers are not social workers nor therapists, but applied research requires an understanding of trauma and a trauma-informed approach. Often designers have to ask very personal questions and go deep into conversations about innate motivations or profound pains.
During an interview for a design role, we would use the same skills to learn about a candidate’s innate motivation, concerns, and experiences.
Designers usually have a deep curiosity about how others see the world and follow it intuitively, asking questions like “ah, great, why is this so important for you?”
Senior designers and design researchers are usually trained in applied psychology, and the basics of social work and are trauma-responsive. User experience researchers often start their careers in these disciplines before moving into applied design research.
A designer with a graphical design or more technical background usually develop this skill through handling variety of clients’ needs over the years.
Analysis
While empathy helps us to get raw insights, we use analytical skills to place these in a context and make them actionable. In the EDP trio of modern tech startups: Engineering, Design, and Product, we are responsible for a deep understanding of people's needs. We advocate for meeting these needs in a responsible and respectful way.
Designers work in collaboration with engineers and have to understand complex state machines and logical flows. With our focus on how things work over how they look, this is an exceptionally important quality.
Product Designers are a lot closer to engineers than to artists. The difference is in tooling, scope, and primary focus. In a simplified comparison, software engineers choose to think a bit more about bytes, data structures, and algorithms, while software designers choose to think a bit more about people, situations, and emotions. Both manifest their work in bringing colourful pixels to screens.
Even if they started from websites or app interfaces, designers usually grow beyond screens to a holistic practice.
Understanding why some design choices create emotional responses in people is essential for any designer. When we interview a candidate or evaluate for promotion, we are looking for the ability to analyse why some design works and some other do not. Recognising how the same design might not work in a different situation.
The analysis also shines tough in deliverables like the structure of design components, journey maps, flow diagrams, and the understanding of the business model in simple terms. A good designer will explain why an ugly solution makes sense. A junior might try to hide behind a portfolio with trendy button gradients.
Product designers in digital often learn how to code to improve their understanding of what makes a digital product work. As well as to learn the business fundamentals of a domain they happened to work with.
Articulation
It is one thing to understand something and another to be able to explain it well. The ability to say things concisely and write down a coherent narrative is a core design skill.
While a lot of design practice is about feeling and experiencing, what makes it practical is the ability to codify insights and concepts in clear language. Ability to simplify and make a digest from a long article, ability to reduce an interface to fewer essential elements.
We usually look for designers who enjoy writing and can tell a story. Our daily work requires us to make stories and make them serious, touching, or silly to help our teams understand and address real people's needs. These stories must also be logically sound, persuading with good analysis.
Many designers choose to learn standup comedy, improv, or role-play skills. Some write blogs or share over social media.
Facilitation
Our work always involves others. While empathy, analysis, and articulation help a lot, emergent facilitation skills allow us to be the most helpful to our teams. We often find ourselves in a room or on a call with people who need support to understand our needs, solve problems, or articulate concerns efficiently.
Senior design practitioners develop the ability to hold space for others: create a room for reflection and creative innovation with minimal interventions. Quickly moving from grabbing attention to disappearing and letting others shine.
Designers developed many practical technics expanding design thinking and borrowing from theatre and coaching. Service design is an essential toolbox. But none of the technics replaces the quality of presence.
A deep interest in helping others to adopt design principles in their work is something we looking for in a candidate.
Optimism
The design process starts with hope. A strong conviction that things might get better and we might be the people to see it through.
Behind the energy we put into many-many iterations of our creative process, often with limited resources and under time pressure, often with painful restrictions, is a strong belief that in the end, we will make things work.
This deep innate motivation makes it a joy to work with our colleagues.
Designers often advocate for short iterations and embrace clearly defined constraints. We fail fast. We build from the first principles embracing that our initial solution might be naive, ugly, and obviously subpar. More senior designers go through the same process: they just keep iterating, compounding the improvements up to excellence.
Designers have to have hope to trust their intuition, their convictions, and the co-creative process to yield meaningful improvements.
Ethics
Design is a co-creative field. Nothing we do is completely original; we always stand on the shoulders of the giants who managed to build working systems before us.
Creating something completely new is often a bad choice because we must follow established conventions to bring the necessary conveniences.
