What’s similar between the Dead Sea and Product Designers.
Have you ever been to the Dead Sea?
This is what it looks like on Google and probably in your heads.
“The lowest place on Earth”, mysterious, otherworldly…
Stop…Dead Sea is a psoriasis fest inside a smelly sulfur puddle. The air is above 35 °C, the water is around 30. It’s hot and oily because of all the minerals in it.
The second you step in it feels like you are walking inside a pot of minestrone.
Apparently it’s good for your skin, but nobody knows for sure.
If you’re among the group who values eyesight, then you probably don’t want to dunk your eyeballs into saline-grade water.
Not a single town or place to go around. No entertainment besides smearing mud all over your body.
Hordes of retired Russians (it is particularly popular among them for some reason), some hummus and an occasional camel — that’s all you get. Oh yes, there is this spot for a nice selfie, I’ll give it that.
Have you ever seen a Designer?
I mainly refer to a product one formerly known as UI/UX.
This is one of the first designer photos you can find on Google.
Design thinking, sticky notes, wireframes and meet-ups with small plates and veggie-burgers…
Nope…in reality designers occupy that sweet spot between what the business wants and what the developers or manufacturers cannot do. We pretend like we actually matter but unlike in most of the stories you can read on Medium — designers rarely have a seat at the table where grown-ups make all the important decisions. They are always less important than any other parts of the business and the executive team — hey CFO’s, COO’s, CPO’s, CTO’s, and any other chiefs out there. They always need to learn the wisdom of other professionals on the team (designers need to code, designers need to understand business….why developers and the guys on Operations don’t need to learn design then if it is so important?). Oh yes, they are allowed to have nervous breakdowns, tattoos and an above-average percentage of women in senior positions.
See the similarity? Nurtured by hype and great PR, both are marketing phenomenons and in reality, are very different from the initial promise. The purpose of this article is to prepare the designers who are entering the world of tech to the realities of the job (which besides everything mentioned above is still fuckin awesome). Help them to not set unrealistic expectations and work on the practical skillset that really matters and not the one the privileged few from a handful of companies brag about on their personal blogs just to create an even larger distortion of reality.
- Learn how to find your ways inside Mixpanel/Amplitude/Google Analytics or any other tool that can give you access to data. BI people and Product Managers are always busy and if you want to learn how your product performs, and you do want to know how your product performs, you need to become familiar with these.
- Learn the developer’s jargon. You don’t need to code, all you need is to love your developer and the developer will love you back. Think of it as a pilot (developer) and navigator (designer).
- Practice your multiplying by 2. Every estimate that you get from the developers is always underestimated by half. That’s the general rule of thumb. If your team delivers on time, cherish this team, carry their photos in your wallet and buy them matcha lattes.
- Avoid Sketch vs Figma vs XD vs whatever the fuck you use discussions. When taking an Uber from your dealer to your partner does it matter if it’s a Prius or a Camry? The only thing that matters is to get their safe, on time, don’t lose your reality-altering chemicals and avoid long and pointless conversations with the driver. Figmas and Sketches of this world will all do the job. Invest your energy somewhere else.
- Do you want to schedule a usability session with a customer (you really should)? Start getting comfortable with the logistics behind it. Call, schedule, follow up, think of an incentive, approve it with the money person on your team….I have never met a Senior Usability Scheduler person in my life. It all falls on your shoulders.
- Run retros for each feature your release and critically review the process and the result. Get feedback from your teammates, customers and stakeholders and learn how can you get better the next time. Obviously hitting KPI’s and metrics is important but also how you got there and the number of casualties in the process.
- Stop always looking for a reference from similar products and avoiding new solutions to familiar problems. Blind copying of one another’s solutions can’t really make the experience better. When parents are blood relatives, there is a higher risk of disease and birth defects, stillbirths, infant mortality and a shorter life expectancy. I’m not saying we need to test user’s adaptability with every feature we release, but please remember that imagination, invention and innovation are not terminal diseases and your solutions can be something the world has never seen before. That’s what you have usability sessions for. Just fuckin test and improve and test and improve and test and improve…
