Design seems to be at the centre of everything. Huge tech giants such as AirBnB, Apple, Google all champion design for their success. Yet, even the most senior designers struggle to describe where they add value to companies.
A few weeks ago, this headline from Fast Company where design leader John Maeda said ‘Design is not that important’ caused an uproar. As you can imagine, #designtwitter was flooded with keyboard warriors.
Most designers work at companies who want to grow. Whether that’s to drive profit, time to market or innovation — design has a big role to play in making that a success. But, the conversation around design is often immature and focused on the wrong thing.
inVision recently released a report outlining 5 levels of ‘Design Maturity’ in organisations. Ranging from designers who are straight-up producers (Level 1) to designers who drive business strategy and growth (Level 5). All these levels are important. The biggest impact on business goals came from the more mature organisations . Yet they only made up 5% of companies surveyed.
The more ‘design mature’ a company, the less emphasis there is on traditional “design”. I read a blog from the team at Automatic which describes the role design has to play as ‘Best supporting actor’. This might be uncomfortable reading for some designers — but I think it’s a blessing.
As well as producing quality deliverables, it’s our job to make sure the whole picture comes together. We do this whilst not stealing the spotlight. Our goals are the teams goals. Design is only used when it can support the bigger picture. A big part of this is to help make sure great design happens, even if we’re not involved. That means putting our ego’s aside.
Our role is one of support as much as it is delivering. We can relieve all the pressure of having to ‘be right all the time’ or come in as a ‘creative superstar’. We can ditch the idea you need to create a UX lab and run 6 months worth of discovery research to get anything done. We can stop making design so complicated and opaque. We can stop worrying about our stupid job titles.
At Mindera, we explain this to all the designers we hire. All our designers know that we work in cross-functional teams. Design has a huge role to play in this. It’s integral for us to learn how we can better support our product and engineering teams.
The simplicity and focus of our task is refreshing. Our service is to our users, to our team and to the business. We’re George Harrison. We’re Buzz Aldrin. We’re Heath Ledger in Batman.
Shine on, you crazy diamonds.
We’re hiring a UI/UX Design at our Leicester office in the UK. Apply here: https://minderacraft.workable.com/jobs/468519
