Design salesmanship

I’ve been doing mobile design full-time now for a year and a half, and am still loving it. I really enjoy the challenge it presents and the strange problems you have to deal with while designing for touch. Even today, I’m learning how to account for screens where lots of text fields are present when keyboards take up 70% of the available screen real estate and how to let the user easily flow from one text field to the next even when they aren’t visible.

Doing QA on my own designs is another fun aspect that I keep getting better at the more I do it. Every time I design a screen, I’ve started to ask myself if I’ve accounted for every possible situation that could happen. For example, say I’m making a screen that allows users to edit their profile information. I’m fairly comfortable with making the UI for it at this point. The hard part is deciding on the functionality for all use cases. What happens when the user edits an entry and hits the hard back button on Android instead of Save? Does it save the information or not? What happens when the app crashes after the user has made a few edits? What happens when the user enters an invalid entry for one text field but valid ones for all the others? What do you do when the profile picture upload fails and the app has already deleted the older picture? Do you just show no picture or default back to the old one? Would we need a “Remove photo” functionality in this case?

It’s situations like those which keep coming up and keep the work interesting. Dealing with all of this should not be neglected for the sake of “edge cases”, it’s just good design to account for them. One aspect of design that I’ve noticed I consistently have kept getting better at, is selling my own designs. Since I’ve started doing design full-time, I wouldn’t say that my UI and UX skills have improved that much. I’ve naturally gotten better by doing more of it, but I haven’t noticed a tenfold improvement in my icon design or wireframing skills. What I’ve gotten incredibly good at, is selling my own work.

Salesmanship was an aspect of design that I did not have a ton of experience with prior to foraying into the mobile design world. I could recognize good design, and I could probably point out what it did right and wrong, along with provide suggestions on how to improve it. Now, I not only have to do all that better, but also convince the client that a certain design is better than another because of those reasons. When I present three different options for a way that a screen can be laid out, I have to explain the pros and cons of each one, and then suggest which one I think would work best for their business goals. “Good design” is not just making good UI, it’s making design that fits the client’s needs.

Things I’ve gotten better at include throwing in metrics from in-depth studies done about full-width cards versus offset cards, citing previous work about the prominence of CTAs, and pretending to be a non-technical user myself going through the flow and stumbling upon some pitfalls that aren’t very obvious at first glance. The more you act like you’re trying to help the client solve their own needs, the more they’ll trust you and go with your suggestions. You could, of course, game this and try to manipulate the client to go for the design you like the best, but it’s best to just help them achieve their goals instead of sneakily trying to get your favorite work in. Chances are, the product will have a higher chance of success if the client achieves their goals, not if you manage to get four hundred likes on Dribbble because of it.

Picking up the client’s reaction to your work is essential as well. When presenting mockups or skinned screens for the first time, try your best to do it in person. The body language and facial expressions of the client says a lot about how they really feel — more than what they actually say about it in a follow-up email. It’s likely that they don’t particularly love the design but believe that it’s right for what they need at the time. It’s also possible that they are totally taken aback by it but don’t wan’t to offend you in a meeting. All of this happens with subtle body language which you’ll get better at picking up over time.

So yeah, salesmanship of design is extremely important, arguably more important than how good the design actually is. It makes your life as a designer significantly easier when you know how to recognize problems and address them immediately just by reading the person you’re designing for. It pays off immensely when you know you’ve not only addressed the client’s goals, but also the user’s needs by managing to sell the client on a better design than a bad one. I think this is a valuable skill for designers to develop to eventually end up managing teams and making design decisions down the line, and I certainly find myself getting better at it everyday.