Over the course of my career, I’ve had a broad range of experiences in design that have taken me to far-flung corners of the creative economy. As the years accumulate, my resume should begin to possess the weight and merit of a Tolstoy novel; a tome rich and dense with professional accomplishments, intellectual achievements, and valuable results. Instead, my job skills and responsibilities are starting to feel more like Hemmingway’s prose on a bar napkin.

Design Skills: I figure it out.

The problems designers face are not getting any easier. The one constant is ambiguity. Business, Technology, and People move too fast for complete and clear definition even on the best of days. To be a successful designer today, it is requisite to define, understand, and design for a group of end-users of a given experience. That’s the idea. The methodologies of Design Thinking is one widely adopted approach to achieve these ends. That helps designers get their job done. Halfway.

Designers, UX practitioners, any human with a heart who wants to make the world a little better: don’t stop reading now. Our work is not complete.

As we work our way to the heart (and minds) of today’s problems, more is needed. Designers also need to define, understand, and improve the complex relationships among all people — not just users, but also among the stakeholders “behind the glass”. This complex and sometimes contradictory group includes product owners, business stakeholders, technical and engineering teams, even other design teams. They all have their own priorities, agendas, unique abilities — and limitations. It often feels like one large, dysfunctional family. And as a designer, I always feel like I show up for Thanksgiving dinner.

The problem, on either side of the glass, is about people. Designers: you have your work cut out for you. You need to Figure It Out. We are all counting on you.

Design Thinking methods and activities are an established, and usually prudent approach to improving the user’s needs. But it is often not enough. To achieve real progress we need to first reconcile the competing agendas, fix broken communication styles, and find common ground with those stakeholders whose trust and understanding are required for the designer’s needs. Without that, we cannot fully do our work on behalf of those aforementioned users.

Before Design Thinking, we need Design Therapy.

To be a better designer, don’t focus on technology or business. Focus on people.

I don’t have all the answers. And what answers I have found, are not panaceas. Each project is different because people are different. What I have found has been gained the hard way. What follows are what is constant in my successes and failures. By sharing these three observations, perhaps it can be less hard in the future for all of us.

Until stakeholders are aligned and understand their own internal relationships, the Good Fight for the User cannot fully succeed.

1. Design is often a sub-function of Technology within organizations — but only because it is funded that way.

The manner in which organizations are structured can explain a lot about how teams and individuals operate. How “families” are structured, and paid for, is a matter of concern, with big impacts. As part of a design team, I identify my client and our user’s closest allies, and understand where they sit within their firm’s organization.

I’ve worked with clients who belong to Marketing and Business teams. More often, however, the role and responsibilities of Design exist within Technical and Engineering teams. I prefer the former because I believe Design is more closely related to aspects of why customers and employees form relationships with companies and less about how it happens.

All this matters because, as designers, we need to know who is funding the project (and why), their relationship within the firm, and what success means to them. And like at the family dinner table, you need to understand which side of the family you as a designer have ‘married into’. Knowing this context can allow for better communication and facilitation among all at the table. Being a designer feels a lot like being a therapist. Sometimes it also feels like a moderator, interpreter, and at times, a referee.

2. Most people are not great at communicating. Achieving clarity is what Designers should do best.

People and their problems are complex. Communication can be hard. When in doubt, draw. A modern practitioner of User Experience Design needs to be deft in the performative arts of facilitation and communication as much as they are in delivering user-centric arrangements of pixels (or whatever medium is needed.)

As a rule of thumb, communicating with images is always better than words.

The teams ‘behind the glass’ all possess different pieces of knowledge and expertise. They may also have different motivations. Each possess a piece of the puzzle needed to understand the requirements needed for a designer to be successful. Each of those puzzle pieces comes with its own language, jargon, and terminology.

As designers, we need to bring teams together, orientate them to common, human-centric outcomes, as simply as possible. Often, that means drawing. Be it in prepared design mockups or visualizations, spontaneous whiteboard sketches, Mural, FigJam, or common slideware, ideas that are visualized are often more understood than words spoken through Zoom calls. In a world of remote work, this job isn’t made easier for most of us. It is a designer’s job to effectively express and communicate. Not only to end-users, but to everyone.

3. Teams behave differently because they are rewarded differently. Listen to people and then communicate design’s value accordingly.

Everybody is usually trying to the right thing. Everyone on a product team possesses important knowledge that can and should aid in the design process. Most also possess biases and are motivated by different factors. As a Designer, there is a level of neutrality I can maintain: regardless of (or despite) a product team’s internal dynamics, I come to the table to represent the user.

In practice, it’s more nuanced. I need to understand the relationships among stakeholders, and translate user needs in ways these non-users understand. I need to connect the merits of good design to what matters to them, their careers, and their bosses' latest mandates. The same design insight or feature can be explained as a reduction in costs to the business sponsor, an increase in engagement to the marketing director, and technical efficiency to reduce tech debt to the engineering lead.

The dinner table is often big and noisy, and everyone has their own specific dietary preferences, but we all gotta eat.

The empathy and skills User Experience Designers possess can and should be extended to all people. A good Stakeholder Experience is required for a good User Experience. It can take some healthy Design Therapy sessions to accomplish this. Designers can rise to this challenge.

Designers, we need to think. But in order to Figure It Out, We also need to feel — for ours users, but also for the large, dysfunctional, yet well-meaning, maybe even lovable, family often contractually referred to as “the client and all relevant stakeholders”.

For this, a little therapy is often required. Now please pass the gravy.