Everyone Needs A Design Mindset
When you accept the reality that design decisions are coming from outside your group, by people without “design” in their job titles, you approach your co-workers differently. Now they’re not just your co-workers — they’re your design team.
The companies that produce great design, such as Apple and Airbnb, have learned this.
Does everyone need all the skills of a designer? Of course not. But each person needs to be armed with the tools to understand how their decisions affect the customer experience and User Experience Methodologies has those tools.
When an engineer takes a shortcut and scrimps on performance, they need to understand how that damages the user experience. Likewise, when a designer pushes an engineer to make a change that affects performance, that engineer should help the designer make the best overall design decision — not just roll over and do what the designer asked. It’s this type of respectful collaboration that makes great design happen.
Work outside your design team
When you accept that design happens almost everywhere in your organization, you have to take responsibility for it. Your app is slow? Go sit with your engineering team. Your marketing team is poorly communicating your product to future customers? You’d better offer to work with them on the problem.
Yes, doing design with everyone at your company is a lot of work. But it’s necessary if you want to be a truly great designer — otherwise, you’re simply papering over bad decisions. For example, imagine that your CEO created a complex pricing structure for your product. You could focus on making the pricing page as clear as possible using your interface and information design skills. But the harder and more important design opportunity is to work with your CEO on repricing your product so it’s clear to customers and compatible with the business goals.
Focusing on the core business is what differentiates real product design from interface design or even user experience design. Fundamental product design is really hard and requires a lot of legwork, but this is what designers at the highest level do — and it’s why their work is better than yours. - Daniel Burka
Grow your design team to include non-designers
Design is a hard job. You’ll need a wide range of skills (look at all of those circles in the diagram of UX Disciplines by Dan Saffer) and years of practice to truly master design.
Maybe that’s why so many designers are offended when non-designers do design work or get called “designers”. You can act offended if you want, but the reality is that other people are making design decisions with or without you. Embrace them. They don’t make your job less valuable. They don’t make your job title less meaningful.
