The One Thing That Drives Product Designers Crazy
Proactive creativity and the misaligned role of design in product development. In 2001, Kerrie Unsworth, a psychology professor and researcher proposed a matrix of four creativity types. Among them were “responsive creativity” and “proactive creativity.” Responsive creativity describes someones ability to come up with a solution to a direct problem where the requirements are clear. Proactive creativity, on the other hand, refers to indirect problems that are ambiguous. More recently (2015) a team in South Korea found correlations between ambiguity in the workplace and proactive creativity. Those with a high tolerance to ambiguity were able to perform at a higher level of proactive creativity.
Switching to product development, Marty Cagan (Inspired) explains there are two main activities for every product team: determining what we should build and how we should build it. Naturally, the engineering team takes it upon themselves to oversee the building and the business goes about making requirements, usually by way of a product manager. Now that the two main activities are sufficiently accounted for, where do we place the designers? The most obvious value is their ability to generate a visual output to aid the engineers in the delivery of the product. Clear requirements come from the product manager to the designer, who creates a document for the engineers to reference. This is a classic example of responsive creativity. While this is a critical element of the product development process, it is not a complete picture. There are several factors at the design level that are often misunderstood. They also deal with ambiguity and proactivity which are hard to measure and quantify, by nature.
The first factor is that, much like the product team, designers don’t measure success by output, but rather by outcomes. Every product leader from Steve Blank, Eric Reis, and Marty Cagan will tell you that the product team must be aligned on measurable outcomes. Jeff Gothelf said the same thing to the design community in his seminal book, Lean UX. However, in the model we described above, the role of the designer is to respond to requirements with an output of designs. A designer that is no longer measuring themselves by output will have difficulty correlating their design output to product outcomes.
Secondly, as a designer matures, their tolerance for ambiguous problems increases. And what can be more ambiguous than figuring out what your product should build next? What are the customers real needs? Will the proposed solution provide real value? Suddenly mature designers realize the answers to these questions become of monumental importance to the success of the product. They also provide a way to measure impact. Combine this with their growing skill for proactive creativity and now the mature designer is not satisfied to stay on the delivery, or responsive, side of the workflow. Anything that can improve the success of the product now becomes of interest. The self assumed, or proactive, responsibilities of the mature designer now become much more broad.
The most common response I get to this description is, “that sounds like a PM, not a designer.” My reply is that a mature designer should be the product mangers best friend when dealing with discovery activities. They are constantly validating assumptions when needed and proactively providing information to aid in the decision making process. Likewise, the mature designer will be a tremendous asset to the development team. To put it succinctly, the designer is a devoted servant of the product.
The problem in most organizations is that this new outlook is not understood and therefore not supported, much less cultivated. Proactive work dealing with ambiguous problems is hard to understand let alone quantify. Responsive work with visual, tangible output is much easier to grasp. So when designers begin to complain about pixel pushing or not being able to perform research, I can see why they are met with confusion. These designers are counseled from industry leaders to demonstrate the value of this new holistic approach (Spool). Many times, resources are required to perform an adequate demonstration. More often than not, the main resource is time itself, which can be the hardest to come by. As one CEO told me when I asked for more time or more help, “how long does it take to draw a button?”
In my experience, the greatest challenge in the UX industry is not a lack of talent and ability among designers, but a lack of knowledge and understanding among organizations to utilize design to its fullest capacity. First and foremost, the designers must have sufficient bandwidth to be proactive. Not only are they serving the development team, they are also assisting with discovery. As an example, not to be prescriptive, a good PM to UX ratio has been 1:1 or 1:2. The rest of the so called “design” resources required can actually be considered general “product” resources. Most of them will require a certain amount of infrastructure or workflow development to be successful. For example, a process to talk to users quickly and efficiently. Or, tools to share design patterns and validate usability with users. Finally, a convenient and easy way to share learnings with the entire product team.
Adequate resources must be provided to preserve proactive creativity. This new outlook must be understood and cultivated by the organization to build a strong design department that can in turn, strengthen the product itself. This is where “a seat at the table” is particularly valuable. An individual at the top of the organization that understands the designers situation and can vouch for them. Someone who is empowered to cultivate the appropriate environment and educate the rest of the organization as needed.
Update: after showing a rough draft of this post to some of my colleagues, one of them sent me Jared Spool’s article on proactive UX, (which I hadn’t read before) that is consistent with my own thoughts here. Find the link below.
Cover photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
