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9 Ideas For Designers (& Everyone) To Live By

By: Sarah Doody on Jan 31, 2012

Years ago while living in Portland, I wrote this as a reminder of why I do what I do.
Having recently found it and being inspired, I thought I’d share it with my designer friends … a source of inspiration for people who are just starting their careers, a kick in the ass for people who maybe need to make a change, and a reminder for everyone else, that there is no ‘there’ and that what matters most is not what you achieve, but who you become along the way.

1. Look beyond the immediate
Don’t let yourself become paralyzed by the situation you’re currently in. Whether you’ve hit rock bottom or feel like you are at the top of your career, always remember to look to the future – to examine your potential – to look beyond the immediate.

2. There’s always room at the top
If you are great at what you do, people will notice – whether they are looking for it or not. When people find someone who is great, someone who has authentic passion, talent, and persistence that is so rare, they will take notice. People will carve a place out at the top for those who choose to be great.

3. We’ve all done our time
Along the journey, each person will likely find themselves in a place where they don’t fully enjoy where they are at. Realize that these times are only temporary – and if we choose, lessons can be learned along the way – that will help you get to where you want to be.

4. Seek wonder in the detail
Train yourselves to be an observer. Learn how to filter through the noise and see the beauty and inspiration that we often let pass us by each day. Slow down. Don’t think so much. Learn to imagine again and think like a child – with curiosity, inquisitiveness, and fearlessness of the unknown.

5. Discover your strengths
Each person is born with inherent gifts – unique talents that when discovered, should not be ignored. Realize that you’re greatest potential will be realized when you focus on your strengths, instead of trying to fix your weaknesses.

6. Work from the inside out
In creative projects, in life, in everything – learn that you need to work form the inside out. You can’t know your purpose until you know who you are. Likewise, you can’t know a design, until you have an intimating understanding of the product or service, you can’t build a great building until you know each intricate detail about how it needs to function. Work from the inside out and the design will come naturally as a result of the intimate understanding of purpose.

7. Make your own rules
Change is inevitable. You must be flexible and agile to adapt to the
change that you face each day. Don’t allow yourself to be caught up in doing things the right way. Do what works – in the context of the situation – in the context of change.

8. Ask stupid questions
People love to be listened to. It is validating, empowering, and flattering. Take time to focus on listening more than speaking and you will be amazed at what type of information and ideas people will naturally volunteer.

9. Love the process
Forget the destination. The destination is dead. Half of the time you have no idea what the destination is. Learn to appreciate the process. Understand that what you learn during the journey is far more precious than the destination.

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High school, start ups, and the power of perspective

By: Sarah Doody on Jan 30, 2012

In high school, I was on the volleyball team. We were pretty good, but we had one big problem. In volleyball, you play until you get to 21 points. Every time we’d get to 10 or more points, we’d just simply freeze up. We missed plays, we messed up serves, we just couldn’t play anymore. One day in the middle of a game, when we reached 10 points, our coach called a time out, gathered us on the court and said “You’re down. The score is now 0, 10 … for them”. We went on to win the game.

Every game for the rest of our team’s career, when we’d reach 10 points, we would all yell “0,10”!!! I’m sure the other teams thought we were completely crazy. But this reverse psychology worked for us.

Sometimes when you think you’re winning the game, it’s easy to fall into the trap of guaranteed success, entitlement, or feeling more secure than you should. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you are right now. Because in an instant, the other team could catch up. And for my little volleyball team, we needed to think different. We needed to focus not on where we were, but where we were headed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and it’s especially relevant in start ups. A small victory can give you a boost of confidence and make you feel like you’re on top of the world, that there’s no way your idea could actually fail. But it’s at those very times that we tend to ease up a bit, get a little too comfortable, and leave just enough room for the other people to catch up.

Small victories are great, but the key is to not lose sight of the rest of the game that’s in front of you. Because chances are, in order to win you’ll have to overcome about a million times more setbacks than you faced to get to that one small victory.

