Design should serve your team, not the users

My parents still ask me what I do at work. My friends think I photoshop stuff. I once had to explain my job to a bunch of kindergarteners for career day. I said, "I make things useful and pretty."

They didn’t get it.

So I asked them if they used YouTube, and all of their tiny hands shot up. I explained how people designed the thumbnails, the playback controls, and the microinteraction of smashing the like button. They got it, oblivious that removing all friction in an experience facilitates endless content binging, tracks every move for algorithmic manipulation, fuels our need for constant validation, and turns us all into dopamine-chasing zombies while tech companies rake in profits from our inability to look away.

Anyway.

It’s easier to explain good design with an anecdote. Two weeks ago, I paid for my subway ticket by tapping my phone at the Chicago Metro turnstile. It took two seconds. Thousands of hours of physical human labor, design, manufacturing, and engineering effort went into making this two second interaction feel so effortless.

Good design just works. It blends into the background.

And as the above example illustrates, good design is more than good software. People realize their hopes and dreams in the real world. Software is just a means.

What does this mean for product designers? We can't fully control the outcomes of the things we design. We don't even write the software!

As designers, our outputs are visions of a better future: sketches, wireframes, maps, and prototypes. These artifacts help our teams realize the better outcomes for our end users. I'd argue that our real users are the people that consume our outputs: developers, PMs, and internal stakeholders.

Amazon has a concept called "input metrics": things that you can directly control to drive results. If you focus on the what you can control, success (output metrics) will naturally follow.

Articulating our vision and aligning our teams on that vision are the designer's input metrics. Instead of lamenting over the “seat at the table” and being a “champion of the user (but nobody listens),” focus on shepherding your team towards better outcomes through better outputs.

Craft good design outputs, and good design outcomes will naturally follow.

If it doesn't, then that's what the design process is for.

Iterate.

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P.S. Shoutout to our sales and marketing team for inspiring this post. I presented what product design is, and they asked really good questions about our industry. I love good questions.