How to be a Product Designer. Excerpts form the Blindfeed Podcast

What if we could build a world in which 99% of people go home every day feeling they created work that matters?
At Blindfeed podcast we talk with people who figured out how to better understand themselves and the people they work, live and play with.
Here are some excerpts from the last episode: we talked with Liam, product designer at Blindfeed, about the meaning and responsibility of design and everyday struggles designers face.

I went to Birmingham to study as a visual identity designer focusing on a branding area. It was a new country and I had too much fun at first, so I failed the first semester. I realized I just didn’t work hard enough and I couldn’t go back home to Hong Kong like that. I also understood that I failed because I didn’t have passion for branding and visual identity anymore. At that point I met Robert, a tutor in the master course at the University and he mentioned user experience design and how it is about how you design things for people and how you make it easier for people, how you make people think less while interacting with the product. At that point it somehow clicked in my mind and I became really interested in the studies, asked lots of questions during lectures and ended up among the best students.

What does product design mean to you?

It means a lot. After I got into product design I also started to think differently and see things differently. Rather than just seeing some beautiful things and trying to steal or copy them, you start to think about why are they so beautiful, are they just aesthetically or also functionally beautiful. So what design means to me is the thinking behind it, it is not just the action, but also the way to analyse and observe things.

What are the most common mistakes you see companies make when it comes to design?

I think that quite often people do not realise that design thinking is really messy. If you just google ‘design thinking’ you will see nice looking diagrams, orderly shapes and double diamonds, but when it comes to the actual process of asking questions and searching for solutions it can get messier than you expected. We are looking for the best possible solutions to the problem, and quite often people do not put enough time or preparation into it. People want to say ‘After two weeks we will have this, after four — that will be ready’. But the actual design process never stops. Even after you launch you continue with user testing, search for better solutions and iterate.

And the second mistake is about technology: many companies focus on technology to solve the problem, but when you apply design thinking you might find out that the answer to that problem doesn’t need technology. Companies kinda know that they have to get a design team and have a design strategy, but at the same time are conscious of the fact, that it maybe possible to solve their problem without using the technology.

We recently discussed that it can be really hard for people of creative professions to receive feedback well. Why do you think it is so?

I must say it was really hard for me as well. I guess this is because people share their perspective on the work that you created, and you take it too personally, as if they were attacking you. But after joining Blindfeed I realized that people want to share their opinion because they are curious and because they want to help you. I came to this realization while reading a book, ‘Thanks For The Feedback’, totally recommend it to everyone.

Now lots of people are addicted to their phones more than to some hardcore drugs. And they get sucked in by the mechanisms that we as a tech company develop to bring them back in, because this is how the industry sees growth. How do you see the responsibility of design to promote mental digital health?

I guess the industry came to this realization just recently. For the past years our mission as designers was to create product as addictive as possible. So we ended up in the world that constantly demands your attention. I think now our responsibility as designers is to find answers to meaningful problems rather than creating addictions: you help people tackle their challenges but it doesn’t mean that they need to come back to the product 24 hours a day.

Learn to say ‘no’ to things, or rather learn not to say ‘yes’ all the time. As a designer you need to be honest with yourself and know your capacity. You can’t say ‘yes’ to everything and keep up the quality. If you really want to do something meaningful you can’t agree to everything on the spot.

You can listen to the whole episode on Simplecast or Stitcher. Subscribe for more interesting conversations and let us know what topics you’d like to get covered in the next episodes.