Be a good Product Designer, listen to your mom
No doubt about how important are our mothers in our lives, they are our real heroes, a limitless source of love and wisdom and the best life instructions book we can get. They are also the inventors of some of the best, wisest (and sometimes most terrifying) quotes you had ever heard, quotes that you won’t forget and you can even apply to every sphere of your life, including your career as a Product Designer, here are some of my favorites.
Who do you think you are?
You can call yourself as you prefer, a UX/UI Designer, Product Designer, Interaction Designer, etc. You can do all the research you want, understand the meaning of every bit of data that gets into your hands, find the winner in an A/B tests, build the perfect sitemap and a very detailed wireframe, recreate the right personas and build a congruent prototype, but at the end of the day, you are a designer, and what you do, overall, is Design.
I know, go and explain what design is, how many things fall under this concept and how cool it is, but if your mother tells her friends that her son/daughter is a designer, she is the one who is right, not your colleagues, not your friends or a LinkedIn title. Talk to your mother about what you do for a living is like a bucket of freshwater for a too hot ego, and that’s very healthy.
What part of no, don’t you understand?
You have run all type of tests, analysis and the result is always the same, that pixel perfect and wonderful new section you have been working on for weeks is not useful, clear or interesting for your users. Don’t keep trying to make it work, try to understand why it is not working and start working on a better solution with the info you got from the past failure. Don’t waste more time and money and listen to your mother.
Beds are for sleeping, not for jumping
Jumping on your bed is a wonderful experience for a kid, but that’s not what beds are made for, right? Don’t think of an experience as a separate thing to functionality, a product that works is a product that 1- It does what it is meant to do, 2-It is intuitive and easy to use and 3-Solves real problems. People are not going to jump on your product, they are going to use it, and that’s the real experience we have to work on.
I don’t care who started it
In general, we tend to be too afraid of failure, for many reasons I am not going to mention here (better ask your mother) and when it comes down to a failing feature or not expected results, some people tend to focus on the fault instead of the responsibilities. This could create friction in many teams and it ends up making the snowball even bigger, instead of focusing on solutions. The difference is huge, if something goes wrong because of you, it is not your fault, it is your responsibility. Feeling guilty makes you focus on yourself as the problem, but feeling responsible brings the attention to accepting that you and/or your team failed and to immediately try to find a solution because it is your responsibility to solve problems, not to search for whose fault it was. I don’t care who started it, let’s solve it and learn from it.
Money doesn’t grow on trees!
Companies and products are not candy shops, you shouldn’t work for a company just because of the benefits, free snacks and unlimited holidays. At the same time, the primary goal of your product is not to look great in your portfolio. Be aware that the best price you can get is to release a product that people like to use, being paid for doing it and having fun during the process is also great but I think it is important at least to know the financial aspect of what you are doing and be responsible for it.
If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it?
Trends, trends, trends. Always keeping an eye on the trends is good, it gives you ideas and pieces of information that you can use or modify for your own product and it provides you with a general picture of where things are going in your field. But don’t blind yourself with trends, not everything is valid and at the end of the day, you should rely on your design decisions on research, analysis and more importantly, your users. They don’t care if ’Navy Blue’ is the trendy color this year, or if cards are the new way to bring content to the home screen. They use your product for what it has to offer and for how it solves their problem. If you see your friend designers, other companies and products jumping off the bridge, think twice, listen to your users, and listen to your mother.
I don’t know’ is not an answer
This is pretty obvious, you need info, data, understand the behavior on certain screens or why users don’t follow the path you carefully built for them to perform an action. ‘I don’t know’ is not an answer’ do some research, test, test, and test again, ask many questions and don’t stop until you don’t get a better answer for your users (and your mother) than ‘I don’t know’.
If you can’t finish your dinner, you are too full for dessert
Oh, that feeling when you know there is a huge bucket of ice cream waiting for you in the fridge and the only thing stopping you from attacking it is those pieces of broccoli on your plate and the look of your mother. Well, in Product Design, the ice cream is a pixel perfect beautiful product ready to use with that nicely done UI that you think people will love. The broccoli is the not so sweet process you and your team have to go through before enjoying the ice cream; technical aspects, researches, tests, solving bugs, and a long etcetera. The broccoli might not be as tasty as the ice cream, but it is definitely healthier and necessary. Your mother knows it, and you should too.
Thank you for reading, and remember to be good and listen to your mother 😃