Only you know what it took to get to where you are. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter where you are right now. What matters is what you are doing to get to the next level. And to get to the next level, sometimes you need to turn your focus away from any victories you’ve had, and keep your vision on what’s yet to be achieved.

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What user experience designers can learn from filmmaking

By: Sarah Doody on Jan 15, 2012

Lately I’ve been thinking about the lessons that user experience designers can learn from filmmakers.

When I first started researching this concept, I thought that the key discovery would be related to storytelling. I thought that there would be an undiscovered process or method that we could take from film and apply to products. But, turns out, that’s not it. I think the greatest lesson we can take from filmmaking is not the art of story – but the art of decision making and the role of the director.

One of the greatest challenges in any project is to maintain that precious momentum forward (and hopefully, upward). Without continuous progress, you aren’t learning anything, and a huge amount of our time is spent learning about people, industries, and how things work.

The primary reason for loss of momentum, I believe, is a decision that either wasn’t made, or wasn’t the right decision. Decisions can be the death or life of a project and a team. Therefore, to maintain that momentum, you need to have a director – a chief decision maker.

I discovered a talk that John Gruber gave at MacWorld in 2009 that touches on exactly this idea. John has a concept called the Auteur Theory of Design. The theory is derived from a french theory of film, the Auteur Theory of Filmmaking that suggests the best films will have the director’s imprint and evoke their personal views and vision on the film. In essence, the directors are the authors because it is the sum of their decisions that influence the film.

At the beginning of his talk, Gruber asks the question “Why does the output of a project often not equal the aptitude of the talent that made it?“ He suggests that in any project, especially creative ones, the person who gets to make the final decision (or in film as they say the final cut) is the one who ultimately governs the quality of the work. Gruber says “The quality of any creative endeavor tends to approach the level of tase of whoever is in charge.” As Gruber points it, this works for good and bad. I did a little sketch to show the idea:

This shows two scenarios. If the director of your project has a higher than average level of taste, then over time, the quality of your project will climb upward. However, if the director of your project has a lower than average level of taste, then over time, the quality of your project will decline.

So next time you are working on a project remember three two things. First, that since user experience is at the center of a project, where all teams intersect, you have a responsibility to set the bar of taste, of quality. But second, remember that you are not the hero. Ultimately there is a director, an auteur, who gets to make the final cut.

PS: To learn more about John Gruber, you can visit http://www.daringfireball.net or follow him on Twitter.

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On Creating A Culture Of Design: The Founding Team

By: Sarah Doody on Jan 14, 2012

Products are not only judged on what they do, they’re judged on how they do it. The experience that someone has when using your product is largely what they remember. These experiences are not forgotten quickly and are shared stories that spread through networks of people as their either praise or throw punches at your product.

Today, consumers expect great experiences, and they really are learning to spot the difference between a good and bad experience. It’s not enough to just fulfill a need or solve a problem. You have to do it in a way that creates an experience. In the past, we’ve had a strong focus on creating great technology. But, unless the great technology is woven into a thoughtful user experience, chances are that it will never be accessible to a consumer.

How do we ensure that experience is part of the fabric of our products and process? I believe this can only happen when we consciously choose to embed design into our culture from the very beginning.

In his article Silicon Valley’s New Secret Weapon: Designers Who Found Startups Enrique Allen argues that in order to have a culture of design, you shouldn’t spend time training people who to think like designers, but instead, have a designer in your founding group. In doing so, you set your team up to embrace design thinking and innovation.

Allen touches on a concept that I’m very passionate about – that there’s a fundamental lack of understanding about the value of design and designers themselves. Too much focus is placed on the deliverable of design and not enough on the process to get there. In his article, he writes:

Now, more than ever, we face complex problems that designer founders are well-equipped to solve. Everyone in a company should have empathy and practice design regardless of their title. Design can no longer be just be an outsourced add-on, limited to putting “lipstick on a pig.” Tech moves too fast for such short-sighted design thinking; it won’t be a lasting advantage.

