UX designer, it’s time to Unghost yourself
Become more visible and increase your design influence
Do you feel invisible as a User Experience (UX) designer, every now and then? I know I felt like a ghost a few years ago. Again and again, I was asked to deliver wireframes and prototypes (‘asap’). It wasn’t easy to convince stakeholders that we as a team needed to spend more time on applying Design Thinking methodology, which lets you focus on solving complex problems in a highly user-centric way. Things became even tougher when the remote and hybrid work mode kicked in and we all slowly disappeared in the mist.
Nevertheless, I managed to boost my visibility and influence over the last 3 years, managing a big project in applying Design Thinking and empowering a number of colleagues in my team to improve the user-centric way of working. As a consequence, I was named the ‘Customer experience (CX) champion’ in the organisation in 2021 (a nomination for colleagues who show the right mindset and true customer-centric behaviour).
Looking back, it seems that I — without realising it — applied the 5 UX leadership skills mentioned by Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) and operated within the 5 leadership levels from John C. Maxwell, increasing my influence and efficacy.
Let me tell you which leadership skills I applied at which leadership level. I will represent this combination of skills and levels in a new visual representation. I hope it will help you to seize the opportunity to unghost yourself too.
5 UX Leadership skills from NN/g
Last summer I followed an eye-opening training at Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) about UX leadership. It helped me to improve visibility and efficacy in the organisation: it is all about applying the right soft skills.
The life of a designer is about more than delivering artefacts and be an expert in hard skills, such as wireframes and prototypes. It’s also about convincing stakeholders of what your design work could achieve, aside from the artefact it delivers. You need soft skills like empathy, patience and sometimes an effective confrontation to convince others. Delivering good design is important, but really listening and trying to understand other people’s feedback on your designs is just as important.
NN/g states every UX professional should master these soft skills, which are captured within the following 5 essential leadership skills:
a) Driving design vision
b) Communicating ideas and insights and
c) Managing feedback
d) Translating UX into business value
e) Evangelising UX
The good news is practice will teach you to apply these skills. We all can be UX leaders, no matter what your current skills are.
I found out that I applied these 5 skills over the last three years and what really matter is, when and how I applied these skills. To show how my influence progressed in time, we should discuss the 5 Levels of Leadership from John.C. Maxwell. It offers you a roadmap on how to achieve full leadership potential and maximise your influence.
5 Levels of Leadership from Maxwell
Maxwell’s 5 levels of leadership show how your influence can progress as you grow. Each level serves as a building block for the next one. It can help you to assess where you are now, get awareness and decide on which leadership level you are striving for.
The 5 levels of leadership are:
1. Position (based on rights)
People follow you because they have to.
2. Permission (based on relationship)
People follow you because they want to.
3. Production (based on results)
People follow you because of what you have done for the organisation.
4. People Development (based on reproduction)
People follow you because of what you have done for them.
5. Pinnacle (based on respect)
People follow you because of who you are and what you represent.
You don’t have to reach level 5 (Pinnacle) necessarily; it’s totally fine if you want to stay at level 3 (Production) if you find that satisfactory. As I was getting close to the beginning of leadership level 4, I noticed my influence grew and leading became easier.
“Leadership is influence, nothing more nothing less” (Maxwell)
Combining leadership skills with leadership levels
Looking at the relation between the 5 leadership skills from NN/g and the 5 levels of leadership from Maxwell, I was able to pinpoint which particular skills really moved me up the leadership level. The more influence I got, the easier it became to be a coach in the design-thinking methodology and inspire the team to reach for success. As a consequence, it made me more visible in the organisation.
I combined the two theories; leadership skills and leadership levels into a new visualisation to make clear which skills you can apply to increase your influence step by step.
Level 1. Position
Based on your rights, people follow because they have to.
Leading based on Position is the lowest level of leadership — the first reason why people follow you. It’s the only level that requires no effort to achieve. It is leadership based on the rights granted by position and title, like when your are appointed as the lead designer in your team. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, unless it is by title alone. Real influence must be developed in addition to that foundation.
