What do designers *really* need to know?
What matters in the real world? And where can we learn it?
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What follows is the actual post that lives up to the title you saw in your Inbox.
What skills make a designer effective in the real world?
Designer, and founder of NotBoring software, Andy Allen tweeted this take on what designers really need to know:
One theme of Why Design is Hard is we need to be more honest about what the real roadblocks are that designers face. The myth is that the challenge is crafting ideas, or growing design skills, but the truth is far different. In reality, any product or UX designer spends much of their time talking and collaborating with engineers, project managers and leaders. Most of the important design decisions (vision, goals, priorities) are made by project leaders, not designers. We’re not granted that much power, which means we have to depend on influence to be effective.
In Allen’s diagram, he calls out four kinds of knowledge: statistics, computer science, management and business. We think it’s not knowledge that matters most, but social skills. We call out these three as the most important:
Persuasion: the ability to convince decision-makers
Negotiation: how to make deals and compromises
Facilitation: leading conversations across different roles
It’s these social skills that allow designers to be effective. They reflect how design is usually a social process and not a solitary one. Someone has to collect and vet requirements. Someone has to get multiple teams to agree on goals and what ideas to use to fulfill them. Someone has to digest customer research and make it actionable. If the designer is going to be effective they have to be involved, if not helping to lead, all of these processes. If they don’t, they’ll tend to be involved too late in projects to do much good.
We think every design book and course should explicitly state how central relationships will be in designers having the careers they desire. Something as simple as this declaration should be taught to all designers early in their careers:
Your success as a designer depends equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent. The powerful people you need as allies, or your clients, will likely know little about design, and you will have to teach and persuade them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built by your organization. Your ability to explain your design ideas and convince people to use them is equally as valuable as your creativity.
What skills do you think are most important for designers that are often overlooked? What would your version of Allen’s diagram look like?
Yes, the Designers must understand [the] business.
This, however, works only when their colleagues equally understand the value added by design.
Oversimplified, any business must answer a few important questions: what, why, when, and how. To take the answer to the market, you need everyone to understand the answer to all of the above.
This means everyone needs to understand context, capabilities/resources and be willing to share the room.
I don't think designers learn the wrong things; I think culture shapes the dynamic of every company.
We need persuasion, negotiation and facilitation because [sometimes] we are bad at understanding the overlap and the connection between the questions. The state of play takes these sensible skills and funds internal politics.
If your only way to collaborate with your peers is to constantly engage in politics, well, as a designer, you lost.
Design is a function/domain that requires perspective to understand the problem, creativity to frame it in a way that can be solved, and the will to fail. This makes designers vulnerable to many things-and this is an understatement. But designers are not some frail creatures; they don't need protection but support.
Sometimes, the designers understand the business better than an Operator sitting in the CEO's seat.
Does this help? Not really. How do I know?
I've been in a few rooms where one person talks 95% of the timel and the how is answered before the design team says a word.
I'd argue you need to have both that knowledge and the soft skills you mention (or really the power skills of communication!) to be the most effective.