Designing things is great. Regardless of your title — UX designer, UI Designer, Information Architect, Illustrator — I know you agree. For those of us fortunate to make a living doing this, we know the job comes with its issues as well. Tough clients, creative block, Adobe products frequently crashing (seriously?).
However, I want to take a few minutes out of your time to highlight an issue bigger than all of these things. You. It takes a certain level of knowledge, personality, and drive to be an effective designer. We are detailed oriented. We obsess over kerning, colour, spacing and the such. Yes, these things matter. But after all that tinkering, what’s the point if you can’t sell it?
When we present design, we often do not have the luxury of presenting to other designers. In reality, we are presenting to marketing departments, developers, accountants etc. We are literally presenting to anything other than a designer. What we often fail to do is not speak their language. We speak our own. The presentation does not go up to expectations, clients ask to make changes that we know will break the design, and we end up being flustered.
What I suggest and what I learned the hard way, is we as a collective need a paradigm shift. We often feel that we are misunderstood and that the client just doesn’t understand. “Why can’t they just see why I’m right?” We are asking the wrong questions. Rather, we should always ask “How can I make them understand the benefits of my design?”
Speak benefits. Speak about your design in terms of conversion possibilities. Accessibility ratings. Best practices. Competitor differentiation. Align it with business goals. Align it with pre-created personas. Speak the language of the business you are in and your design will begin to sell itself.
Design strategy is the buzz word these days but it carries a lot of merit. I believe this is where we need to go. While this article is very brief, it highlights the importance in the mindset shift we need to adopt.
In summary:
- Define your design by what it accomplishes
- Understand who you are speaking to. Speak their language
- Above all: keep your execution simple at all costs.
Things like this are critical lessons I learn as I made my career shift from freelance design at a small level, to large scale professional design that makes impression on millions of users. I hope to continue highlighting things I learn on my path because I love the creative community online and think we all should do our part to contribute in some way.
Catch me at: www.aadilkhan.com
