How to be happier (for designers)

Lets look at the research for why we're unhappy and take action

People want to work on the cutting edge, until… they get cut! Being a designer means you are in the business of the new and that comes with risks. If you’ve been around a decade or more you’ve likely seen it before. Downturns happen. Existential crises arise. AI may be the reason de jour, but we’ve been here before.

The intro to Why Design Is Hard, says:

Many feel the design profession is in crisis… yet others say these problems have been with us since design became a profession, so why worry now?

I share this not to dismiss your feelings: if you’re looking for work right now that is unavoidably demoralizing and scary. My goal is to put this moment in context. I promise things are not as bad as they seem. Bad news gets easy attention and social media rewards people who talk about the end of everything, when it’s more likely that things are shifting and changing, not ending.

The spirit of the book Why Design Is Hard is that we underestimate ourselves. Even if our fears are based in reality, we are uniquely skilled problem solvers. We should not give in to despair easily. We owe it to ourselves to first use our superpowers of investigation, creative problem solving and explaining things and see where that gets us. I think it’s gets us pretty far.

What makes designers unhappy?

On this Substack I try hard to be practical. I call out many problems, but I always? mostly? sometimes? offer ways to make them actionable. So I say to you: if you are unhappy, the first step is to break that feeling down into small enough pieces that you can take action on at least one of them.

Designer Matej Latin created this survey of 751 designers. and it’s is a good start. I love it when designers get research instead of just sharpening their preconceptions. The rub is this survey has some limitations (mainly self-selection bias, leading questions and no comparative data). If they had a researcher involved it would have helped data quality significantly. That said, it’s the best survey I found and I’m far too lazy to do one myself so I should shut up and get on with it.

Here are the top three causes and this post will give you advice on them:

1. Limited ability to get feedback

2. No strategic approach to design

3. No career progression opportunities

Bonus: become a fulfilled person

Since all designers are people (I hear the AI fearful screaming “so far!”), the canonical advice on happiness comes from Viktor Frankl. He suggested that happiness is a poor goal. Why? Happiness ensues: it’s doesn’t happen directly. We only feel happy as a result of doing things that are fulfilling.

This means fulfillment is a better goal than happiness. American culture is happiness obsessed and to our detriment. Trying to be happy in ever moment only leads to misery. The goal of life is meaning and satisfaction, or a range of interesting experiences, not the empty fantasy of one shallow sugary emotion forever.

One huge step towards fulfillment is to escape the ego trap. Being happy, or not, is based on expectations. If you expect a 5 star meal and go to McDonald’s you will be disappointed. However if you have been starving for days and are handed a Big Mac, fries and a coke it will be one of the best meals you’ve ever had. You will remember it forever. Yet the meal itself is the same, only you have changed (it’s Heraclitus’ lunch!). Persistent unhappiness and can be a failure to set healthy and realistic expectations.

And our expectations as designers come from… movies? TV shows? Design books? We have poor sources filled with mythology and the survivorship bias of legends. It’s as if we only read The Fountainhead, and tragically modeled our expectations on the narcissistic Howard Roark, who puts his ego above everything. He is not a real person and most of what young designers imagine great designers to be like isn’t real either.

Now I’m not here to kill your design fantasy. Instead, what I want for you is to live your dreams, but you have to be pragmatic about how to make them happen.

1. How to get better feedback

Feedback came in at #1 on the list of causes of designer unhappiness. This is a simple one to solve: understand the difference between passive vs. active feedback. Passive feedback is what you are given. Active feedback is what you seek out and shape to satisfy your needs.

Most designers who are unhappy about feedback feel like feedback victims. Something unpleasant is done to them in meetings by people with their own agenda. But this “bad” feedback is often unintentional. They are ignorant of the creative process or how designers work. But how could it be otherwise? Unless someone tells them, they can’t know what they don’t know.

I recommend you take responsibility for getting the feedback you need. Make it an active process instead of a passive one. Don’t wait for feedback: create the meeting, write the agenda, and set the ground rules. Be a leader for your own feedback system. By leading the feedback process people will… follow your lead! Isn’t that what you want?

You can read more of my advice about how to do this here: How To Get Really Good Feedback. It’s a transformative skill any designer can grow.

2. Instant design strategy creation

There is no strategic approach to design

In the expectation resetting department: everyone at your company may feel there is no strategic approach for their job function! Some companies are just poorly run and yours might be one of them. The sooner you can see a wider perspective, the sooner it will make more sense (and be actionable).

I admit I remember having this complaint about design at companies I worked for. I always felt like my executives never had a coherent product or UX strategy. That products were a confused mess and executives seemed not to notice or care. How could this be! I’d wonder. Now I know and I’ll explain.

What I didn’t know is that any designer who has a few years of experience can likely create a workable design strategy on their own. There are just five steps:

1. All organizations (claim to) have a strategy! Go learn what yours is.

2. Study for who is a good leader towards the best strategy you found

3. Write an answer to: how can designers contribute more to this strategy?

4. Talk to the person from #2 and get their feedback on #3

You now have a design strategy. BOOM.

I’m not joking. If you’re thinking “nooooo - what I meant was I want my entire company strategy to be centered on design like Apple or Airbnb” that’s a very different thing. You are now asking your CEO to have a strategy that likely does not make sense for the assets and liabilities they have as an organization. If they tried it they might go out of business and have to fire everyone. It’s better to have a job somewhere with no design strategy than no job at all.

Put another way, we have to be mature enough to admit that bad design makes money. Much of the value of designers is to raise product quality, but not all businesses benefit from higher quality products. But maybe at your organization there is a sweet spot where higher quality on part of one product is a clear win. Can you find it?

3. Specialists vs. Generalists

By choosing to be a designer you have chosen a specialist career. In the NFL (American football) league, there is a position called the kicker. What do they do? One thing: they kick the ball on special plays. That’s it. In the 100 year history of the NFL a kicker has only won the MVP (most valuable player award) once. Why? They are specialists! They contribute in more narrow ways. They may still be important but not as important as other larger roles.

No career progression opportunities

This is untrue. The real complaint is there are few career progression opportunities if you stay in your specialized role.

To cut to the chase: if you work in UX and want career progression, become a product manager, project manager or team leader. Generalize your skills and responsibilities and career progression is easier. It’s just a fact. It’s a gravity problem: organizations have natural limitations for what things they are likely to provide to specialized employees. To be unhappy about gravity would be strange, wouldn’t it?

Designers often feel that other roles, project managers, product managers and team leaders, end up making many of the decisions that the designer feels they should make. Well, why not just take those other jobs? They’re making the design decisions anyway, so wouldn’t it make more sense for a designer to do it? And get paid better and get more respect? That’s clearly what I think. But I’m biased: this is what I did in my own career.

The real question is what do you want from your career? What will be fulfilling to you? Many designers want to be craftspeople and just hone their craft forever. Maybe you want to be a Level 99+ supreme-ultra typography wizard. That’s fine. But it is also naturally limiting. There are only a handful of organizations that need typographers at all, much less can provide career progression for them.

I will say I’m convinced what many designers really want from their career is to make a difference and to see their ideas out in the world helping people. The scary question is: what if the best way to achieve this is to have a job that doesn’t include the word designer ? The not so scary answer is then you should seriously consider it.