Rasmus Andersson · Staff Design
As a designer my concerns are with planning, puzzling and learning. When I tried working in a software-engineering capacity, the concerns were similar, but with other materials and a very different way of learning.
With management it’s almost like a completely different universe where little to none of the skills of a designer are useful. It’s more about politics and juggling particular needs of individuals on your team. I admire people who are good at this and I really think it’s one of the hardest things you can do in life.
It will likely always be a challenge to feel like you are learning and “progressing.” This will be totally fine as long as you’re willing to work on building mental tools and constructs to help yourself.
Speaking of compensation, depending on the company and region on Earth, management might or might not be considered a harder task and already command a higher level of monetary compensation than a designer. This varies quite a bit in my experience. Some companies, especially traditional or old ones, tend to give managers a higher salary than ICs simply by tradition and belief.
This is great stuff and in some way what makes a good designer efficient: the ability to estimate and approximate the path to good decisions and solutions. Work on making use of this intuition, dare to “trust your gut.” Work on communicating these hunches to your coworkers in a way that is never condescending or dismissive but rather assistive.
For example, if you feel that the information density is too high, that there is too much information being displayed, you might start a conversation about how important approachability is to the thing you are building. In contrast, what you probably shouldn’t do, is to assert implicit authority — perhaps unconsciously — by saying “this won’t work, it’s way too dense.”
By leveling up to the subject or category of your intuition’s concern, you can help your coworkers see what you see: that the design may be a bit overwhelming. When people come to a concrete conclusion like that on their own, they are much better equipped to do a good job at addressing it. Sometimes it also turns out that your intuition is misdirected and a short conversation can help you realize that.
To directly answer your question: It is imperative to stay sharp with your hard skills. Imagine going to university and getting a professor who lost touch with their craft. Not only will your time and money be less efficient, but you may even learn the wrong things. As experienced professionals, we have a considerable influence on people who are earlier in their path to mastery. By staying current on hard skills — like color management and display technology of the latest generation computers — we are able to help other designers do better, build better things and to a higher degree of happiness and product quality.
I see this slow evolution happening that has happened in other, more mature fields of design: Being a designer today and tomorrow increasingly means understanding the materials you are working with, like how computers work, and the greater constraints around work we are doing.
Choosing to design software UI is choosing to work with the materials. It is making a choice to really learn and understand these materials. For software design, materials are programs, instructions for the computer, along with hardware — like displays and input devices. Programming may seem like it’s a skill only needed for people in the software “manufacturing industry” but really it’s not that clear of a contrasting line; it’s a gradient, of course.
Putting in a big investment into things you only need to know right now might be a loss, so to speak. You know, like if you spend a whole week learning about this thing that you just need to know for a few days, then the balance is off.
It’s like that XKCD comic of like how much time you should spend automating a thing on one axis, versus how much time it will save you on the other axis, you know?
With software engineering, every day you could learn something that other people find trivial, for the first time. You can get that quick fix all the time, constantly. With design, not so much.
But that seems to be the point where things fall apart. Cool, we’ve built a tool that can turn your Figma code into React, but that’s not actually taking a user’s problem and converting it into a solution. We’ve just made it maybe a little bit faster to convert a rectangle into a div, right?
Posted on March 3, 2021