In the project I worked on I did not have influence based on Position; they didn’t have to follow me because they had to. They didn’t even know who I was; I was a service designer stationed in a multidisciplinary team. I was very eager to convince others to follow the ‘right’ design approach, because I had experienced its success in another project. This eagerness is the start of becoming visible without having influence yet.
Which UX leadership skill can help you?
a) Driving design vision
Something that helped me increase my visibility without Position, was talking about vision and overall design direction instead of discussing tasks at hand. When we talk about vision, most people will start to yawn because they are often vague and too general. But a good vision can really inspire a team and drive innovation. With sharing your vision you can describe the full value you are striving for. Vision can propel mutual attraction; Steve Jobs said vision pulls you and can bring people together.
“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” — Steve Jobs
A good vision is at the very least achievable and based on research. You don’t have to make all the decisions while you manage the process, you do this together. NielsenNormanGroup shows a video how you can start small in creating a vision. Would you like to tackle it more thoroughly, read the article in UX Magazine:Creating A Shared Vision That Works.
Which hard skill could you use?
Designers can make this vision tangible, that is our nature. We can provide context where, when and why we serve users in those moments. You can figure out how to create a story from the perspective of a user. Draw, sketch or even use screenshots from other companies for inspirational reasons, that did a good job on the same topic .
Examples
I used storyboards to inspire stakeholders to give clarity and align everyone around the customer contexts they would focus on for the foreseeable future. The storyboard was sent to upper management and really helped to convey what we wanted to achieve. Your team will understand the context better, which leads to a positive impact on your influence as designer.
Level 2. Permission
Based on the relationship people follow you because they want to.
To be able to persuade the team that your ideas are worthwhile, your primary role is not to teach but to listen. You have to understand the purpose of the team and devote time an energy to understand individual persons needs. Include your colleagues, because it is about collaborating with each other and because part of the reason they want you in their team is the relationship you build.
If you include compassion, empathy, and patience while you are b) communicating ideas and insights and c) managing feedback in respond to your designs, people are more willing to follow you because they want to. In other words, they give you Permission to lead them.
Which UX leadership skill can help you?
b) Communicating ideas and insights and c) Managing feedback
You are not an excellent designer when you can’t sell your ideas to stakeholders. Don’t just send your design per email, but communicate persuasively why you made certain design choices. You can build relationships with your team and stakeholders when you are able to b) communicate your ideas and insights in a confident face-to-face meeting, giving people the opportunity to respond and ask follow-up questions. Introduce your designs with solid problem statements and back it up with relevant insights and real evidence you retrieved from research.
Hearing someone respond to your designs is one thing, but truly listening is a skill. To be able to c) Manage feedback in a constructive manner, you need to understand why they are responding to your designs as they do. Hear them out and identify the underlying problem. In the end you don’t care about your perspective but the user’s perspective. During my study in Psychology, I learned that applying active listening skills will enhance empathy and tighten your relationship. You can read more about these skills in 13 steps to actively listen. Trust will grow, which usually leads to respect and more influence.
Which hard skill could you use?
Designers are good storytellers, able to create narratives that can inspire every stakeholder involved. Explain that your wireframes have evolved over time. So don’t just present the idea and the end result- but also show them how it gradually evolved.
Examples
To create a stunning user experience for our users we need to tell the story. A wireframe without context is meaningless. You can best tell the whole story using Customer Journey maps based on real user insights and data.
A journey map is a visualisation of the process that a person goes through in order to accomplish a goal. It helped me to convince my stakeholders to understand which pain points and moment of truths we were trying to solve in the end-to-end journey. Your team will become more customer-centric. When you initiate this, it will do your influence well.
Tip: don’t forget to add the data layer in the customer journey map to validate the problems (pain points and moment of truths) that you distilled from your research.
Level 3. Production
People follow you because of what you have done for the organisation.
This level is about getting things done. If you can produce results and are able to help the team to be effective, you’ll build influence and credibility. People follow, but they do it for something beyond your relationship with them. It’s because you made significant impact to the organisation. If your desire is to climb into this level of leadership, you simply have to produce.
