Socializing design work
Unveiling the underrated merits of sharing in product design
The joy off seeing your work go live — watch actual users use it in their everyday life and draw value from it — is a feeling hard to match up to for a product designer. Just the idea of someone somewhere clicking on those mighty rectangles right now to order food, plan a travel, book a medical consultation, …[heck, to even] find a life partner is exhilarating! Isn’t it? But the Yin to this Yang is the fear of `What if they don’t like it? What if …they know I designed it and they hate ME?`. This balance of feelings do keep us humble, but they also become opportunity blockers if left unchecked.
Product designers instinctively choose perfection over small changes and this often lands them in a tough spot. We fail to realize that in the longer run, this failure to practice low level of shame and not trusting our intuitions can become blockers for our own growth.
Open source has lessons for us all
Every designer’s frame is unique, shaped by their lived experiences, interests and background. The open source movement has a big part to play in shaping mine.
Everyday, across 52 million projects, thousands of developers make contributions[to open source projects] that are subjected to scrutiny by community members and maintainers . They are held accountable for their work, asked difficult and conflicting questions and have their approach challenged. And yet, the contributions never stop. If anything, with every passing year they increase by folds. Because with every feedback, discussion and inspection, contributors find themselves coming out as a more knowledgeable and efficient individuals with better software-development and communication skills. And if uncertainty kicks in, the rewarding feeling of seeing those tools impart value to the world in real-time helps them stay motivated.
As they’re going through this transformation in the open, they’re simultaneously and effortlessly broadcasting their growth, establishing themselves as a desirable candidate for recruiters and whoever else is taking notice. They are actively able to see a tangible result of this participation in the form of real-time opportunities. The design community doesn’t share this reality. The level of transparency and openness that the developer community is so familiar with and is rewarded for is dreaded among product designers. A possible reason for this could be — it hasn’t been an easy ride for designers to confidently exert authority over product decisions.
This can be attributed to misplaced organizational practices, being followed up by second guesses due to lack of trust for the discipline and ethical malpractices such as not providing attribution to a fellow designer/contributor where due — a community can only thrive so much as it is fair. This either induces imposter syndrome among designers, eventually bringing down self-confidence or just erodes their trust in the likes of their own.
Only when we acknowledge that these factors have been holding us back for extracting value from the open movement and contribute to the larger good through our work, can we do something about it. If the future of design is indeed open, designers need to equip themselves with the grit and ethics required to achieve it. A practical first step in this direction can be to practice meaningful transparency through socializing and bring a mindset shift in how we handle criticism.
Benefits of socializing design work
I better have good reasons to suggest you should add yet another responsibility to your list. Fortunately, I have three.
- Uncover mentorship opportunities: The reasons to indulge in mentorship as a designer seeking growth in your career are endless. It makes you better at communication, allows you to polish your craft, helps improve leadership skills necessary for progressing your career, and gives a platform to disperse your distinctive experience as knowledge which can be highly rewarding. Despite this undisputed value associated, there’s a narrow set of approaches to mentorship that designers are conventionally exposed to. We’re conditioned to believe that mentorship has to be a formally structured exchange between two individuals, compulsively dependant on certain platforms. Writing and speaking are the more accessible forms of mentorship with better reach and yet are less popular. Trust me, you don’t have to wait through a tedious vouching process to start sharing about your learning, processes, and approach with the community.
- Discover new pathways to collaboration: Those of us working for mid to large sized organization would agree that staying on top of everything relevant happening across the board, that can potentially impact your work takes unfathomable effort. Unknowingly falling into silos is inevitable if sharing with the right stakeholders isn’t intentional. Working at one of the largest all remote company, building a product with a considerable breadth of features has taught me a thing or two about being intentional while sharing and the impact it has on both, internal and external collaboration. Recording short video overviews frequently and sharing those over Slack, broadcasting research insights to the larger product team as opposed to a small group, and participating in product and design showcases are few of the practices that have helped me invite collaboration, reduce effort duplication and make faster progress. Remote, hybrid or onsite, the methods may differ, but better sharing practices always boost collaboration, in return increasing the overall efficiency of an organization.
- Build visibility on-the-go: These are tricky times for tech and will not be know for stability. For other jobs an impressive resume is enough to apply for a new position. Designers are required to either have an impressive portfolio and/or enough visibility for their talent and craft. List of product design responsibilities run really long and expecting one to fulfill those and also build and maintain a portfolio, all at the same time, is unreasonable at best. When you publicly share blog-posts or video overviews, or contributing to open projects, you’re amplifying your visibility in real-time. A few examples:
1. At my job, I try to write about the changes my team works on soon after it is released, so its easier for us to communicate those to our users and also share with them a channel to provide us with timely feedback: Beautifying our UI: Giving GitLab build features a fresh look
2. These contribution can go beyond individual product/project too. A good example of one such public collaboration(contributed by Rahul Chakraborty ) is this framework — Design recommendations to improve digital payment experience where a group of designers came together to openly contribute to a framework based on common interest and expertise. One doesn’t have to always be a associated with an open organization or movement to be able kick-start or contribute an open project.
Projects are protected under confidentiality agreement?
I realize that transparency and openness in the product development world, that I’m more used to, is more of an exception than a norm and many designers have their work protected under NDAs or confidentiality agreements. In situations such as these, leverage the data and information in the project that is publicly available, abstract the finer-details to an acceptable level, bring in mock-data sets and focus your writing on the process rather than the content. The previously mentioned example of the design recommendation framework will sit well here too.
I’d limit myself to suggesting safe-practices only, steering clear of the legally grey areas. If you wish to get deeper into the topic, read the blog NDA: How to show confidential work in your portfolio by Tamila Zamotailo.
Transparency and public accountability can be intimidating for those who are not used to it and have been subjected to negative outcomes only. Product designers shouldn’t forget that the very crux of our profession is sustained in the spirit of experimentation and the lack of willingness to deal with uncomfortable feedback will only set us back. We have many barriers to overcome in our path to embracing transparency, and it will only be possible with mutual support and respect in the community. It is time we design our own on-boarding journey and do so with courage!
Blog review credits:
