Design Tips in Less Than 3 Min — Give your job away…
This is part of a series meant to give Design Tips as I experience them for other prospective Designers. These Tips should not feel groundbreaking, but a “back to the basics” aura should exist around them.
In my time of Design I have observed something troubling amongst Designers — They want to keep their jobs to themselves.
Design is an inherently democratic and inclusive process.* What I mean by this is that your Designs should be the product of multiple people, not just your own intuition. The level of collaboration may be up to you and have a variety of different restraints from resources, to time, to emotional energy etc.
However, I still find that getting others involved in the Design process is the best way to not just advocate for the power of Design Thinking at your organization, but to improve your designs. You see, we all have our owns biases, prejudices, and mental models…this can lead to patterns of thought and even repeatable offenses in our designs (don’t be hurt by this, your mental model is not wrong but it can create patterns in your Design you don’t often see).
By inviting others (Devs, QA, Product, Marketing etc.) into the process, we invite our Designs to mature and roam freely outside of our intentions and desires. It also pushes us to be better communicators and documentarians of our process in order to bring others alongside us.
I will close with this brief story: I recently got the opportunity to co-lead a Design Session with a variety of people from across the org. After spending time in the Problem Space, our representative from Marketing made some astute observations about the Problem Space. “I think we keep saying ‘cost’ as in money, but I am seeing users talk about the ‘cost’ in reference to time.” Bingo.
Our Marketer was on the money, and observed something that hadn’t crossed my mind yet on how our users spoke about “cost” and “spending”. Who knows how long we would have spent circling the same topic over and over again, if we didn’t have a variety of people in the room?
Bottom Line: Don’t let your insecurities or fear of inviting others into the Design Process keep you from seeing the beauty of collaboration. In fact, give your job away. Sometimes as Designers, we guide conversations around Design instead of breaking out Figma. Design is inclusive enough to include collaboration and conversation with those who don’t think like you.
*NOTE: My choice of “democratic” here isn’t to say there won’t be times you as a Designer need to make the final say. This goes without saying, especially in younger organizations. However, despite you maybe having the final seal of approval, we should still make room at the table of Design for other’s voices to be heard.
