What kind of designer you’d like to be?
I have been asked many times, “so… what kind of designer you want yourself to become?”, by family and friends, by colleagues and managers, and by people who saw the description of my Medium. This has been an important question to me. At the time when I wrote it down two years ago, I could only vaguely sense to the type of designer I’d like myself to be without being able to articulate it. And I have been seriously seeking for the answers since then. Today, when I went back to this question to regularly challenge myself to think through and define my career vision, I see some concrete definitions formed in my head.
Here is my thoughts:
I want to grow myself into a “Designer who …
- thoroughly identifies the fundamental human needs that user/customers have
- thinks holistically about the user groups, the context that various groups are living in, their goals and emotions, and the stakeholders
- thoughtfully designs solutions that are useful, usable, empower individual and society as a whole, and that help the business staying sustainable and produce valuable product/services for human and society.
- prioritizes the user needs and strategically segments the solutions for constantly maintaining and gradually improving the user experience in the agile development process
- influences the cross-functional team/collaborators to work together and bring the vision into life
- has the courage to embrace unknowns and can adapt to new learnings or out-of-control changes, holds the hopes in hands, and pivots to find and try other approaches
I am happily seeing myself being on track and making good progress. Most important is that these objectives and the vision they support have helped me getting my feet back onto the ground again.
The trigger for me to come back to this question was because the frustrations I have been going through in my career lately. When I saw myself being upset, hopeless, confused, and feeling lost, I knew I need to do a reflection and try to make some changes. In my conversation with my manager, he brought up a great point that my frustration is from the feeling of powerless — I have my vision, motivations, reasonings, good faith, and approaches, but feel frustrated because “I can’t push things forward to a better place in a faster speed”. After this conversation, I started to think how to get my power back. And today, I found some clues. The key is going back to the root reason what brought me here and why I am doing this, shifting myself from being too deep into the frustrations to seeing opportunities. I was hit by quote from Sylvia Earle, who is a scientist studying ocean, “Looking at your eyes through the mirror everyday, remember what kind of person you want to become, and putting all your efforts to make that happen.” What a strong inspiration to remind me what is the top priority in life!
I started to recall that I want to become a thoughtful designer for human’s well-being, and I joined my current company is because I wanted to help re-shaping the insurance product/service to gradually become a money-well-spent and a time-well-spent experience for the consumers as why it was initially invented.
This helped me to sort out the conflicts I am going through, and see things I can do. I realized that I have been focusing too much on convincing and winning each debates on design details and design approaches and trying to make my colleagues happy. Although all of these efforts probably will be helpful to the ultimate goal, but I have been too busy handling these granular level headaches to save enough energy for my vision which is bring the value to the users. I felt overwhelmed in the discussions about if a button should be used on a card, if there should be only one filled button on the entire screen, which were disconnected from the users and their needs. I worried about whether I should support the idea of using the left-aligned layout because it shorten the card length or take care of other group’s emotions, and had hard time to find purpose when spending time in the conversation where people argue because most of them are personall preference. The conversation often is based on “personally like or think”, such as the sideways arrow looks odd as part of text-link. I felt emotionally upset when there is someone tried to make an argument and said it loudly ”your husband had problem with can’t represent the consumer group.”, when in a situation where getting some unbiased feedback from a potential user before a build has been a challenge.
After thinking theough, I think, although I’ve been emphasizing almost everytime when there is an opportunity, I should speak up more than we should conduct user research and usability study more often and earlier. And in the argument of if the feedback should be valued, I should have spoken up my rationale that “Getting feedback from even one person is better than zero feedback. And Yes. We can’t make conclusion that majority of users have usability problems until testing with larger groups of users, but it shows the problem in this non-biase testing. And it leads us into a bigger question, which is if there is an only a very small group of users who have problem with the system, should we ignore the frustration? your argument sounds like the answer is “Yes”, and the reason is because they are minority? Well, Yes. We probably can argue that the priority can be ranked as low if our target is to focusing on the existing user group instead of user growth, but we can’t argue that this is an issue for this person and potentially for others who share the same mental and behavior model. This is also relevant to a classic popular question in the ethical, psychological, and political discussions: trolley problem. As a designer who cares about human experience, I’d like to constantly look for solution that works for more people, aiming to work for all.” But at that moment, I felt I was out of energy to fight the fight, although I knew that I will still hold my design principles and look for the solution that will solve that problem. Being pulled into multiple directions and looking for a solution that meets everyone’s opinions and expectation internally deepen my feeling of powerless.
Thinking this through, I realized I have lost my target — users, the audience who is the center of the design and who I care the most as an individual And designer, while I was so deep into managing expectations from peers and stakeholders internally. And as a consequence, I lost my point of view of being objective, and the decision making process becomes way more complicated than it is supposed to be. I put too much attention and emotion into fitting into the team culture, protecting my design peers’ reputation, taking care of my teammate’s emotion. And all of them are linked as a chain, triggers my deeper but not so related worries — job security and visa status, which sounds a little ridiculous now.
“When adding things to your life doesn’t give you any value, try subtracting them.”
“When adding things to your life doesn’t give you any value, try subtracting them.” So I went back to this root question — who do you want to be and what is more important to you, and I started seeing things fading away. Not saying things I mentioned above are not important; they are very important to me as an individual, and there are many scientific research explaining why things mentioned above can matter to individual’s happiness and quality of life. But when I think through that the things adding value into my life are user’s happiness and peaceful minds, a lot of frustrations that bother me start fading away. And to help myself staying physical, mentally, and emotional healthy matters too (!), so that the upset feelings also start fading away. The frustrations become challenges for me to conquer, and I feel being empowered again.
As a designer who is truly motivated by people’s happiness and peaceful minds, I take in the responsibility to advocate for the users of technological products or services, for the consumers of commercial products or services, and for human’s well-being. When getting back to my vision, it becomes clear again that I should focus on the results delivering to the users by being adaptive to the circumstances. If, to deliver a good experience, the situation needs me to build relationships to bring folks who haven’t been thinking about customers or users on board, I will think about ways to build the relationships; if influencing others by stepping out and having tough conversation is necessary, I will take in the uncomfortableness to do it. If the situation doesn’t give sufficient time to think through a solution that would work in various possible use cases, I will spend as much times as I can outside of the given time, and work on building the shared-understanding and determine the approaches that allow for the necessary time spent to understand problems and think-through. If I need to acquire a new skills or build up understandings of the context or business, I will do it. This is the type of designer I admire and want myself to grow into. I know I am on track.
