The 3 bad arguments designers use

Retire these phrases for greater happiness and success

If you repeat the same argument with someone over and over again, you should probably stop. Why? This situation means one of four things:

1. You are wrong

2. The way you’re expressing your opinion is not as persuasive as you think

3. There is something important you are missing

4. They are not ready to hear it (from you)

We repeat arguments because we believe the other person should do the work to change. But change is hard. No one likes to do it. The fact that we repeat the same argument is evidence that we don’t like to do it either. We can always stop and ask: “Hey. I’ve said this five times now. What needs to happen to change your mind?” But we rarely do. To do this requires admitting #2, #3 and #4, (and possibly #1) which is a lot of humble pie to eat at once. The surprise is the vulnerability of this act often makes our arguments more persuasive, not less.

Many designers have repeated the same ineffective arguments for decades. We need to stop. They don’t work. These arguments rally other frustrated designers but that’s not who we have to convince to get what we want. Repeating ineffective arguments makes you predictable and easier to ignore.

I believe that design is optimism. I have great hope in you and this entire profession. I want a better designed world as much as anyone. But my hope is rooted in reality which requires some tough love. Focusing only on how things should be doesn’t change anything. We have to be honest about why things are the way they are first.

Here are three popular arguments we need to stop using.

1. We are misunderstood

Product strategist Sophie Freiermuth recently posted on Linkedin about the decline of how UX us valued. It’s a rousing post and worth reading. Midway through she frames designers this way:

[we] are in fact misunderstood specialists of the space-in-between: in-between users reality and the business's dreams

I agree we often feel misunderstood. The question is why?

Our core competency is explaining things to customers. If we are master explainers, why don’t our coworkers understand us?

It’s one of two reasons:

1. We’re less persuasive than we assume. A major argument of Why Design Is Hard is that designers are trained to create, but not to persuade. We are conditioned to believe ideas speak for themselves, which is a fallacy. Many designers would benefit greatly from taking sales training. Sales is basically the UX of persuasion. These are skills anyone can learn, but it requires a humility that is outside the ego trap. Coming up with good ideas and selling them are very different skills and many designers stink at sales.

2. We are understood, we’re just not important. The hard truth is that often leadership understands us well, but prefer strategies other than quality design. That’s it. It’s not personal. UX is a kind of quality. Most businesses are not based on high quality products. It’s rare! Do you typically buy the highest quality products on a daily basis? Of course not. Affordability or convenience (e.g. fast food) often matters more. Yet we get mad when organizations don’t always bet on quality as the primary strategy.

#2 is a hard message to accept. Designers have faith that good design should always be the most important thing. But it’s not a rational belief, as evidenced by how hard it is to convince most people to share it. Great design isn’t easy to achieve. You need an organization and culture built for it and most are not built that way. Why? High quality is a strategy for differentiation when other means of competition are commoditized. A simpler and more widely understood strategy is to have mediocre products, and win on promotion, partnerships and price (3 of the 4 Ps of marketing).

Instead of accepting that we are in a quality game, and not a design one, it’s easier to keep repeating old ineffective arguments and believe the problem is leaders misunderstanding us. But the truth is it’s up to us to understand the landscape we’re on and set realistic expectations for what is required to get what we want.

The good news is engineering teams often have similiar complaints as designers do. They want to make higher quality products too. Go talk to them. You’ll discover what you experience is not anti-design. More accurately it’s anti high-quality. And this is a frustration every craftsperson in your company likely feels. Which makes them potential allies! If you are reading this, you likely need allies more than anything else.

2. They just don’t get it

I’ve worked in different cultures of experts: user research, UX, project management, leadership, innovation and communication. The keynote talks at events in every different expert culture I’ve been in often includes the refrain “they don’t get it”.

It’s kind of ridiculous to get mad about this. We’re experts! Of course non-experts don’t get it as well as we do. Designers, like all experts, are rare. If everyone in the organization “got it” they wouldn’t need us experts, would they? A big part of the job of being an expert is explaining things to non-experts. Saying “they don’t get it” is a cop-out for expert professions.

One exception is sometimes people are rewarded not to get things. In which case, of course they don’t get it. But if this is the case, why are we so angry about it? It’s a gravity problem, something we should expect and be prepared for. Many experts are hired by executives for a kind of plausible deniability: they can say they were advised by UX experts, and “products are tested in the usability lab”, even if they always ignore their recommendations. This is a real situation! It might be the one you are in but don’t know it. I hope not, but maybe this story helps explain some mysteries.

Here are four questions from a past essay to ask any time the phrase they don’t get it is used:

Who are “they” exactly? If there is more than one of them, they are in fact different people. Some of them will get it better than others. Even if they are all fools, one will be least foolish, and that person is where progress begins. There is always someone who is the most open minded in any group. But if you lump them together into a uniform Borg-like entity called “They” it guarantees you will stay stuck in the same place.

What is it? Any idea is comprised of smaller ideas. If you lump them together with one name, as in “They don’t get Design” or “They don’t get the First Amendment”, you’re pretending Design or the First Amendment is an all or nothing proposition, which ideas never are. Until you break a large idea down into small bite-sized pieces, you can’t see which parts are understood, misconstrued, or ignored. You really don’t know what the it you’re so angry about is.

Us and them. Socrates feared people who were certain about their own knowledge. He saw them as the least-wise people as certainty creates a closed mind. It’s possible that they see you in the same exact way you see them. They wonder why you don’t get their it. If nothing else, you and them share this view of each other. This is great news – you now have something in common! Their militancy in their thinking might mean you are more like them than you realize, an observation which should motivate you to rethink your attitude.

You might be wrong (or are right, but not in the way you thought). The high school social studies exercise of arguing both points of view on an issue is one shamefully lost in the adult world. Empathy for their position will help you see your own more clearly, and the resulting clarity increases the possibility of the resolution you claim to seek. You still might not agree, but if you understand them, the way you try to engage with them will change, and for the better

3. Why should I have to?

I’m aware that some of the advice I give feels like more work to do. Persuasion, reframing, ego-traps… it’s all work! And it’s the hard self-reflective kind of work too. And who wants to do more work? No one does.

So when I give talks or get emails I often get asked, “Yes Scott, I see what you’re saying, but why should I have to put more effort in when I am already doing X, Y and Z, and have experienced A, B, and C?”

My answer is: You don’t! It’s all up to you.

You may be at a place in your life or career where you don’t want to do more. That’s totally OK and I support you. You may work for a lousy boss or for an organization that takes advantage of you, and if that’s true I say to hell with them. Do the minimum required to get by. Blame them all you want if that makes you feel better. There are plenty of broken organizations and bad bosses out there and I’ve been involved with some of them myself.

However, if you want change the only way it happens is if you do it. No one is coming to save you or me or anyone. Much of my advice is to reframe frustrations so they are easier to solve or accept. This doesn’t necessarily require more effort. But it likely require reseting your expectations. In your work as a designer you reframe problems on projects every day. All I’m suggesting is the way forward for you might just start with reframing what frustrates you so that you can do something about it, instead of angrily repeating the same ineffective arguments and shaking your fist at the sky of your organization until you retire.

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Question for you: what are some other bad arguments you think designers should retire? And what better ones should we use instead?