Kindle Notes & Highlights
crafting ideas can be a solitary process, but bringing ideas to the world requires relationships and organizations where designers are not in control
What we call designing is mostly advising.
“Being a designer is mostly just making people feel good about decisions that have already been made.”
There are roughly 400,000 professional UX, web, and graphic designers in the United States.10 With a working-age population of 130 million, we are a mere .03%.
incorrect expectations about most workplaces, including: Design skill is already valued and leaders know how to leverage it Everyone knows the basics of good design principles There is a healthy process for making project-level decisions The organization is free from chronic cultural and political tensions People will readily give up the favorite parts of their jobs to us People will readily give up their sense of heroship and its rewards Leaders will quickly trust us with strategic decisions Old, self-reinforcing, and biased systems of incentives will change upon our arrival
Decision-making in the real world is a social process, not a solitary one. This means design is usually a social process too, even if it’s just between a visionary solo designer and their fancy client.
Your success as a designer depends as equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent. The powerful people you need as allies, or your clients, will likely know little about design, and you will have to teach and persuade them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built by your organization. Your ability to explain your design ideas and convince people to use them is equally as valuable as your creativity.
To be a good designer, you have to be half-psychologist.”
Early in this book we shared that designers have the power of skepticism: we are gifted with the ability to find flaws in things so they can be fixed. A more positive way to look at the same ability is by labeling it as idealism.
The warning sign that idealism has gone too far is the use of the word should. This is a dangerous word because it presumes a convenient, super-powerful authority is waiting around to agree with us, and all we have to do is reference them to get our way. Classic examples include statements like, “design should have a seat at the table,” or “UX should be involved earlier in the process.”
The better approach is to admit that should statements rarely change minds because they don’t explain why your should is better than their should. To be persuasive, you have to express why your should is better than their current position.
design is not a good career for people who only want to say, “this can’t be done,” or “this won’t work,” or “this organization is hopeless.” Anyone can say those things—they require no effort or creative talent.
do not waste time complaining about gravity problems. We don’t spend our time complaining about gravity, and how heavy many things are to lift, because it is an immutable law of physics.
To make this clearer, we think wise designers: Have open minds Are rooted in the real world Reframe (or redefine) important problems Make problems actionable
Deciders don’t care about your title—they care about how you can solve their biggest problems. That’s it. It’s not that complicated.
The difference between a good designer and a great designer is the ability to not only solve the problem, but also to articulate how the design solves it in a way that is compelling and fosters agreement… There are three things that every design needs to be successful: it solves a problem, it’s easy for users, it’s supported by everyone.
Make a habit of asking questions like: What are the most important unsolved problems leaders have? Which powerful people have problems I can solve, but they don’t know it yet? How can I sell them on a small, safe project to demonstrate my value? Who defends the status quo? Who wants change and how can I ally with them?
If we choose to treat negotiation as a central role we can play, we become far more influential with deciders.
Whenever there’s a proposed decision you disagree with, before you get upset, investigate. Consider these questions: What tradeoff is being made? Is the decider aware of the trade (i.e., the iron triangle)? Do you and they have the same goals? How can you align? Who, if anyone, is arguing the side of the tradeoff you prefer? What investigation or explanation can make this position stronger? If no one is arguing for it, why do you expect it to win? Who should do it? Why aren’t they?
Creativity is a distraction. More than anything, our job is to make sense of things. It isn’t about being clever—it’s about being clear.
it’s dangerous to confuse outputs with outcomes. An output is just something that was created, but it may not lead to the desired outcome.
Why should an organization full of stakeholders trust design if they feel as if the designer doesn’t trust them?
When we insist on too many details too early, it frustrates deciders. It makes them feel like we don’t belong in the conversation, since we’re focusing on the wrong scope of the problem.
Obsessions we indulge in often include: Labels: Names for features, products, methodologies, job titles Railroading: Resistance to collaboration, insisting on one single path Preciousness: Sensitivity to feedback and an unwillingness to discard ideas Refinement: Demanding precision too early in the process
Another flavor of detail obsession is what is called bikeshedding, or Parkinson’s Law of Triviality.38 The term comes from a committee created to approve a nuclear power plant, but instead of discussing important matters (you know, like nuclear fallout), they argued for hours about the bicycle storage shed. Why? Because it was a topic simple enough that everyone felt qualified to have an opinion
Bikeshedding is a kind of theater, a show that allows people to believe they’re adding value when, in reality, it’s just a distraction.
as the narcissism of small differences: we tend to fight most with the people we have the most in common with, often over trivial details.