Nevertheless, our work is, undoubtedly, unapologetically original. With deep respect for others, we never mindlessly borrow design solutions but instead build from the ground up, focusing on what matters the most in our current circumstances. We are not artists, but we do our work with style.
We openly credit others from whom we learn and own our successes. We aim to provide an advantage to our teams by bringing innovation and care to our work.
When we interview candidates, we note how they talk about colleagues, companies, and significant others. How do they treat people with less power? Who do they empower? We are hyper-sensitive to the signs of disrespect, fraud, or drama. We look for people who elevate others and do honest work.
A creative process is always messy, and the lack of any disagreements in a candidate's story or a colleague's accounts of work is also a red flag. We want people who can disagree, prove a point, and commit to working with people they do not admire.
We measure success by the success of our teams and our communities.
Specialisation
So what about knowing Adobe Photoshop, Sketch or Figma? Autolayout? Graphical Design? SwiftUI? Artistic drawing?
We do not hire or promote based on these. Designers are lifelong learners and, with the above qualities, usually pick up whatever tools are necessary for the current job quickly. Pay attention to deliverables as evidence of possible qualities, but never assume that the portfolio proves anything.
Many designers are proud of their craft. You are looking for this authenticity, for the ability to show their work in real-time (how they think, tell a story, and show you their real workflows).
Sometimes we are looking for specialisation.
Design Operations
Design operations are about designing design workflows. It is very meta. You dedicate your time to help reflect deeper on how others work with the design deliverables and help to level up operational efficiency.
A design operation specialist usually has in-depth knowledge of tooling and good judgment in building a simple and reusable system.
In a candidate for Design Ops, we are looking for deeper technical skills, an understanding of the relevant tech stack (HTML, CSS, DOM, client-server architecture, managed components, etc.), design tooling (Figma, auto layout, prototypes, etc.), and collaboration tooling (design tokens, Notion databases, etc.).
Design Ops requires attention to detail ability to spend a day making a flow chart and iterating on it for a few weeks until it is very accurate and understood well by the whole team.
UX Researcher
Design starts with applied research, and it is essential for every designer. But some of us choose to go all-in on building channels to recruit relevant participants, gather toolsets for accurate tracking of observations, and write down insightful reports.
There is a plethora of methods and guidelines to equip and wield for the sake of getting research done better: reduce bias, represent everyone, include your tea, and empower a community.
User Experience research done well empowers the whole organisation and promotes quality and quantity insights as the primary way of learning about our customers.
Brand & Communication
Good design is good communication. Some of us like to go deeper into generating feelings and helping to express our brand values.
This work usually involves a deep understanding of what makes people react to means, how social media works, network effects, and the balance between grabbing attention and providing meaningful content. Good taste in what is timely and trendy and what is timeless.
While this work involves more deliverables like illustration and animations, it is more about understanding the brand and the product and choosing the right communication channel.
It is a job of amplifying our competitive advantage and making our brand voice heard loud and clear. A communication designer is in tune with the market as a marketing professional and helps to emphasise what matters with their work.
This specialisation also often requires understanding product-led growth and data analytics.
Accessibility
We are building a public service which has to be highly available for everyone. Including everyone makes service better as a business and as a community institution.
A person with good vision today might use our app tomorrow after the eye check and face the same challenges as a visually impaired person.
All of us had and will have difficulties hearing, seeing, touching with precision, holding well or staying calm at some stages of our lives. Sometimes it will be expected, and sometimes it will hit us like a rock when we expect it the least.
Design for accessibility means working directly in co-creation collaboration with people who have different from your abilities. It means embracing the human condition and working to elevate it. It also means hiring diverse designers with different abilities.
It also means advocating for accessibility across the whole organisation. Make the man feel the menstrual pain and take everyone on a day in wheelchairs! Force developers to experience voice-over in our app for real. Help us all know what a good ALT text is. Teach us how blind musicians learn note notation.
Am I qualified?!
It might be part daunting and part inspiring to read an aspirational summary. Nobody is an ideal representation of all these qualities at all times.
It is not about measuring each in a quantifiable way. It is about having a quality conversation about how we might improve. If any ideas here seem weird, do not hesitate to ask about them. This article is littered with indirect references.
Want to ask me anything? I’m @ilyabelikin on Twitter and many other social media.
There are many books, articles, and documentaries to learn from, but the fast lane to level up is to get rich life experiences and practice design.
