Why Designers Aren’t Understood
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX … More about Vitaly ↬
As designers, especially in large enterprises, we often might feel misunderstood and underappreciated. It might feel like every single day you have to fight for your users, explain yourself and defend your work. It’s unfair, exhausting, painful and frustrating.
Let’s explore how to present design work, explain design decisions and get stakeholders on your side — and speak the language that other departments understand.
As designers, we might feel slightly frustrated by the language that often dominates business meetings. As Jason Fried has noted, corporate language is filled with metaphors of fighting. Companies “conquer” the market, they “capture” mindshare, they “target” customers, they “destroy” the competition, they want to attract more “eye-balls, get users “hooked, and increase “life-time value.
Designers, on the other hand, don’t speak in such metaphors. We speak of how to “reduce” friction, “improve” consistency, “empower” users, “enable and help” users, “meet” their expectations, “bridge the gap”, “develop empathy”, understand “user needs, design an “inclusive” experience.
