The ability to deliver a great experience to the end-user is becoming a significant competitive advantage for the modern company. That’s why design is becoming more deeply integrated into the product development process. According to the 2017 Design in Tech report, Facebook, Google, and Amazon have collectively grown design headcount by a whopping 65% in 2017 alone.
This, of course, has made the demand on product designer greater than ever before and is forcing the role and design skillsets to rapidly evolve. At the rate in which the design industry is shifting, having an underperforming product designer could create significant opportunity costs.
So how do you know when a product designer is costing you? Here’s 7 signs that he or she is falling short.
The product designer is ultimately the steward of the experience. If he or she doesn’t annoy you (and your users) with a barrage of questions the way a toddler does, it’s a bad sign. It’s likely the reason why your product has feature bloat or feels inconsistent when the experience is changed
Recording thoughts and data is an essential part of staying organized and capturing critical information for design decisions. But if the data is so dense and overcomplicated that you can’t retrieve important information or identify patterns, then it becomes inevitably paralyzing. Nothing gets done.
If your product designer can’t document concisely or synthesize in real-time, it’s a bad sign that they won’t be able to make use of the data gathered over however many hours, days or weeks of research.
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.
Research has shown that an individual’s level of creativity (and the open-mindedness that facilitates it) can be directly influenced by the amount of traveling that they do. More importantly, traveling affords a designer the ability understand cultures, languages and experiences on a deeper level.
Dieter Rams once said “you cannot understand good design if you do not understand people.” Immersing oneself into different cultures illuminates the subtle nuances that shape the way we think and the contexts that we operate within. If your product designer doesn’t at least aspire to travel abroad, then he or she may be limiting his or her capacity to empathize with your users.
Even the best, most experienced designers are wrong–and they’re wrong most of the time. That’s why design is more successful when it’s collaborative and iterative. Being able to burn through as many ideas as quickly as possible is both a means to increase creativity and speed of feedback from you and, more importantly, users.
If a designer starts their first idea in a design tool, rather than using pen and paper, he or she isn’t moving fast enough, wasting the time needed to learn from mistakes that will inevitably be made.
This seems petty, I know. But the reality is, complacency kills. If your product designer isn’t up to date on the latest tools used by the industry, it’s probably a sign that they aren’t actively looking for ways to be more efficient or effective. Be honest, would you hire a product designer that uses Photoshop to create mockups?
If the final implementation of a design doesn’t look as intended (read: pixel-perfect), it’s the designer’s fault. Either he or she lacks an understanding of what’s technically feasible or he or she didn’t communicate effectively with developers to course-correcting as code was being written. The designer should be expected to create pleasant experiences, and that includes experiences interacting with teammates.
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Productivity Hub 