Recently, I’ve been talking to larger teams so I can work on more impactful products with greater reach and get back into more mentorship opportunities. The pandemic kind of forced a lot of us to really think the paths we are currently on and I’m no different. My small design company, Adjust Creative, is just that—a small company. We’ve been able to do some amazing things over the last few years in the design space and I’m very proud of what we’ve done. But, it’s time to wind it down.

At the beginning of 2021, I started the process of exploring what I want to be doing next, which is a senior level individual contributor on an awesome design team that allows me to still do the craft, but also mentor and help guide the team, and it’s given me a lot of perspective about what it means—to me—to be a product designer for the internets.

tldr; I love design, art, and technology.

Product Design is about identifying and then trying to solve business problems over many iterations

I, like many of my design-focused colleagues and friends, love solving problems. We also love advocating for design and often times the elegance of communicating a complex workflow into something very digestible.

The work is problem-solving—I would think in the truest sense—by nature of balancing conflicting problem sets with one another. Whether you like it or not, we are a very capitalist society and we need to design products that fit into that society. I personally find it interesting to try and figure out how to design digital products that feel and work well for users as well as push the value of the business KPIs. There’s a fine balance to be had.

On one hand, we don’t want to design those info-overload Guru landing pages that just convert and punish folks any time you interact with a feature. On the other hand, building something only for users with no real business in mind, means it will likely fizzle out and die in obscurity because there’s no incentive for the owners to keep it going.

As a consultant, I’ve seen the digital design world from a couple of perspectives:

I’ve helped a few companies design products over multiple iterations over years as things changed for business, user or analytics reasons.

I’ve jumped in at various parts of the process depending on where a team was missing specialties. Like, designing out a new app interface and component style guide. Or, doing user research and persona building to hand off to the design team. And of course, just building stuff that was already designed.

I think having this business knowledge and perspective is something product designers need, but ultimately takes time to learn and experience. I would urge anyone that wants to design things for the internet or just products in general should take business courses.

Shameless promote: you can take business leadership courses that my company designed the platform and course structure for via Strategic Decisions Group.

Ambiguity is part of it

Oftentimes, business ideas or user problems are pretty abstract at first. We may know that we want a certain type of shoes to sell on our mobile chat app, but it seems weird to just drop a shoe advertisement directly into a chat stream and disrupt the user’s conversation. There’s a lot of ways to try and interpret or design a solution for this that may take some lateral thinking to get to something that works for both.

As well, you may have to think of your own ways to implement features that don’t exist but you believe could help bottom lines or help users with a pain-point. So, you’ll need to design that idea out enough to pitch or present it in a way that the team can get on board with you.

In that respect, there’s likely not a manager or any junior designer that’s going to just jump in and start thinking through potential solves for these problems. So, you just gotta pull out pencils, open up the computer, and get to it.

Ben Holliday has a great article on this topic as well.

UX is a part of the job, but the industry mixes up the titles and duties lot—or at least recruiters do

User Experience Design is not Product Design—but it is part of the process.

To be honest, I think a lot of times people using the term UX really mean IxD, but that’s a different topic altogether.

The UX designer works on how we get folks from A to B. The product designer needs to think about what happens before they even get to or how they get to A, and then after they get to B, how can we follow up and get them to C, D, and F, and then come back to C later for a different reason.

That’s kinda abstract, so here’s a more simplified macro product thinking example:

1. Funnel: The marketing campaigns b2b or b2c that get folks interested or to some sort of entry point
2. Core Offering: This is the main content that they want or need
3. Tangential Offerings: Other useful or helpful features or tools that are related to the Core Offering or “upsells” essentially
4. The followup and churn-reducing campaigns
5. Feedback loops, analytics, and research
6. Related: 6mo to 1yr business goals, understanding of the teams capabilities and limit

I would argue that most UX folks are thinking mostly about #2 followed by #3—which is valid—since it’s the reason folks are engaged.

I could be wrong—feel free to call me out in the comments.

Being a programmer is absolutely an asset to solving design patterns

Building the applications you are trying to design teaches you how the software can function from a fundamental level. This knowledge is invaluable when validating workflows or interaction design patterns.

You can really think about what’s possible from a programming perspective.

UI level:
It could be anything from a single search input form to a fully immersive WebGL 3D game or just simply a paragraph of text.

Server level:
It could be connecting to a database to make quick search queries or how fast will it take to do 5 API calls to different servers so you can surface and filter the right data, to even just crunching numbers or compiling files and responding with a JSON endpoint.

Having that information at your disposal when designing views, user flows, and micro-interactions really is an invaluable part of the job in my opinion.

There are a lot of edge cases or states that need to be taken in account that programming can help you think about during the duration the design process.

Not only the skill knowledge, it allows you—as a designer—to communicate with developers better. Then after a while, it allows you to see how designers and engineers communicate and help bridge that gap so that more folks can be involved seamlessly in the design process.

It allows you to prototype or even build out the idea if you have the time to further proof before designing something out fully

Knowing “too much” seems to be a hindrance in some circumstances

Now that I’ve talked about how valuable knowing how to do multiple parts of the process of building user-centered software, let’s talk about the not so great parts.

At first glance, sometimes it looks like folks with a wide skill range are either overqualified or you can’t focus your attention or specialize. This isn’t a great thing if you’re looking to do a specific part of the process with a larger team and can’t explain your goals and expectations well.

It also becomes difficult to talk about “what you do” because there’s likely a lot. You have to generalize in many circumstances and then talk about specific parts of the process with specific people that understand them.

