You are an amazing designer. Don’t let your English stop you.
Once there was a designer who cared more about the spacing of A B C’s than the meaning of A B C’s.
Imagine yourself in a room full of people who don’t look like you or speak like you, and you are dying inside because you have all these ideas in your head that you want to share.
You build up your courage to say something and you get “Can you repeat that?”, “What did you say?”, or, “Ok, let’s move on”. You feel yourself crumble into a tiny piece of shit and you carry on through the rest of the meeting with your “calm” and “nice” composure.
As a designer with English as my second language, I used to experience this a lot (and also often have nightmares about this). I also often hear from my fellow ESL designer friends that this happens to them all the time. I hear things like: “My English is not good enough for me to get that raise”, “I don’t think I can become a leader because my English is not perfect”, “I’ll just stay at this level because I am not good at English”.
Yes. English is important for us to learn and practice because as designers, the most influential thing is to communicate well. Communication by far is the #1 thing that I feel that is required when you want to work well and be successful with others.
However, English is not the only tool that we have when we want to communicate. What is Google’s definition of communication?
Nowhere in here does it say “language” (or English)! There are some familiar words that I see that we do all the time as designers: conveying, reporting, presenting, spreading, broadcasting, circulation.
You don’t need perfect A B C’s to do any of these things. In fact, as designers, we have so many other skills that we can use to do this right.
Use your drawing skill.
OK. I am not talking about taking out your sketch book and drawing with your 2B pencil. I am talking about our skill to quickly digest information and draw a simple chart and flow that everyone can understand and discuss.
This is how people communicated back when there was no language. They drew some icons and used them to tell stories. Sound familiar? That’s what we do as designers. We use graphic elements and use them to tell stories, user journeys and flows.
Once I was so impressed by a designer I was interviewing. He led all of his communication by drawing charts on the whiteboard. I had never felt such a clear strategy and responses from an interviewee in my life. I asked him, “Where did you learn how to communicate this way? I have never experienced this before”. He said he had to teach himself to communicate through charts and graphs because he felt that his English skill wasn’t strong enough and often felt that he couldn’t communicate his thoughts to his teammates. He said he had to teach himself quickly an alternate ways to speak his mind that would be faster than learning English.
As designers, drawing can come so much easier than anything else that we do. Strengthen and use this skillset as it will come very handy as your communication tool.
Let the users speak for you.
As designers, we are the closest to our users. We know what their pain points are, why they love the product, what they wish would be improved, and luckily, they probably know how to speak English better than us.
When you are presenting your solutions, clearly re-state the Objective that you have set as a team, and explain why this is important and how you got to this solution by borrowing or quoting the users’ voice. If you have like feedback from multiple users, let the team know that. You are speaking for the users, so your English skillset…doesn’t really matter at this point.
This is why I love user testing as a designer. Whether it’s quick interview sessions with your users over the phone, or a grand research project with 3000 users across the board, you as a designer have first dibs into what they are saying.
You are the bridge between everyone in the cross functional team and your users. It’s pretty much the coolest job that anyone can ask for.
Borrow your competitors language.
Competitive landscape is not usually my first go-to-method. I really like to push my designers and myself to come up with a solution that solves the problem on your own first before you limit yourself by looking at what the others are doing.
I believe as soon as you compare your ideas with what someone else is doing, your creative limit is contained in a box of what others have set.
Think about the problem you are solving and brainstorm! You don’t have to brainstorm in English. You can brainstorm in any language you are comfortable with.
It’s honestly the most fun part of my job because you can never tell what’s in that brain of yours. Once you’ve done that, and you have a couple of good solutions of your own, then you can look at the competition.
Competitors’ design can become a great talking point for your team. It can also easily become the safe design option that you can test against the brilliant ideas you just came up with. I often create a prototype that mimics the biggest competitor’s app and listen to users’ feedback on it. It’s a great way to find out if your competitor did any user testing on what they did.
Go do what you do best.
“Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems.” — Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO
Don’t let English define who you are. You are not here to be the best English speaker. You are here to be the best designer (who you already are).
Your accent? It gives you character. It took me about 3 years to clearly pronounce “Sword” differently from “Swordfish” (on a bad day I still have hard time saying them). But who cares, own it and laugh with your friends, give everyone a break they deserve.
We live in a world where everyone has different languages they speak. Engineering, Product Management, VC/Entrepreneurs has their own language. Art is its’ own language. Describing the taste of wine is its’ own language. Everything is made out of different languages that we learn to speak and use to communicate.
As designers, we choose to learn Design as our second language, and I believe Design is a language that’s makes a huge impact in this world.
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc.
Fellow designers who look different from everyone else in the room and have special accents, keep your head up high. You are certainly an integral part of the team. You are celebrated for what you do best — Designing! Solving problems!
You are not the only one who is on the boat of “constantly learning something new”. All the smart people are on this boat with you. Do not let this small part of you define who you are. You are an amazing designer. Go do what you do best.
