Be prepared to work hard because design is hard.
My first mentor on ADPList is Michael Tam, Global Design Director at IBM iX. In 60 minutes, I learned valuable lessons from Michael. Let us take a peek at my key takeaways.
How did it all begin?
Michael studied marketing, information system, and eCommerce back in university. After he graduated, Michael worked as an Art Director in the advertising industry before joining IBM iX as UX Design & Creative Lead in 2016.
I spent eight years in advertising before pivoting into UX design. Now I am part of the consulting arm of IBM, and I moved from just UX & UI to working on service design, business design, and strategy.
You mentioned a lot about the importance of writing. Why?
Writing is a good practice for storytelling and communication, and they are critical for designers.
Communication comes from your thinking. The more you write, the better you think. And guess what, the better you communicate.
But the truth is, not a lot of designers like to write.
Some visual designers are even scared of writing. Often they struggle to find words that go with their aesthetic expressions.
Little do they know that usually, the very best visual designers are great with words, like the legendary George Lois.
Recommended read by Michael
George Lois is an art director best known for designing the covers for Esquire magazine in the 60s and 70s.
In this book, George said, word first, visual later. He believes in writing the idea rather than trawling randomly for visual inspiration. Start with the Word, George said that is his first commandment.
What George Lois attracts Michael is the simplicity in his book.
I am not a very good reader, but I love books written by great visual communicators because they tend to have a way to keep things simple and find a balance between visuals and words.
What Michael teaches his mentees
Every mentee is looking for different support from the mentor, and Michael never ceases to spot every mentee’s different needs.
As a young designer, you hear a lot of different opinions about how you should do your portfolio, and how you should approach job hunting. It seems like all the boot camps and courses out there have a certain way about it. And sometimes I don’t see it that way, so hopefully, the advice I give them is a little bit different, which gets them to think a little bit differently as well.
Young designers have been so desperate to get into the industry, and they would look at the portfolio, they want to make sure they’ve done everything, but then they haven’t gotten the chance to step back a little bit and ask themselves does it really answer the question of what’s in it for me? As a user, why do I have to use this application? Why do I need to buy into this service?
What about Michael’s gains as a mentor on ADPList?
I get to hear stories from designers with diverse backgrounds. They bring different life experiences to our conversations and that is important for me.
It’s learning for the mentees but also learning for Michael.
Connecting with young designers keeps me in sync with all the latest technologies. At the very same time, it gives me an insight into the challenges young designers face nowadays, and I think that is my biggest takeaway.
It’s hard to put business and UX on the same table.
I think we are at a stage where the maturity of the global market of business sees value in design. It also means the business has a higher demand for the skill set of designers, they have high expectations of designers, and they expect them to be able to be a part of the business.
We are not artists, we are designers, which means you are not there just to make things pretty. Even at a junior level, you are there to be able to communicate the value of your design. And I think that’s the biggest gap.
Globally, as a whole average, the maturity has improved. That means you probably don’t need so much effort to convince a business or stakeholder that it is important to think about the user, but you probably need to spend a lot of effort to guide them, advocate and guide them.
It’s always not what but why.
Henry Ford, who built the first car, once said, “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Instead of asking what users want, we should instead ask why.
People understand it’s important to listen to the user, but they don’t know how to listen to it, or they don’t know how and why you need to go for a certain approach so that design can actually bring value to the product.
The basic and most important value of UX design is identifying the pain points of users, and that’s how we create a product or tool that is really valuable and usable. This is what we are taught in school, but design in real life is far beyond this.
Be prepared to work hard because design is hard.
Design is hard because there is no right or wrong answer.
This is my favorite quote from Michael, and it’s so true. A lot of time, our work is not just solving user problems but meeting all the different stakeholders’ needs while there is no one single answer.
You have nothing to lean on. You need to be able to justify, and not just the nature of design is hard, but also the industry. The discipline of design is hard because we’re in an era where all the different design disciplines merge and are interconnected.
We aim at creating simple and easy-to-use products but the design process behind is never simple and easy. And I believe for Michael and other UX designers, that’s what makes this role so challenging and fascinating at the same time.
🤙 Feel free to book a call with Michael on ADPList: https://adplist.org/mentors/michael-tam
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