Introduction
Product designers hold a unique and vital role in shaping users’ experiences and interactions with the products they create. They are responsible for transforming innovative ideas into tangible solutions that not only meet the needs of users but also inspire and delight them. In this blog post, we will delve into the essential qualities and mindsets that set exceptional product designers apart, including their ability to embrace the spirit of play, collaborate effectively, tell compelling stories, cultivate empathy and compassion, and find meaning and purpose in their work. By understanding and embodying these qualities, product designers can create human-centered solutions that genuinely resonate with users, leaving a lasting impact on their lives.
Embracing the Spirit of Play in Product Design
This process of exploration requires of us a spirit of play. It means being open to the flow and the dynamic moment-to-moment opportunities that present themselves. Figuring out whichever one is the one that feels most promising, that seems to have the richest potential.
A spirit of play also requires us to open ourselves to impractical, impossible, science fiction, and absurd possibilities. By keeping ourselves open to ridiculous possibilities, we prevent ourselves from developing unconscious filters, developing these internal editors and sensors that declare specific ideas unacceptable, to declare certain ideas off-limits. Those sensors restrict our access to the adjacent possible. So it takes conscious effort to stay in a spirit of play.
Collaborating and Playing Well in Groups
That spirit of play is also essential in inviting others into the creative process. Other people bring diverse ways of thinking and different perspectives informed by their own experiences. This requires us to figure out how to work with people who think and work differently from how we do. It requires us to develop approaches to collaboration and communication that allow for the free flow of creative ideas, even if those ideas come from different places.
We must acknowledge that there is no one way to design and that each team member can approach it from their unique strengths. Creative leadership means finding ways to leverage those strengths and integrate them into a single creative process. It means noticing how divergent thinking plays out on your teams and finding ways to balance and blend complementary approaches.
The Power of Storytelling in Product Design
Playing well with others also means having various ways of communicating ideas. This is especially important during those phases of the design process where our ideas are vague and unformed. Finding the best way to communicate an idea to the specific people we’re collaborating with — whether that’s writing an email or drawing on a whiteboard, or simply talking something through — helps bring those people into our process earlier, bringing them along for the ride, where they can help us evaluate and validate ideas before they become maturely developed.
No matter where we are in the design process, we must tell stories well. Sometimes we tell pictures to tell stories, and sometimes, we use words, but when we can find the narrative that gets at the essence of an experience, it becomes both an effective communications tool and an effective way to organize our ideas about the design.
Cultivating Empathy and Compassion in Design
Being human-centered challenges us to open ourselves to other people’s emotional experiences deeply. It requires us to engage with others as emotional beings and reconcile ourselves to our creative choices’ impact on their emotional lives. Empathy is vital to this work. We must be aware of what others feel beyond simply understanding what they are trying to accomplish.
But it requires more than empathy – it requires compassion. It requires compassion for people who make different choices than we make, come from different life experiences, and see the world differently from us. It requires compassion for our users’ daily emotional pressures that are beyond our control.
Empathy is not enough because empathy only tells us about other people. What we do in response to that is up to us. And the choice we must make is to be compassionate towards our users.
There’s a word for someone who understands other people’s feelings but does not respond with compassion. We call them sociopaths.
Finding Meaning and Purpose in Design
When there is a sense of meaning to our work, it guides our choices. It gives us purpose, a role that we play in the world — not a mission, not a finite objective to be achieved, but a state of being we continually live in.
Yes, we want to reduce the incidents of user error out there in the world. Still, we also want to acknowledge that users will make errors. Machine-like perfection is not the point.
Systems that acknowledge the impossibility of machine-like perfection are the point.
You have to love people. Honor them in your design choices, no matter how irrational these people are or how often they overlook your carefully laid-out interaction cues. Beyond that, you have to love the world, love design, and all the incredible possibilities we can make real through the processes of creative problem-solving in love with the experience and the rich array of ways that we can shape experiences for one another and in love with the vibrant diversity and complexity in our world that allows for such richness.
The Personal Growth of a Product Designer
The best designers are people who cultivate themselves. In most cases, designers – humans – grow into these qualities over time. We need to feed ourselves as creative beings – with new information, new ways of thinking, and new ways of doing our work. Good designers are invested in their growth, not simply from the professional development perspective. They invest in their growth as human beings in many ways that have nothing to do with design. They have creative projects and pursuits beyond design that they invest their time and energy in because these pursuits enable them to experiment. Use different muscles or find meaning they can’t get elsewhere. They have passions that fill them up as people: music, art, and theatre, things that enrich us and deepen and diversify the experiences we empathize with and can draw on in our work. These are the things that make us more human-centered.
Human-Centered Design: Embracing Our Humanity
Accepting our faults, but also accepting and embracing our infinite capacity to synthesize information, ask new questions, make judgments, take chances, and follow threads into new possibility spaces. So maybe being human-centered isn’t simply about centering our design process around other humans. Perhaps it’s about being centered in our humanity. We cultivate our ability to connect to others by cultivating our humanity. In other words, maybe what makes us more human-centered also makes us more human.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the qualities and mindsets that make product designers exceptional lie in their ability to embrace humanity, empathy, and personal growth throughout their design journey. Designers can create meaningful, human-centered solutions that resonate deeply with users by cultivating a spirit of play, collaborating effectively, mastering the art of storytelling, and practicing empathy and compassion. Additionally, through personal growth and finding meaning in their work, designers can continuously develop themselves as creative professionals and human beings. By embracing these qualities, product designers not only enhance the user experience but also contribute to the enrichment of the world around them, ultimately making a lasting impact on the lives of others.