Artificial Intelligence
A satirical take on navigating the product design world, this piece offers ten unconventional tips for aspiring designers. It humorously explores the journey of becoming a product designer, providing lighthearted advice and insights into the design industry.
So you want to be a Product Designer? Forget about going to school and racking up debt — take the road less traveled and your career journey will be a winding path of unexpected turns. Many have survived before you (the stories of legend) and you can too, with these hard-won tips:
Haunt design forums, sub-Reddits and Slack groups like a shy, lurking ghost. Observe the rituals of this strange tribe, absorb their language and spot opportunities to contribute small insights here and there. This immersive exposure will help you transform from design outsider to semi-credible poseur.
Product Designers leave tantalising trails of breadcrumbs across the internet in the form of case studies, articles and podcasts. Binge on these to reverse-engineer their processes and mentality. A word of caution — do not overconsume as the risk of pretentiousness may increase alarmingly.
It’s crucial to find a grizzled design sage willing to take a chance on you. You may luck out on a generous design leader who sees enough raw potential in you to become your Yoda. They will patiently mentor you in the ways of user research, wireframing and generally not making the UX worse than before.
There’s no avoiding it — you must become a Figma/Sketch/Adobe XD jedi to bring your ideas into reality. You’ll never forget the thrill of creating your first crude wireframes and prototypes. It resembles child-like scribbles (incoherent to anyone other than you), but it’s a start.
Be a hussle-monger and grab (or create) any design project tossed your way. Redesign apps, do pro-bono work for local businesses in your community, enter design challenges — anything to build your shabby portfolio into something worth bragging about. Sanity-check your whimsical ideas early, so you don’t float to far into the ‘blue sky’ impossibilities and keep one foot firmly grounded in the possible.
Despite what your early work may suggest, there are indeed “correct” ways to design digital products and experiences. Make sure to drill into the core principles like accessibility, usability heuristics and design patterns. It’s not always the Wild West and you will need knowledge of these holy scriptures that underpin all great user experiences.
The beauty and curse of the modern design path is the never-ending acquisition of new skills and tools. Once you stumble into a compelling new area like motion design, design systems or neuro-design, it’s impossible to escape the gravity of online courses and the YouTube abyss. But at the end of these rabbit holes are also portals to new creative worlds.
Language obfuscation is a powerful survival skill. When colleagues quiz you about some-kind-of-agile-wordy-process, smile confidently and say “Absolutely, a huge priodesignility for me is enhancing intuitive modality flows.” They’ll think you’re an expert — then frantically Google those terms later.
We product folk dream up design flights of fantasy — and it’s the engineers or developers who must wrestle those visions into real, functional entities (software, websites, platforms etc.). Make sure to cultivate dev friends to sanity-check your whimsical ideas early, so you don’t float to far into the ‘blue sky’ impossibilities and keep one foot firmly grounded in the possible.
At some point, skeptical clients or stakeholders will question your design decisions with phrases like “Is that really a good idea?”, “That just won’t work.” and “We’ve been doing it this (that or the other) way for 10 years!”
Here is your chance to employ the most crucial design skill — the ability to weave and clearly communicate legitimate and plausible-sounding justifications from a motley crew of user research, design principles, past experiences and sheer gut instinct.
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Master these tips and one day, you too may achieve the impossible dream — becoming a reasonably competent and employed Product Designer.
But truthfully, the mastery never ends as our field is mutating at warp speed. We must all remain humble students for life, doggedly converting each mistake into a breadcrumb trail for the next cohort of hopefuls to follow.