Many companies don’t hire designers. Why? They don’t expect them to generate enough profit or to earn what they’d have to pay us. It’s not complicated. We’re not special in this regard: all employees are evaluated in the same cold way.
Some frustrated designers think they’re Michelin star chefs and are in denial that they’re employed by the equivalent of the local pub.
good design is typically good for business. It’s just not as universal as we’re led to believe.
design for sale is the priority: making choices that help drive sales, like adding more features, even if it makes the product harder to use.
we’ve cultivated the false belief that what is good for customers must always be good for business. It’s an assumption we rarely question:
designers often fight for ideas, unaware that they work against the business goals of our employers. And instead of investigating the business logic that explains the resistance we experience, perhaps finding the sweet spot where design for sale and design for use overlap, we resort to moral arguments (“we should do the right thing”), which we rarely win.
“design is only as humane as the business model allows and rewards.”
94% of the success of an organization is its systems, rather than the behavior of individuals.
Consider that we don’t pick the year we are born, what country we are born into, or who our parents are, yet these are likely the three most important factors that define our lives. The individual choices we worry about pale in comparison to the systemic factors we never had control over in the first place.
if we think in terms of systems, we can ask better questions that help us really understand what happened: Who decided what work this person was assigned? How was this person hired, trained, and managed? How were they rewarded, supported, or punished? What powerful people enabled this situation or failed to prevent it? Did this event happen in line with the team culture or in rejection of it?
Make good maps to ease navigating the system Look for points of leverage where your assets are greater than your liabilities Find allies in the system so their status becomes an advantage
the path to redesigning systems begins with what is known as Chesterton’s Fence: You should never destroy a fence, change a rule, or do away with a tradition until you understand why it’s there in the first place.52
To construct your map, consider the following questions: What is the real path ideas follow to get approved? Who are the true influential players on that path? What secret passages or backchannels do they use? Who trusts you? Likes you? Avoids you? Who owes you a favor?
The reason you are more of an advisor than a decider is likely because you are more of a specialist than a generalist and lower in the hierarchy.
you assembled a superstar team of the world’s best specialists, you’d likely fail to make anything good unless you had someone skilled at leading, negotiating, planning, communicating, and managing up, and who was also entrusted to make tradeoffs between specializations. This is what film directors, who simultaneously play the role of artist and entrepreneur (in partnership with producers), do as the core of their jobs.
Choose organizational power: Take the role most aligned with the decisions you want to make. Choose influence: Stay in your role, but earn trusted allies and negotiate power. Accept gravity: If you don’t want to change (A or B), that’s OK, but blame others less.
Healthier organizations make this less painful through trust, communication, and good leadership, but it’s still hard work, and rarely is everyone happy.
Part of the problem is the fantasy of having the fun parts of power but none of the downsides. This does not exist. Power comes with unpleasantness no one wants, like higher stress, dealing with difficult people, and being responsible for things you can’t control, including ugly, messy hot-potato problems everyone else was smart enough to avoid. The upsides—deep satisfaction, joyous collaboration, and getting paid to
powerful metaphor that helps is what Makoto Fujimura calls border-walking. He describes this as people who choose to spend time on the edges of ideas, cultures, and tribes. He explained that: These were individuals who lived on the edges of their groups, going in and out of them, sometimes bringing back news to the tribe…. [They] lower barriers to understanding and communication, and start to defuse the culture wars.…[It’s] a role of cultural leadership in a new mode, serving functions including empathy, memory, warning, guidance, mediation, and reconciliation. Those who journey to the borders
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The Japanese have a concept called wabi-sabi, which is the beauty of accepting imperfections—it’s only through failures that we develop the character we need to become better creators. Whoever your heroes are, we bet they inspire you because of their tireless commitment to their vision, not because they easily won a finite game years ago and continue to celebrate that single victory over and over again.
There is no one, not marketers, not engineers, saying, “Please tell me what’s happening as late as possible so I can be surprised and ineffective.”
Often stories have more power than data, especially when told by a persuasive storyteller, and a high-profile customer who is upset might just be the most persuasive storyteller there is.
Nothing is intuitive to everyone.
