Kill Your Baby

Designers and Their Egos

Published in

Digital Media Design Solutions

5 min readJan 23, 2016

In the book Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge, he says that “It is very difficult to be a good designer without having a big ego.”

So does that mean all designers have huge egos?

Numerous blogs littered across the internet seem to think so. And unlike Moggridge, the majority’s opinion is that a designer’s ego is more of a hindrance than an asset. Bruce Nussbaum says that “designers suck because they are arrogant.” Another blog published by a Tokyo-based studio, storm from the east, asks “Is Everyone Involved in Design an Arrogant Jerk?” Designers seem to have a bad reputation for being a little too arrogant, and several articles out there posit that an inflated ego impairs your ability to create great solutions.

How does your ego get in the way of great designs?

Every designer begins with little process, floundering to figure out how best to approach design problems. Over time, they learn processes that allow them to succeed and pick up methods to work more efficiency. For example, the following is a potential process for development:

Gather insights and constraints
Make personas and list out scenarios
Come up with numerous low fidelity ideas
Low fidelity mockups
Interactive prototypes
Coded high fidelity version
Reiterate and reiterate

After following this procedure for a number of successful projects, these now-seasoned designers start to abandon processes. It happens all the time. It is a subtle process deterioration that creeps up on designers as they begin to believe they are mastering their craft. It is when the designer starts to think “I’ve been doing this for a while. I’m an awesome designer! I know what the users want”. It is when designers stick with their first design idea rather than thoroughly vetting a plethora of ideas to come up with the best one. It is when designers forego the initial “boring stages” of the design process and skip straight to the high fidelity prototypes and code without deeper consideration for the true users. It is when designers think that they are good enough to fast track through the process and still come up with the same quality results. For the majority of designers, they’re wrong.

It is ego-driven laziness.

UX design is not art

Art primarily serves the artist. It is a vehicle of self-expression. It serves others as an after effect through inspiration or a demonstration of what is possible. Design, on the other hand, first serves the client or user. Design is always a service to someone else. A designer’s opinions about the aesthetics or functions of the product solution is always secondary to the client’s needs.

“Art is profoundly ego driven; design should not be.” — Keith Bryant

Artists feel personally bonded to their work. They create something personal and it translates to an almost parental responsibility and attachment to their end product. But UX design is not art; art is merely one aspect of it. Art can only be applied to UX design to the extent that it improves the presentation of content for users to accomplish their goals.

Design is not about self-expression or demonstrating creativity. Assuming that UX design is just art undermines its more concrete underlying motivations. It is born of research and as a result, may be considered closer to science or business. It utilizes the scientific method, and serves business and user goals.

What is ego?

Ego is the line between possessive and passionate. The more a person sees a product as “theirs”, the less they perceive it as a product of the team. But a project benefits most from teamwork and collaboration. The strongest project solutions are always a result of multiple iterations and input from others.

Working alone as a designer in a pursuit of perfection is exponentially more difficult than working in a team because lone designers tends to get tunnel vision. They come to believe that their solution must be the right one. They fall in love with their own ideas too quickly and too deeply. As a result, these designers risk creating designs that they love alone but do not resonate with other people, namely their clients and their users.

There is no “me” in “design”. Design is a collaborative and repetitive effort. Constructive criticism should be a welcomed part of the process because growth and improvement is a product of honest feedback. A good designer should be able to kill their own ideas in favour of better design choices that is more beneficial for the project as a whole. In other words, you need to be able to “kill your baby”.

Design is not about you

There is no place for your ego at work. But some might say that ego is what provided direction. What now? Without your ego, empathy — for your users, stakeholders and teammates — should be your new compass.

Good designers do not defend themselves; they defend their users. Personal opinions take the back seat to the primary user-focused goals of the design challenge. As a designer, you need to question your assumptions and intentions: “Do I want to include this element because it is good for the user or because I personally like it? Is my process truly better for the team or do I simply not want to adopt someone else’s?”

In the place of subjective judgement and intuition should be data and metrics. No matter how good a designer becomes, experience is not a replacement for hard data. While an artist might choose colours of paint based on gut feeling, UX designers use an array of research methods to infer the best design decisions for their users. But does that mean there is no creativity in design? Of course not. After all, data still needs interpretation. However, designers need to prevent confirmation bias by keeping their user personas in prime focus rather than falling back on personal opinions.

Designing without your ego at the forefront is not the same as designing without confidence or not caring about the design. Again, passion and ego are distinctly different. But designing for users, especially when the users are different from yourself, requires empathy and humility. Designers need to deflate their egos, accept that they don’t know everything, and admit that they may not know what is best for their users. Only with the right balance of confidence and humility can designers come up with effective solutions.

“Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity. Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer.” — Clay Shirky of NYU’s ITP program