One of the main mantras of design these days is to be user-centered. This roughly boils down to talking with people who will use your product, understanding their needs, and designing products and services that are easy for said users to, well, use. All this talk about users has left out one very important person in the design process: you. At the end of the day, your work is about you.

Well, not about you per se, but rather your connection to the problem you’re solving. This connection often comes from sniffing out problems that have meaning or personal significance to you. Here’s the thing: despite what the 400 x 300 pixel shots on Dribbble may lead you to believe, the best work has nothing to do with aesthetics.

Now, I’m not advocating ugly products. It’s just that making something pretty can often obscure the deep flaws in a product, and distract from the fact that you don’t have a nuanced understanding of the problem space. Or, more alarmingly, the fact that you’re solving a problem that doesn’t really need to be solved. I won’t name names, but I’m sure you can think of a beautiful product or two that makes you go hmm…

Aesthetics are something you earn the right to care about. Like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the top is meaningless until you have tackled the more fundamental issues. In the case of design, perfecting the pixels on the wrong problem is like putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.

Here’s the part where I stand on my Silicon Valley soapbox and implore my fellow designers to stop thinking about users for just a minute.

Think, instead, about you. And whether the work you’re doing is something that matters. Matters to you. Matters to your friends and family. And, if I may be so bold, matters to the world.

I’m aware of so few startups in our little tech bubble that are solving problems that are truly meaningful. Now, I’m not saying every designer needs to work at a nonprofit, cure sick people, educate children or fix our government, although those are common areas for designers looking to do good. As an aside — if you’re interested in these fields, I’d recommend checking out this list of companies doing good from Deena Rosen at Opower, a company fighting climate change.

But it’s about more than finding a company with a mission. In addition to the industries listed above, there are also plenty of meaningful problems out there that are decidedly unsexy — enterprise software, anyone? — but vitally important to many people in their daily lives. The trick is understanding what problems out there resonate with you, because that will be where you do your best work.

One major blindspot in Design Thinking is purpose. There’s so much focus on identifying user needs and coming up with clever solutions that it’s easy to overlook the basic question of whether the problem is worth solving in the first place.

Personally, I choose to work on projects with a bigger vision. I know I’m not the only one who thinks Silicon Valley needs to step up our ambitions. I’ve spoken with numerous designers over the past years, disillusioned with the options they have for startups to work with. Peter Thiel of Founders Fund famously declared:

“We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was 140 characters.”

Last fall I started sharing my thoughts on Design, and critiquing elements of the current design thinking culture in Silicon Valley. In the midst of putting together this post about using design for good, my older sister, Sarah, entered hospice care. Suddenly, sharing my thoughts with the design community were less important than reminiscing on my family’s CaringBridge website and spending time with family. Sarah died last Thanksgiving from a congenital heart defect related to a genetic disorder called Rubinstein Taybi Syndrome.

My sister’s genetic disorder has been a guiding force throughout my career. While I believe design research can bring you close to users of your product, nothing substitutes from the visceral understanding that comes from solving a pain you personally have felt.

I direct a Product Design team at a DNA testing company, helping other families to avoid the same kind of story my own family has lived through. While it has been a rough last year, there has also been a poignancy to using my sadness to inspire my work. Many of my colleagues have similar stories — a mother who died from breast cancer, a friend in gradeschool with cystic fibrosis, or a cousin who died in infancy from SMA. That kind of connection gives us insights that Google Analytics, A/B testing, user interviews and other research methods never could, and inspires us to do good work even as we’re iterating on the same part of the product for the upteenth time. I feel privileged that I am able to do work that I believe in, since that connection inspires me to do my best.

I share my story, the sadness over the loss of my sister, in the hopes that it can inspire others out there to take on big challenges that are meaningful to you. You only have one life to live. Spend it doing work you feel good about. The users will thank you.