The Good, The Bad, and The Great UX Designer

UX Design has exploded in popularity in recent years. Bootcamps and content creators have bombarded the internet with how to get from bad to good, not so much on how to go from good to great. Increasing supply with decreasing demand has created a market where good isn’t good enough. Designers need to be great or they won’t design at all.

Here’s how I distinguish the three. I don’t mean to imply that anyone needs to be great in all of these areas to be a great designer, these are simply attributes of great designers I’ve worked with.

Rationale Designers
Every pixel is a decision. Every decision has a rationale. The stronger the rationale the better decisions a designer will make.

• Bad designers lack a rationale, or rather, a conscious rationale. Instead their subconscious fills the void with ‘because I like it’. This creates designs geared towards pleasing the designer, not creating value. I call this ‘The Designer’s Problem’ because the designer solves their problem, not their users’.
• Good designers have a rationale behind each decision. Point to any element of their design and they’ll have an immediate answer about why they made that decision based on the best data available.
• Great designers have a rationale behind their process as well. They apply design thinking to all elements of their work to arrive at the optimal solution as efficiently as possible.

Outcome Focused
The purpose of UX is to design products that generate outcomes: changes in customer behavior that drive business results.

• Bad UX Designers focus on user needs. Just user needs. Businesses hire designers to achieve their intended outcomes and if a solution doesn’t drive business outcomes a designer's work becomes a waste of resources.
• Good designers connect user and business outcomes. Every pixel solves a problem for the user and connects to generating an outcome. The designer ensures that their solutions work both in isolation and within the greater context of the user journey.
• Great designers examine critical assumptions to understand a problem's root cause and see past the surface-level issue in front of them. This helps them avoid solving the wrong problem to minimize wasted effort and maximize progress towards achieving not just any outcome, but the right one.

Systems Thinkers
A system is a set of patterns working together to achieve an outcome. In software people rarely use these patterns in isolation, so they need to be applied consistently.

• Bad designers only think about one use case, theirs. They make decisions with little to no regard for its impact on the rest of the product. This hurts consistency and increases project scope as custom solutions require new components.
• Good designers zoom out to understand their product as a whole. They see components not as parts to solve their design's specific problems, but as generic solutions to the generic problem across the product. This helps them reuse components and design new ones that scale to meet multiple use cases.
• Great designers zoom out but also zoom forward to anticipate problems before they happen. They can identify which solutions work fine in the present but will break as the product grows.

Scientific Thinkers
Scientists seek better explanations about the universe. They improve these explanations by making hypotheses and testing them. Similarly, designers seek better explanations about how to design their products to achieve their outcomes.

• Bad designers perform fake tests; they test only to confirm their pre-existing ideas. This turns testing into UX theater; performative UX work that produces no value. Worst of all, they gain false confidence and a justification to continue in the wrong direction.
• Good designers treat each design as a hypothesis until validated with data. They determine which hypotheses are most important to test and then seek to disprove their ideas with users. Only once a design has passed an honest attempt at disproving itself can a designer be confident in their ideas.
• Great designers track their hypotheses while they design, not at the end. They also have exceptional awareness of their fundamental assumptions and which hypotheses are most essential to test.

Idea Machines
Ideas come in 2 phases. The 0 to 1 phase gives them a rough start and the 1 to 10 phase shapes them into something workable.

• Bad designers stop ideating once they find their first decent idea, potentially missing superior solutions as well as potential flaws. They ask for feedback late in the design process limiting the potential for substantive feedback.
• Good designers try lots of ideas. With each idea, they examine its weaknesses and find new ideas that remove them, allowing each idea to build upon one another. They share their work early and often with the team to help identify potential flaws in the solution.
• Great designers involve their whole team in the ideation phase to take advantage of everyone's unique perspective. They present multiple potential solutions with pros and cons outlined for each to help everyone think like a designer and elicit the best feedback.

Experience Magnates
Great designers have the most experience. Shocking. But this section is about how they leverage and learn from it. Experience comes in two forms, personal experience and industry experience. Industry experience includes the cumulative work lessons learned in the UX industry over its history.

• Bad designers start from scratch every time. Design is filled with common problems that have already been solved and by starting from scratch designers ignore the collective experience of the industry. They ignore feedback as well and or take it personally. This minimizes growth over time as they never learn from their mistakes.
• Good designers leverage the collective wisdom of the design community and are constantly referencing other products when designing their own. They’re also ferocious learners and consistently seek out ideas from industry leaders.
• Great designers go one step further and have a process for leveraging industry wisdom. They have a carefully curated list of products and leaders they reference and learn from. Most importantly, they examine the reasoning behind their design decisions over time to identify errors and patterns within those errors.

Specialize Professionals
Designers attempting to be great at everything are unlikely to be good at anything. By specializing in a specific skill set designers can maximize their abilities relative to the rest of the market.

• Bad designers are generalists. They try to please everyone. When asked what they specialize in they respond “I do it all.”
• Good designers specialize in who they help. This includes specific user types like consumers or enterprises, industries like finance or healthcare, or stages of company design maturity like early or late. So when asked they might respond “I specialize in early-stage enterprise fintech product design.”
• Great designers add one more specialization, how they help. They have a track record of creating a specific outcome within their specialization such as cross-platform consistency, user acquisition, or accessibility compliance. So they might say “I specialize in user acquisition for late-stage consumer fintech products and have done so at X, Y, and Z.”