Sad Truths On What It’s Like To Be A Designer

Earlier today I stumbled again upon a wonderful short piece on Sad Truths On What It’s Like To Be A Designer by Michael McWatter. It’s an honest and on-point overview of some little sad truths that many of us experience in our careers. As it has turned out, being a designer isn’t particularly easy.

1. The delta between what you designed and what gets shipped can be measured in light years.
2. You will redo your late-night work from scratch first thing the next morning.
3. Many senior designers are survivors of internal politics, rather than evolvers.
4. Your stakeholders will probably choose the option you like the least: so be careful what you show.
5. If you run OS upgrade on a workday, you’ll be asked for urgent changes immediately.
6. Perfect is the enemy of good, but it won’t stop you from trying.
7. You will never convince anyone to use a proper em-dash.
8. Naming things will be the most nerve-wrecking part of your job.
9. Brainstorming is about gathering ideas, then ignoring most of them.
10. All the research in the world is no match for your stakeholder’s opinion.
11. Agency designers had their souls crushed, but they never miss a deadline.
12. No one will ever review your UX copy until it’s live and wrong.
13. You haven’t shipped your work until stakeholders decide that you did.
14. Files stored under “Experiments” will usually hold your best work.
15. You’ll spend hours solving problems that shouldn’t even exist.

Many items above feel so relatable, and hit home for me — in fact, most of them happened multiple times, or hold true this very day. Yet still, despite all these sad moments, being a designer isn’t sad — it’s exhilarating! It’s full of moments of joy and craftsmanship and playing and tweaking the pieces of a puzzle.

Design Is About Care and Love #

Over the weekend I also stumbled upon a wonderful post by Bob Baxley, in which Bob hinted at an interview with Jony Ive, and argued about the challenges of reducing the value of design to a number. Because truly good design is more than that: it’s about care and love.

If you have around 50 mins this weekend, I highly recommend you to watch the interview — it had a profound effect on me, reminding me again about why I’m in this industry in the first place.

Ironically, I have launched a whole course about reducing design to metrics, and so I replied to Bob in the comments:

Vitaly: “For the last few years, I've been trying to advocate for just what you are mentioning — speaking the language of the business, measuring the impact of UX, and making strong arguments on business value of accessibility and research efforts.

Now, looking back, I realize that this is probably the only way that I've discovered over the years to effectively articulate the significance of good design. There has been very little understanding of the value of emotional impact of design beyond loyalty, retention and NPS scores.

And so I used UX metrics to open the door for broader initiatives, to get buy-ins and budgets and commitments to UX. Without it, all design efforts appear to be uncomfortably mysterious and barely noticeable, and hence — unfortunately — often not worth an investment.

Once I open the door, I try to do the best work I can to not just solve a functional imperative (as Jony eloquently puts it), but to bring along trust, joy, optimism, hope, pleasure — and to make people feel valued, understood, noticed, thought of.

It's just, unfortunately, that magical part usually comes later, rather than sooner. But to me, that’s the essence of truly great design.”

Bob then answered with something that I found very difficult to disagree with:

Bob: “If you bring a spreadsheet to a design review you’ve already lost. If you try to argue the value of design on the basis of business, you’ve already ceded the battlefield. And if you give up on the deep, emotional, human reason you got into Design in the first place, you’re going to end up in a place you don’t recognize.”

In my gut, I wholeheartedly agree with Bob.

Yet in some other way, I felt defeated for years. I felt stuck, blocked, dismissed, rejected in many projects as my aspirations for accessibility and good UX work weren’t heard or understood. I simply couldn’t get anywhere, often dismissed even before the very first meeting.

Surely it has been changing over the years, but speaking to the emotional impact of design proved to be remarkably difficult. And the explanation I could bring would be around loyalty and customer satisfaction, which then worked much better.

UX Can Be Measured, But It’s More Than Metrics #

I still believe that we should be able to measure UX to understand how well we are performing, and to show the incredible impact we are producing on business. But it’s never the full story.

No business can be successful without successful customers. And my job is to do both. And despite every political powerplay, arguing about UX metrics, impossible requests, or vague design briefs, there’s always an opportunity to shape something meaningful. Something that might actually change somebody’s life for the better.

Frankly, if that’s not a superpower, I don’t know what is.

And that’s exactly what keeps me going every day.

Happy designing, everyone! 🎉🥳