Many more thoughts on this, but I think the fundamental challenge is that we need to continue to evangelize the value of design and continue to create environments where designers can exercise the full range of their skill sets.

PS. Check out Designer Founders is Enrique Allen’s book on founders who make tech start-ups.

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Why everyone can't be a user experience designer

By: Sarah Doody on Jan 07, 2012

As the Internet and technology because more tightly woven into the fabric of people’s everyday lives, a false sense of knowledge rises. This is a rising challenge for the user experience designer – trying to balance input from vaguely informed stakeholders who passionately believe they know what’s right, just because they use the medium.

Seasoned user experience designers know that education is a large portion of your job and deliverables. You continually find yourself explaining “why” things are the way they are. But today, the element of education as a part of the user experience design’s job is more present than ever. The reason is that we have a breed of people who use the Internet who feel as though they know best. Therefore, they are armed with feedback and input – we’ve all heard it …. “but that’s how they do it on Facebook”, “it can’t be that hard”, “what do you mean it will take a week”. It is exactly these types of conversations that distract from the true value of a product and many times, simply destroy it.

There’s a misconception about what user experience design truly is. It’s time that we as user experience designers, work harder at communicating and advocating for our true value.

User experience design is far more than wireframes, feature lists, and creative sketches on a whiteboard. It’s more than conducting an engaging IDEO-style brainstorm session and leaving our perch to spend a day at Wal-Mart doing ethnographic research. What people don’t understand, is that the biggest part of user experience is what you don’t see. It’s the process that happens to get to those deliverables. It’s the hours of critical thinking and problem solving. It’s the hundreds of being wrong before you finally hit the right. It’s the complex game of Jenga as you try to put all the pieces of the puzzle together – without breaking it.

I recently read Reframing UX: It’s About Designing Products, an article by Josh Korr, web product manager at Viget labs. I think Josh touches on one of the factors that contributes to the misconception about what we do.

It’s incredible to watch Laura or KV listen to a client’s ideas, to user interviews, to internal brainstorms — and then, often in real-time, filter and mentally transmogrify all of that into coherent, awesome, well-defined features and products.

That mental transmogrification has the same surreal alchemical quality that I see when our designers conjure up incredible mood boards and design comps out of little more than a client’s free-associative, often ill-defined, feelings. It’s pure creativity in action.

Josh realizes that the best user experience designers have this unique ability to rapidly take in, process, piece together, and turn ideas and information into tangible product experiences. They do this so fast and almost effortlessly, that to others, it perhaps gives an impression of “I can do that too”. But the reality is that user experience designers have trained their minds to do this and it’s a result of years of learning, thinking, being wrong, and sometimes being right.

I don’t have any brilliant ideas on how to solve this problem yet. I wish I did. The only advice I have is that we have to get more comfortable with letting people be a part of the process. If we want people to understand not just the deliverables, but the journey we had to go on to reach that destination, then we need to allow them ride along.

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9 Ideas For Designers (& Everyone) To Live By
31 January, 07:36 PM

High school, start ups, and the power of perspective
30 January, 08:57 AM

What user experience designers can learn from filmmaking
15 January, 06:26 PM

On Creating A Culture Of Design: The Founding Team
14 January, 09:35 AM

Why everyone can't be a user experience designer
7 January, 06:23 AM

The Perception of Simplicity
26 May, 11:51 AM

Urge For Excess
7 December, 09:37 PM

The Immediacy of Innovation
17 August, 05:50 AM

The New Sweet Spot: Portals & Programming
5 May, 06:36 AM

Dorthy.com spending $4 M on “broken” search for dreams
1 May, 03:20 PM

Target Me Please
5 March, 06:11 PM

Searching Twitter
4 March, 09:23 PM

Can America Stay Online?
25 January, 07:06 PM

Re-creating a mindset
30 November, 07:36 PM

Are we really friends?
25 October, 12:59 PM