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June 27 - July 4, 2021
The best designed products and services don’t simply solve problems — they connect deeply with people.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.[6]
Design can no longer be a specification that is handed off, built, and never seen again. It needs to be embedded within the strategy and development processes, and its practitioners must be deeply familiar with the company’s mission, vision, and practices.
A user’s experience is the emergent outcome of numerous contributions, including design, but also engineering (technical performance has a huge impact on user experience), marketing (how expectations are managed affects the user experience), and customer care (a bad experience can become a good one if handled well). If a single team is labeled as the primary keeper of the user experience, that absolves other departments from concerning themselves with it. User experience must be everyone’s responsibility.
Every design team is different, so no one charter will apply universally. We propose the following as a way to get started. We’re not here just to make it pretty or easy to use. Through empathy, we ensure meaning and utility. With craft, we elicit understanding and desire. We wrangle the complexity of our offering to deliver a clear, coherent, and satisfying experience from start to finish.
A design team needs to be in charge of its own destiny, and this requires focused leadership with autonomy and executive access.
The skills that made someone a great designer or creative director are almost wholly unrelated to the skills that make them a great manager and team leader. Instead, this design leader’s primary responsibilities will prove organizational, working with other executives to clear the path for design, and serving as a manager, mentor, team builder, and operator for the team itself, creating both a figurative and literal space where design can thrive.
Too often, designers practice design-for-design’s-sake, where what’s produced, however cool or innovative, isn’t connected with the company’s goals. Savvy design leaders embrace business value, realizing it can serve as a powerful input into the design process.
While decentralized models work better in the near term and at smaller scales, over time the following kinds of issues arise: Teams are focused on one problem for a long time Designers become lonely and disconnected There is little cohesive design culture and community The user experience is fractured There are inefficiencies as efforts are duplicated User research is marginalized
But within an iterative design and development context, most research efforts should be conducted by designers, product managers, and even engineers, with help from the UX research team.
Frontend developers ultimately serve the purpose of the engineering team, focused on performance matters of stability, speed, and working-as-it-should at scale.
Creative technologists align with the mission of the design organization, using engineering as a tool to uncover opportunities for a clear, coherent, and satisfying user experience.
When making this calculation, exclude developers who are purely backend. With a focus on “product” developers, whose work has some user-facing manifestation, a good ratio is 1 designer to 5–10 developers.
Recruiters need to understand that designers are a different breed of employee, and require a softer touch, a less aggressive stance, and a sense of connection throughout the process.
Be direct and honest about what it is like to work there. Don’t sugarcoat troubles. Don’t dwell on them either, but acknowledge them and make clear the steps being taken to address them.
Make the booth attractive — we’re hiring designers here! A banner hung limply over a table and a pile of business cards will not draw students. Consider standing banners, iPads with the company’s work showcased, or even an HD display. Branded schwag is fun, but unnecessary — cheap-o sunglasses with a logo have swayed no one to work for a particular company.
It’s important that the hiring manager have authority for making this decision. They should seek counsel from all around, but these folks need to be able to build their teams as they see fit.
As an employee class, designers were millennials before there were millennials, and much of what is being written in the business press about new management practices has long applied to them. The following rules of thumb might not feel revolutionary, but are necessary to keep in mind when working with designers.
The goal is not for the company to deliver great design, but to deliver a great product and service experience in a profitable manner.
Professional development is often described as “climbing the corporate ladder.” It implies the employee has a careerist bent, and a narrow, steady focus to reach the next rung. Often, such a linear orientation is not of interest to designers. Many don’t seek to climb so much as to grow.
When design leaders address matters of corporate culture, it is typically from the perspective of shifting a company’s culture in order to embrace design.
We’re not here just to make it pretty or easy to use. Through empathy, we ensure meaning and utility. With craft, we elicit understanding and desire. We wrangle the complexity of our offering to deliver a clear, coherent, and satisfying experience from start to finish.
Ideally, the answer can be “both.” A healthy approach is for designers to spend chunks of time in both contexts, where execution time is spent with the cross-functional team, and reflection and review time happens among other designers.
The spread of software has driven the spread of design, but as companies embrace design, they realize it contains so much more potential than just making software easier to use. The challenge for designers is to embrace this window of opportunity, and to establish themselves as core to business.
Because every organization is different, so are the paths they’ll need to take. Managing such change will be difficult, and will often not feel worth it. It is easier to maintain the status quo, even if that means design doesn’t realize its potential.
