The Quintessential Mindset for a Product Designer
We humans are obviously different and surprisingly similar. And a product’s success depends on it serving everybody’s similar needs while ensuring it serves them in their different ways.
We all talk about products and in doing so I often think about how a product came to inject itself into a human’s life. This is the seedling for a mindset I’ll construct going forwards.
I will begin outwards towards customers and product teams and then inwards to your own self. The underlying theme is to strive for an understanding of how we humans wish to live. This is my letter to every product designer out there.
A good product speaks to the entire set of people who must use it. And for me to understand this group of people, I have to be one of them. It’s hard to imagine designing a product that I am not going to use. Consider this the key disclaimer to this essay. In any case, you would probably be designing a product which has similar elements to products you use.
What shall we make
We don’t want to poke at screens with a stylus and hundreds of products made with that technology didn’t succeed to the scale of the iPhone. We want to point at things with our fingers and until we reached there, we didn’t have a computer that my never-used-a-computer-before-Mom would like to use.
It seems to me that every time a new technology is invented, a gold rush ensues as everyone tries to take their pick of the many new possibilities. But just because we can build something, doesn’t mean we should. Instead, we must come up with products that reaffirm how we wish to be as humans. And then we can go about picking or inventing technology as we need.
As Steve Jobs once remarked,
“You’ve got to start with the customer experience, and work backwards to the technology.”
This is the essence of “human-centered” design pioneered at Apple. Now, one can study a bunch of guidelines and processes to be a good “human-centered designer.” But I think that completely misses the point. To be a good designer, first and foremost, you must tap into your very own intuition.
“Intuition is more important than Intellect.”
With the above conclusion, Steve Jobs returned from India to create Apple: the most successful design-house in human history. Steve’s intuition was the Great Filter that dictated everything that was made at Apple.
When I talk about my product intuition, I often use the analogy of products as musical instruments. Philosopher Marshall McLuhan said that technology is an extension of the body. A car is an extension to our legs, a book to eyes, clothes to skin and a computer to our brain. This is most obviously visible in the case of a musician playing an instrument.
Who am I playing for
Every time you make a decision as a designer, you do it for thousands or potentially millions of users. And following your own intuition could seem extremely biased. You might be inclined to survey the consumers about what they want and simply make that. That’s what they will tell you to do. But that’s what has knocked giants out of the game. Take for example, Nokia.
In a stunning Ted Talk, technology ethnographer, Tricia Wang recounts her episode with Nokia in the year 2009 during the dawn of the iPhone. Her conversations with 100 or so people in emerging markets like India and China revealed the now obvious excitement for iPhones. But Nokia rejected her insight as their survey involving millions of data points said otherwise. The phone giant got acquired, the never-made-a-phone-before-company conquered.
The folks at Apple created the iPhone with a simple mindset: create products you would want to use. This is the guiding principle Steve rallied his team to follow through all of the revolutionary products Apple has created over the last 4 decades.
I believe
It is the life you wish to live that guides the life you make available to other people. Some of the best products are created when its creator wishes for a product and forces it into existence.
GoPro was invented when its creator, Nick Woodman, wanted to film himself surfing. Instagram was like the 20th photo-sharing app at the time but it embodied what Kevin & Mike (its creators) wanted photo-sharing to be like.
Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngeList and quite simply an industry legend who knows more about building businesses than most people in the world, recently tweeted:
“If you build for yourself, you’ll always have product-market fit.”
The masses won’t tell you the product you need to invent. New products are seldom conceptualized from the status quo. In fact, the most important products push the status quo.
In the year 1984, when Steve Jobs was asked about market research, he had this to say:
“Customers don’t know what they want, until you show it to them.”
The reason is whether your ideas in a product are good can only be truly known if it integrates seamlessly into the lives of its users. And nothing can definitively predict that. You, your colleagues and every user has to use it to know for sure.
Thankfully today, we can quickly create animated design prototypes and “use” our ideas to some extent without coding a single line. Also, the ideas that go into a product are present to some extent in other existing products in the market and observing how it is playing out can be really valuable.
Simply put, focus on building what works for you and you’ll be surprised at how many people like you in the world there are. Then observe and iterate.
There’s design in every designation
When understanding why Figma, a tool for designing software products, dominated the industry, Kevin Kwok explains:
“The core insight of Figma is that design is larger than designers. Design is all of the conversations between designers and Product Managers about what to build. It is the mockups and prototypes and the feedback on them. It is the hand-off of specs and assets to engineers and how easy it is for them to implement them.”
You must note that no matter what position you’re designated, you’ll always be exercising your designer instincts. It’s how you choose to communicate your understanding for a product: code, marketing pitch, the written word, design mockups etc., that will determine your designation. But there’s design in every designation.
