Creditability is not negotiable
Let’s start with an allegory…
Someone shows up at their Doctor’s office, claiming to know both the nature and treatment of their malady. They have a stack of articles from printed from various websites, and passionately make their case to their physician. But no one who would observe this interaction expects the Doctor to take this person’s opinion at face value. The Doctor, likely after rolling their eyes loud enough for everyone in the waiting room to hear, will still run a thorough examination before making any final determination. If tests are needed, the Doctor will make the call, not the patient. The Doctor may walk the patient through alternative treatments, in order to accommodate the realities for the patient. In the end, the patient may refuse the tests, or even the treatment, but the neither the patient or the Doctor has any expectations that the actual diagnosis will be negotiated.
Why should interacting with a Designer be any different?
Why do so many of our colleagues assume that their opinion about design carries the same creditability as a professionally trained Designer? What’s worse; why are so many of those Designers willing to negotiate their point of view? Or worse abandon their point of view altogether?
The rise of the Cargo-Cult Designer
In the early 2000s design gained prominence as companies recognized its value in enhancing products, brands, customer experience, and profitability. And over the last 20+ years, consumers have become more discerning, recognizing and expecting high-quality design that engages and connects with them on an emotional level; they want designs that feel intuitive, personal, and that make them felt seen. Contentment, simplicity, self-expression, validation, affirmation, and significance—underscored by trust, transparency, and control—are the attributes people look for in the products and services they purchase. None of those come from a spreadsheet, or an ad campaign , or more recently from a genAI tool. Achieving those qualities require the expertise and skills unique to design.
It is worth noting that in order to meet the demand for more designers, UX bootcamps also emerged in the early 2000’s. While some were well meaning, these programs produced journeymen (journeyworkers) who could competently reproduce existing work or assemble existing patterns from a set of established components but lacked the deeper expertise in human emotion, problem solving, linguistics, and human factors to actually design. They approached design as cargo-cult assembly, borrowing the anthropological metaphor: imitating the form without understanding the function. They could only piece together the right parts but had no understanding of the principles which breathe coherence into the whole. These bootcamps taught people to imitate the form without understanding the underlying science that makes design successful.
Given the rate at which these bootcampers poured into the market it is understandable given their lack of expertise that colleagues from other disciplines would question their POV, even point out gaps in their thinking. While that might explain how our peers have come to expect to push on design, it doesn’t excuse the professional designers who offer no resistance.
Cakes are fluffy: (real) Design is not
Adding two eggs to boxed cake mix doesn’t make you a Baker…
…bandaging a scraped knee doesn’t make you a Doctor…
…subtracting, adding, or multiplying numbers doesn’t make you a Mathematician.
So why would having a idea, or access to a GenAI tool, make you a designer?
The simple answer, it does not.
No Baker, Doctor, or Mathematician ever felt their profession was at risk because of a boxed cake mix, first aid kit, or a handheld calculator. Indeed, most would likely laugh at very idea and never give a second thought to those statements. But now with the emergence of genAI Designer’s have unlocked a new fear. But why?
I have written in the past that while everyone designs not everyone is a Designer. Whether its planning our week, setting up a “camera ready” home office, or preheating the oven and greasing the pans before cracking those two eggs into a mixing bowl—all of us make conscious everyday choices how to arrange a set of constituent parts to achieve a desired outcome. With GenAI tools it is easier that ever to generate artifacts (albeit based on a statistical model which is fundamentally historical and reductive). But design is about creating positive, consistent outcomes for others not ourselves. And it requires more than a well crafted prompt to create a successful design.
The only things designers need to fear is themselves
There is over a 100 years of academic research and applied practice behind the field of industrial design, graphic design has an even a longer history. The first university programs for Human Computer Interaction were established over 40 years ago. The science of ergonomics and human factors goes back to the 1940’s. All these design professions share the same structured approach to design education, and they all rely decades of codified practices, underscored by three different fields of science, all with tangible and demonstrable results.
Formal design programs teach how to meet other people’s needs, with a eye toward sustainability, scalability, and with a sense of taste. Blending cognitive science, systems engineering, and ergonomics, with the humanities to focus on the details, to make it graceful, self-evident, and desirable. More importantly experienced, professional designers not only achieve that success in the immediate context but are able to scale their designs ensuring they will be successful in many other settings over time, achieving longevity and reducing obsolesce. Designers study perception and psychology to know what drives desirability, they learn how to express emotion and convey value, trust, and durability through static and dynamic forms, experiences. colors, scale, texture, etc.
That said, I recognize not everyone has the opportunity to attend college. Like programming or product management, design is a field where skills can be developed through practice and self-learning combined with strong mentorship from a master Designer. Which is why Design Leaders play such a critical role in the journey; They must mentor the other designers build their knowledge and objectivity to ensure their thinking is clear and on target. And that they can articulate its value, manage discussions effectively, and communicate their ideas with authority within the boundaries of the organization’s decision-making processes.
While others may not know about the full scope of design’s academic and scientific foundations, their lack of understanding is no excuse for Designers to simply abandon their POV on how to solve a given problem.
Footnote: If you are in a company that where the CEO is not an active member of the design team, you likely will need to repeat this playbook each time you want to design to have an impact:
Tying any investment in design to clear biz outcomes - if design is not baked into the business strategy, you will continually be chasing your tail to understand the desired outcomes and scrambling to define relevant metrics.
Nail the narrative; make the rationale as bulletproof as possible. - Have you ever been stuck listening to someone tell you a story you have no interest in hearing? Regardless, of how great the story about why your design is awesome, if the CEO isn’t interested in hearing it, it will fall on deaf ears.
In addition to user feedback, gather internal stakeholder feedback—especially from your customer/technical success teams (sometimes the pain from stakeholders feels greater because it’s “closer” to the biz). Working from the rear you will at best be able to make an existing product better, but the ability to really design new solutions means you have to be out front, to do this don’t focusing on feedback itself but focus on the gaps those are your opportunities.
Advocacy/Allyship from those you report to and their peers. No one wants to ship bad design. But even the best boss in the world is only going to try so many times to talk the CEO into prioritizing design. Overtime you will likely find yourself frustrated and isolated.
Do a usability test with those you need to influence. But be warned; this is a double edged sword. Getting data from your real users is obviously a great approach. However, using people inside the company—especially leadership, is a slippery slope. These people may have influence but they are not the people you are designing for. As a practice this will simply encourage them to expect you to design it for them and what they think
