UX Designers: 6 Traps to Recognize and Avoid

I’ve worked with dozens of user experience designers in my role as a design leader for firms like Whirlpool, Microsoft and Roku. When I reflect on what distinguishes the best designers from the also-rans, it’s not just their experience and skills that come to mind. The best designers actively create a design-friendly work environment that helps them and the team deliver top quality work. They do this in part by recognizing and avoiding six common work environment traps that can unknowingly and subtly compromise philosophy, focus, and design solutions:

• Designing as a service
• Designing for your boss
• Designing to impress colleagues
• Designing to be the Hero
• Designing without a foundation
• Designing against company culture

Designing as a service

While design cultures vary from company to company, inevitably the individual people working with you and making requests will each have their own ideas of what you do and how to work with you. For the many who really don’t understand design or have not worked with an effective design team, the requests may be prescriptive or come in the form of solutions. Each time you comply with these incoming requests you reinforce invalid assumptions about your role. You quickly become a service waiting to be told what to do and defining your role according to these incoming requests.

This trap is especially problematic if you are a new starter, because you’re more likely to have adopted a strategy of fitting-in to please your new co-workers. If you’re straight out of school, you may not know how to integrate design effectively with a company’s existing processes, so you do what Product Managers, Engineers, and others ask of you. Many design agencies and consultants fall into this same trap when they simply do what they’re told, mistakenly believing it will make their clients happy.

Experienced designers know their role, the value they can offer, and the impact they can make. None of that, however, comes from being told what to do or how to do it. Instead, it is your job to teach others to come to you with the “what” and “why“: the goals, problems and opportunities. They bring the problem but you deliver the solution. Then, instead of being tied to a prescribed solution, you’ll have the freedom to address the situation using your design skills. You, your project, and your company/client will ultimately be more successful when your solutions address the goal, problem or opportunity. This is the difference between doing what you’ve been asked to do vs. understanding the problem or goal to be addressed so you can really apply your expertise.

Designing for your boss

Getting opinions, input, and ideas from your supervisor and key stakeholders is an important part of doing effective design. But a problem arises when you start asking yourself what your [insert name of important person here] will like or approve — and you find yourself beginning to design for him/her. While getting approval from key people can seem like the path of least resistance, don’t fall into that trap. Remember your job, role, and value is to always design for end users: not your supervisor or manager.

Designing to impress colleagues

When you’re under pressure, it’s easy to change the motivation of your work from creating the best solutions for end users to creating solutions to win approval or recognition. If you’ve ever been under a watchful eye and people are judging you, you may find yourself thinking, “This will impress them”. That’s a warning sign and another trap. Your focus has strayed from the real goal. Resolve to focus on the problem and the goals, and to address them with the best solutions for the end users.

Designing to be the Hero

Resist the urge to be the Genius Designer; the one who disappears into a dark room, emerging some time later as a savior with the proclaimed solution. The more you isolate yourself, the more likely you are to become wedded to a poor solution. Thinking of yourself as a genius is the antithesis of teamwork and a design philosophy based on iteration. So stay visible and get feedback early and often from the smallest possible investments. Make lots of smaller course corrections quickly. In my experience, genius designers and big-ego designers do not engender great teamwork or design culture. Read more: The Myth of the Genius Designer

Designing without a foundation

Whenever you are under time pressure, you may find yourself skipping critical steps. You’ll forget the upfront research, or problem definition and framing, or user scenarios and instead, jump straight into ideation or concept creation. Einstein famously said, “If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” The point is that skipping steps in the process, especially upfront foundational steps, does not actually save time or effort. You will simply pay even more for the problems you’ve inadvertently pushed downstream. Instead of skipping steps, you should have a consistent design framework that you can expertly scale based on available time and resources.

Designing against company culture

Many times, the culture or environment within which you work is imperfect. You may get discouraged and frustrated. This may reduce your passion and lead to unmotivated and uninspired design work; or it may lead to being overly defensive about your work; or worse yet, it may lead to excessive negativity that will become very hard to shake off over time. Excessive complaining can actually rewire your brain for negativity!

I’m not suggesting that you simply give up and accept working in a less-than-ideal design environment. However, trying to immediately uproot everything can seriously backfire. So the real challenge is how to be respectful enough to the team and the company by acknowledging you have a lot to learn about the company and its culture, while at the same time being able to stretch your wings and help change the way things work and the way people think. This dilemma brings to mind an analogy…

In the old coal mines of Wales the pit roofs were supported by timber beams. Over time these beams would rot, weaken and need to be replaced. But when putting in new pit props they would never take out the old ones. Instead they would put the new props in place next to the old ones and let the old ones fall away on their own.

I think it’s a good analogy for an effective way to steadily change culture. Charging in like gangbusters and knocking everything down can only risk the roof falling in (on your career if nothing else). Instead, by introducing new ideas and practices alongside the old ones, you can have influence without appearing arrogant or disruptive, while letting old practices fall away over time.

So don’t design against the culture, but rather design within the culture. Change your perspective, and understand that you were not hired to be a designer working in an ideal environment. You were hired to be an effective designer within the company’s existing culture. This means establishing credibility and showing value first. Then, along the way, as a positive and constructive change agent you spend that credibility to effect change and continue to show how that change has increased value. This becomes a positive feedback loop: your change will create more value, leading to more credibility, enabling more change, leading to more value, and so on.

Summary

If you’re struggling to move forward in your current role, use this as a checklist to identify situations or traps that you may have unknowingly fallen into. Because, like any good design process, identifying the problem is always a great first step.

 

Many thanks to David Travis of UserFocus and Philip Hodgson of Blueprint Usability for their terrific input and help on this article.