And hence, even as the designer in a product team, you can't own a design, as Uber’s designer Didier Hilhorst pointed out. What you actually are in-charge of, is the Story.
Design is the story of ‘why, how & what’ of a product. As a designer, you’re the storyteller of the company.
Design is everything that brings us together to build. Design is how we go about building products. Design is not a step in the ‘manufacturing’ process. It is all-pervasive. Design is the interface between technology and culture and in being so it affects both. This becomes obvious when you start using Design as a verb, instead of Noun. You're always designing something!
Design creates culture and the culture of a team washes over it’s products.
Choosing your instrument
I write. Whenever I have an idea about something to design, I write. Some people doodle on a sheet of paper. I sometimes do too, but usually after writing, I immediately head to my computer to start designing colorful mock-ups. I was advised not to do so.
There are methodologies that dictate that you must first do extensive research, define the problem, create a user persona and make lo-fidelity wire-frames, before you start making hi-fidelity mock-ups. But I go straight to the last step.
I have always been interested in stories. So I write the story that will be common across all users and then tend to immediately design for it.
The methodologies are not wrong. But I think they should not be religiously followed either. Ultimately, the purpose of each stage to get feedback on the understanding you’ve consolidated so far. And for efficiency, the way you communicate your understanding should optimize for being cheap, quick and objective.
Also, you should’ve a clear idea on what exactly it is you’re getting feedback on. A problem that I run into with colorful mock-ups is that the person gets distracted by colors when I am really trying to demonstrate the user flow. However, the problem with black and white sketches (wire-frames) is that it often makes it hard for the viewer to imagine the user flow. Wire-frames are recommended because they are faster to create but in the world of ready-made templates and design systems that is often not true. These are obvious to those who don't religiously follow methodologies.
In conclusion, know who you're getting feedback from and the demands of the situation you’re working in. And then pick the method that communicates your understanding of the product in the optimal way.
After constructing a mindset towards the market and your team, we must now look inwards.
Your perspective
If you’re aspiring to be the Designer in a product team, you may plan to begin at the skill and grow your way towards the craft. What precedes skill though is perspective — your perspective.
Try asking yourself questions like:
What are the products I like? What appeals uniquely to me, even if it’s not essential to my life? What products are essential to my life? Is there something about them I wish worked differently?
Answer such questions in as much detail as possible describing the journey, your feelings and the outcome of using the product, and you’ve just performed the first act of being a Designer — surfacing your perspective.
Another thing you can try is redesigning a product that is useful to you and can use an upgrade. This is how a musician learns by covering other songs.
Listening to yourself play
Colors, typography, iconography and animations, while serving their purpose, also carry the taste of their maker. This is where you act like a painter and respond to the zeitgeist of design trends and the culture at large.
As a product designer, your canvas is the product.
It is essential to learn the technicalities of typefaces, color palettes, etc., but guides that dictate decisions like which typefaces should be paired together, or what emotions are associated with which colour can be mostly ignored. I can almost hear the wrath of design schools but I firmly believe that these things should be absorbed from observations and baked into your intuition.
No word can truly describe how a colour makes one feel. What you observe must be felt and what you feel must be observed. Watching yourself go through these experiences, being self-aware, is a valuable asset to a designer.
Listening to yourself is how you nurture your intuition.
One thing I try is meditation. I meditate to be more self-aware and be a better designer.
Overall, the quintessential act of Designing products can be articulated into two parts:
First: how do I communicate my understanding of people and technology in a given context?
The second half: how can it be baked into a product that successfully serves others?
Becoming the “Humanizer”
Having a sense of self-awareness (distinct from self-conscious in which you judge yourself for your vices) allows you to empathize with the most laziest, careless and dumb version of yourself. This is a version of yourself you should be pragmatically studying because guess what: the user feels no obligation to be smart or disciplined towards your product. The best products are the ones where the user forgets that he is using a product and transcends to doing things he wishes to. What comes naturally to you, your intuition, must be embedded into what comes naturally to your users, an extension of them.
Great products become an extension of a human.
To listen to ourselves, being self-aware, is to learn what makes us most effective and grow. Empathy, then, is not a ‘technique’ to understand the customers and your team. Empathy is a way to be more human. It is to sense something human that makes a great designer.
Additional Reading:
- 5 Habits of Design Thinking by Christian Woodtke is easily one of my favorite essays. Talking about intuition, our designs are often a direct output of our habits and Woodtke gets to the heart of it.
- How to develop Product Intuition by Ayush Pruthi gives a simple framework and some actionable exercises to develop your intuition for products.
- The Value of Inconvenient Design by Jesse Weaver serves as an excellent counter-weight to the popular notion of “ease” that gets absorbed into our mental chatter.