Which UX leadership skill can help you?
d) Translating UX into business value
Some designers focus only on users and how to create the best experience users can get, but a lot of designers lack empathy for the business itself. You should sell your designs by d) Translating UX into business value. Incorporate business value when you present something new. Focus on business losses or what could be gained. Will it increase revenue, reduce development costs and how does it benefit users? Present this impact as part of your wireframe presentation. It shows you really thought things through.
Connect your design with business goals so good UX can become synonymous with good business.
Which hard skill could you use?
Even though everybody knows we should improve UX, it can difficult to ‘sell’ the amount of time we need to spend on it. We are having trouble communicating the impact our role as UX can bring. If your project hasn’t kicked off yet, the value you want to bring can be hypothetical. Secondary research or case studies can help — how did an another company succeed on the same topic?
You can also define Objectives & Key Results (OKRs); they form the missing link between the Vision and actions needed to deliver business impact. The ‘Objectives’ are the qualitative descriptions of what you want to achieve. The ‘Key Results’ are a set of metrics that measure your progress towards the Objective.
Examples
Together with my colleague and service designer Niels Larooij, we created a demo which showed our team’s Vision and promises to create the best end-to-end journey for first home buyers. The demo was based on the ideal customer journey validated by solid research. We demonstrated features we foresaw and released features that improved business value and user experience. For every journey phase we presented the key promise and the actual metrics in relation to the Objective.
This demo was shared in the organisation, outside our team, tribe and even cross-border to show the value we wanted to create. This easy-to-share demo helped tremendously in making us designers more visible. But more importantly, it increased the awareness of the our teams’ successes. Showing what you have done for the organisation, will make people follow you.
Level 4. People Development
People will follow you because what you have done for them.
Your goal at this level is to identify and prepare others to become a leader, by investing in them and helping them grow. You should be able to teach others and reproduce what has worked for you to achieve the amount of influence at this level. According to Maxwell, leaders in level 4 put about 80 percent of their time in developing and leading others, and 20 percent in their own personal productivity. I would suggest to start small and coach 2 or 3 colleagues. You don’t have to coach colleagues within the same design discipline; you can also coach business or IT in having a more user-centered design focus, which will increase your influence and impact.
Which UX leadership skill can help you?
e) Evangelising UX
You can evangelise UX by believing in the teams’ vision and guiding the team in applying the right activities that drive a customer-focused way of working. It requires perseverance to convince others that the focus should be on why are we having the problem, where we can do better and identifying what we should focus on next. We can inspire others and make them feel empowered to be more design-focused and work in a user-centered organisation.
Share how the 5 levels of Design Thinking methodology can be applied: Emphasize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. Despite its name, Design Thinking is not the exclusive property of designers. Design thinking helps the team how to apply human-centered techniques to solve problems in a creative and innovative way.
Keep in mind that Design Thinking is iterative: you use the results to redefine the problems and solutions.
Examples
I trained teams in hands-on methods how to Emphasize and Define users’ needs and problems. I facilitated workshops where we are filling in a Scoping canvas to kick-off projects: it helps the team to get aligned on the initiative and articulate a joint Vision, and while having the user in mind from the start. If questions remain unanswered, additional research is needed (i.e. user research, benchmark study, competitor analysis etc.).
I also trained teams how to create a Customer Journey Map based on solid research: it builds empathy by focusing on the present journey of the user. You need Persona’s and real user insights to track quotes and emotions in your journey, and find the pain points in your current service/product. Your goal should be that your team gains the most thorough understanding possible of the users and their ideal solution.
People will follow you because what you have done for them: making others grow and teaching them how to apply the skills will help you gain more influence and strengthen your UX leadership level. Colleagues felt more empowered to optimise and innovate products, because the method to get there had become more concrete. With these hands-on methods you can show them how they can Emphasize and Define. Consequently, designers got a better understanding of what the focus was and the problem of current users; it made it easier for them to Ideate with the team and challenge assumptions. They could identify the best possible solutions and create an experimental Prototype and Test solutions with users.
