Everyone is a designer. Get over it
This post is a Korean translation of Daniel Burka's article, Everyone is a designer. Get over it. There may be some paraphrasing or mistranslation. Feedback is always welcome!
Recently, an article by Jared Spool about "how Netflix's performance engineers are actually designers" caught my attention. It's a provocative premise, but it makes sense. His argument is that everyone in an organization (including performance engineers)—not just those with the title of "designer"—designs the product.
Looking at some of the reactions to this piece, you'd think Jared was a demon who kidnaps children for ritual sacrifices. What exactly did Jared write?
The members of this team are performance engineers. They manage, architect, and engineer the performance of a highly complex system, and they spend all their time—and then some—doing these things. There are few tasks more technical than this in systems engineering.
However, when Netflix users' videos stall and the buffering animation spins while the video player waits for data, performance engineers make a massive difference. At that moment, they become UX designers.
The last line is so important that I've bolded it. Some designers get uncomfortable at the idea that a CFO, a salesperson, or an engineer could be a designer.
Whether you like it or not, whether you admit it or not, people outside the design team also make crucial design choices that heavily impact users. They are designing the product, and they can be considered designers.
This is just stating a fact; there's no need to get mad about it. I work with many startups every year and see this all the time. A CFO makes a pricing decision and changes the product experience. An engineer sacrifices performance for a design element. A salesperson writes a script to talk to customers. In my eyes, the people who fundamentally change the customer (user) experience are designers.
If this is so self-evident, why are Jared and I making a point to emphasize it? I keep harping on this fact because I want designers to change the way they think about their roles and become better designers.
Take a moment to think about how this shift in mindset could change the way you work.
Everyone needs a design mindset
When you accept that design decisions are actually being made by people outside the design group who don't hold the "designer" title, you start treating your colleagues differently. They are no longer just people you work with; they are your design team.
Companies that deliver well-designed products, like Apple and Airbnb, have already learned this. Airbnb's VP of Design, Alex Schleifer, talked in an interview with Wired about how the company is actually not design-led.
At Airbnb, the solution is actually to deemphasize designers. The point is not to create a "design-led culture," because that tends to discourage non-designers from stepping up. It can result in a situation where the entire organization simply has to react to the perspective of one privileged person. Instead, Schleifer wants more people to recognize what has traditionally been solely the designer's domain from a user's perspective.
Does everyone need to know designer skills? Of course not. But each person should be armed with the tools to understand how their decisions impact the user experience.
If an engineer takes a shortcut or skimps too much on performance, they need to understand how this negatively affects UX. Likewise, if a designer keeps asking an engineer for changes that impact performance, the engineer shouldn't just grudgingly comply; they should help the designer make the best possible design decision. This kind of mutually respectful collaboration is what creates good design.
One of the best ways to build empathy is to observe user studies together with colleagues from across the company. When my colleague Michael Margolis ran studies with GV, he insisted that everyone—not just designers—watch and pay attention to what was truly a team interview. If it's impossible for everyone to watch in real time, you can record the sessions and schedule a "watch party" for later.
Work outside the design team
When you acknowledge design issues that happen almost everywhere in the organization, you have to take responsibility for them. Is the app slow? Go talk to the engineering team. Is the marketing team doing a poor job of communicating the product's value to future users? You'd better go work with them on the problem.
Yes, doing design with everyone in the company makes for a lot of work. But if you truly want to be a great designer, it's absolutely necessary. If you don't do this, you're just slapping band-aids on bad decisions. For example, let's say your CEO creates a complicated pricing structure for the product. You could focus on using your UI/UX design skills to make the pricing page as clean as possible. But the harder and more important design task is to work directly with the CEO to establish a pricing policy that aligns with business goals and is clear to the user.
Focusing on the core business is what separates true product design from interface design (and even UX design). Fundamental product design is incredibly hard and requires a lot of legwork. But this is exactly what the highest level of designers do, and it's why their designs are better than yours.
Grow your design team with non-designers
Design is hard work that requires a broad range of skills (just look at the UX disciplines diagram above), and truly mastering it takes years of practice.
This is probably why so many designers got offended when Jared and I said that non-designers can design and be called designers. You can be mad about it if you want, but the reality is that other people are going to make design decisions with or without you. Embrace them. They don't make your work any less valuable. They don't make your title any less important.
Having more people who design doesn't mean you have competitors; it means you have more people to help. Their diverse perspectives make your team and your product stronger. Help them improve their skills, and leverage their expertise for the company and the product.
Let's build a better future together
A few years ago, I met an executive at a Fortune 500 company. When I told her I was a designer, her eyes lit up and she said, "Oh, I love design!" She followed up with, "Our design team is located a little ways away from our core management group, and they do so much creative work over there."
My heart sank. Even though the design team was just a short distance from this executive, they didn't work together. Instead, the designers sat isolated behind soundproof glass walls, doing their special "creative" work.
This executive makes decisions that impact users every single day. She insulated the designers in the other room from negative user feedback. But this is primarily the design team's fault for missing out on the opportunity to discuss crucial parts of the business together.