It kinda blows my mind how many times in conversations with folks outside of the technology world that I just still have to digress and say “I’m a web designer…” to just keep the conversation moving. Then comes the age old question: “Can you help me build my cat photography website?” to which you just cringe at and say, “Ehh, you probably don’t need someone like me for that, you should use Squarespace, but I can help point you in the right direction.”

Having been doing design for a while, I’ve gained a lot of peripheral knowledge about different industries, design team structures, how design solves problems across different types of companies and products.

Prototyping is my favorite part of the design process

Having been both a designer and developer since the early 2000s, rapid prototyping has been part of the gig the whole time.

Early on, I was doing websites and applications with Flash and Javascript that were truly pushing the boundaries of interaction patterns. We would have to prototype weird interfaces to even see if it’s something we could design and pull off.

Sometimes we went too far… but, I think it opened up a can of worms for the internet that truly paved the way for “UX” to really thrive like it has.

These days I’m prototyping design concepts quickly in Figma or Origami and similar products that really cut down the time it takes to design and validate an idea, feature, user flow, or even just a quick exploration of different design patterns for a type of content.

For programming R&D, the evolution of quick start applications are gold. Rails apps or React & Node apps allow you to very quickly test programming or API theories and validate parts of the design or limitations in where data can be moved quickly.

For more experiential UI stuff, things like Pixi.js and Three.js are incredible ways to test the gamification of a user interface and see how feasible it really could be or if it’s just in the way of what you’re trying to get to the user.

Burnout is absolutely a thing

It’s important to not overdo it.

I’ve gotten burned out hard 2 times since I truly started my first “real tech job” in 2005.

The first time, I was just being overworked by an award winning company called 65 Media. The company did great work, but it was poorly managed from the top and I quit the full-time after a few months. They liked me and I was valuable to them, so they kept me as a contractor for a few years after up until they couldn’t keep the doors open anymore. That relationship turned out to be good for them and me both because I was technically a little cheaper on project basis and I didn’t have to deal with their day-to-day firestorms.

The second time, I was working with an amazing company Domani Studios. But again, overworking on a small, but powerful and talented team, to produce award-winning design and marketing web properties. As the Chicago office started to lose business, the hours got more intense. I ended up getting divorced, being very unhappy, and just quitting to play music and be a freelancer for a while.

Now as a consultant and small business entrepreneur, I’ve felt burned out every other year on a regular basis—but it’s not the same. I have learned how to handle the feelings and how to manage my time to better predict when cycles of fatigue may come into play and try to exercise restraint and the art of saying NO—which I’ll admit has been the hardest part for me.

There’s a reason we work on teams. Doing everything yourself is a sure way to not sleep properly and eventually not perform properly or worse, be depressed and ruin relationships.

There’s also a reason we need to be outside, in the sun, with our friends and family. Don’t forget about it—life is short.

The creator mind will create

I grew up as an illustrator from a young age. I think it gave me a leg-up in the design world, at least from a visual point of view. I’m not sure if it’s chicken or egg in that I was able to really focus to create drawings and then similarly programming and playing guitar to a high level. Was I able to accomplish these things because of the hyper focus, or did I learn the focus from doing something like drawing at a young age? I think probably the former, but I’m not a psychologist.

Anyway, I digress…

Many of the folks I know in design grew up doing similarly creative things. Some are more on the analytical side, some on the creative, some are just mad scientists, but I think it’s interesting that these are all very similar in the processes to “create” or even “discover”.

Not all, but of my colleagues have built apps or entire companies while working somewhere. I think this is inspiring and that it should be encouraged in every business. If there’s a budget for a chef in the kitchen, there’s budget to allow for creative ideation.

Let’s not confuse the word empathy

I hear a lot of folks, especially on the research side of things talk about empathy. But, I’m gonna go against the grain a little and say—you’re not always being empathetic to the spectrum of emotions UX folks. We should be saying cognitive empathy—because that’s what we’re actually talking about.

Being emotionally empathetic of others is an important part of designing products for our daily lives too. Heck, it’s an important part of just being a good and well-balanced human being that cares for others.

But, where it gets a little murky is if you’re “empathy perspective” is too narrow and task oriented that you delight the enjoyment emotion that produces dopamine and as a bi-product undermine more negative emotions like sadness and anger. This is a common theme in “social media feeds” and it has real world implications.

For example, Facebook has dealt with a lot of really weird social issues over the last few years because of lack of oversight on monetization of content that can cause anger, hard to detect bullying that can cause fear and fomo sadness.

The designers work so hard, with good intentions, to get the enjoyment and engagement portion down that the bi-product when the product does exactly as it was designed to do, but for the wrong emotions was pretty detrimental outside of the platform. I feel an example was Microsoft’s AI bot that went awry very quickly by finding the worst nooks of Twitter

We’re part of the generation that uses social media a lot, so I’m not saying I have all the answers by any means, but let’s be clear when we use “empathy” what we’re really talking about is task-oriented perspective usually.

Furthermore, if what we’re really doing is looking at how to move a bottom line slightly up for the stock prices—that’s not really empathetic for anyone except for the stock holders. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for it, let’s make product companies that grow into the stratosphere—but let’s not use terms that are so endearing to the majority of the folks if we know that’s what we’re doing.

Lastly, just go for it

There’s a lot of talk among me and some of my colleagues and friends about “when do you know you can do something? How much do you need to learn first?” etc etc. I think the right consensus among the more successful folks I’ve spoken with is that you just have to do it. Try things. Fail a few times, fail all the time even. Keep learning after each time about what you should or could have done differently. Try again. Change things up. Change directions. Keep moving and keep being awesome.

Keep designing and inspiring for the humans and other creatures on earth.

❤❤❤