Level 5. Pinnacle
People follow you of who you are and what you represent.
The highest level of leadership is very hard to reach. Pinnacle leaders stand out from everyone else. They seem to generate success wherever they go. People follow them because of who they are and what they represent. They earned everyone’s respect and strengthening the positive reputation of their leadership.
Which UX leadership skill can help you?
At this level all 5 Leadership skills are applied in an optimal manner and pushed to another level of impact:
a) Driving design vision for whole departments or companies.
b) Communicating your ideas and insights across teams with different expertise (i.e. designers, developers, business, data analysts etc.) cross countries.
c) Managing feedback towards and from senior managers, country managers or CEO.
d) Translating UX into business value for broad business cases or show ROI from a design department.
e) Evangelise UX in conferences about Design or outside of design, just about banking or health insurances for instance.
Examples
Maybe you have an UX leader in your own company who has followers in-, and outside of your organisation. S/he is a designer whose name is mentioned when an idea pops-up in meetings and everybody asks: ‘Ok did s/he saw it? What was his/her feedback and view on the topic?’
Or at a higher impact level: consider the ‘guru of Web page usability’ (The New York Times) Dr. Jakob Nielson; he has lot of followers and gained a lot of respect and influence. Steve Jobs is a visionary and a genius, who oversaw the launch of revolutionary products such as the iPod and the iPhone. It probably takes years of development and recognition to become a Pinnacle UX leader.
Conclusion
In this article I showed you my new visualisation of how the 5 leadership levels from Maxwell and 5 leadership skills from NN/g are combined, to give you a leadership GPS. I hope this will help you in your own journey on becoming more visible as a designer and gaining more influence.
UX leadership is about growth — of yourself, your relationships and your results. You are able to reproduce your success and teach others about the value of good design. You don’t necessarily have to go way up when it comes to the 5 leadership levels from Maxwell from 1) Position, 2) Permission, 3) Production, 4) People Development up to 5) Pinnacle. Just ask yourself: where am I right now? Really asses yourself and make sure you are fully conscious of what you are striving for.
You must know where you are, to know where you’re going.
Moving up the ladder of the leadership level will come naturally once you can apply all leadership skills from NN/g a) Driving design visions, b) Communicating ideas and insights, c) Managing feedback and d) Translating UX into business value and e) Evangelising UX.
Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there or dive into new situations. Challenge yourself. Get comfortable with the idea ‘I don’t know, but here is how I am going to find out’. Focus on low hanging fruit, what is it you can do to become a better designer right now. I hope this article will act as a kick-starter for you as a UX designer and enables you to unghost yourself and make impact.
For those who can’t get enough of this topic:
FAQ
- Do you need to become a manager to be a leader?
No, leaders are able to set out a vision, to change things, and motivate and enable others to contribute to success. While managers like to control, focus on execution and make sure the day-to-day activities are getting done. Leaders can be managers, but unfortunately not all managers are leaders. - How do you convince stakeholders to join a Vision workshop?
It can be tough to allocate time of the people you want to join a Vision workshop. Try to convince them with a vision statement from another department or from an external company; show them how it helped them to gain user and/or business value. Start with a meeting of 45 minutes and prepare well. The stakeholders will find out they don’t know all the answers to very important questions. They will be thrilled to continue with these discussions and allocate more time for a follow-up meeting. - Can’t you Evangelize UX when you are at leadership level 1 or 2?
It is very hard to evangelise UX when nobody has heard from you and haven’t seen what it can bring. I was shouting from the rooftops to follow the right approach, but only mentioning it without providing proof, wasn’t effective at all. Show them, don’t tell them. Successes from other departments or companies can help, especially when you are not that visible yet. Once you increased your visibility and influence in the organisation and presented successes you worked on, it will be easier to convince others to follow the ideal UX approach.
Many thanks to the interesting NN/g training by Rachel Kraus who gave me insight in which skills made me become more visible in the organisation.
