Listen. Inquire. Learn.

These are the four most important qualities you need as a creative. I’ve already convinced myself of this in less than five years of working in the design world. Too often, I’ll see a designer portrayed as an arrogant, egotistical asshole who needs his “vision” to be executed perfectly with no compromises (Steve Jobs certainly didn’t help this image). This stereotype has shrouded creatives in a strange aura of uncertainty to the point where some product managers and engineers are afraid to approach them for collaborating on something.

Yet, I’ve experienced the opposite in my career so far. Developers seem to show up at my desk or Slack me asking for feedback on if the feature looks okay. They’ll explain why they couldn’t build it the way I wanted and will try to work with me on an alternative solution. Product managers will approach me with an idea they’ve got and will try to whiteboard out what a potential visual solution to the problem could look like. They’ll remark that it’s easy to work with me. I’m not saying this to brag, but just to illustrate what it actually means to properly collaborate with a designer.

When former co-workers describe me, I often see words and phrases like like “humble”, “modest”, and “rigorous thinker”. You won’t see them brag about my illustration skills or the sweet transition effect I made (not that it’s bad, but like, it’s not what stands out when people recall working with me). It’s always the personality traits. And it got me reflecting on my own behavior and interactions with my peers to figure out what I was doing that makes them think this way.

Step one is to simply listen to what people are saying. A big takeaway of this personal introspection is watching myself simply listen to people when they talk. It’s no secret that America is obsessed with talking about itself. People love sharing details about their life and they crave validation for it. As a result, everyone keeps talking and very few people actively listen. By “active listening”, I mean really digging into what they just said and trying to get to the root of it, not just replying with a random personal anecdote to make the conversation about yourself. The volume of spoken words and sentences in a brainstorming meeting boggles my mind sometimes, and when I look back at the notes from the discussion later, I’m all “What did we really even talk about? We just jumped from one topic to another idea and joked about this other thing and got nowhere.”

Everyone can talk but very few can actually listen. Everything that people say is coming at you loaded with unconscious bias or them intentionally being vague about specific aspects of the topic. It’s up to you to dig in and probe further on what they’re trying to convey. One time, a product manager told me to “make sure that the price of the products is the most visually prominent thing on the screen”. It would’ve been easy to go “ok” and tinker with a few concepts and present three alternatives. But instead I asked “why? do we want this to be the first and most important thing the user sees on the screen?” and the response was “no, they need to know that this is a screen where they can buy and sell things.” This is a larger problem with a different design solution. The PM clearly had something different in mind than what I was thinking. The solution we ended up going with was to modify the header on the page to more accurately depict a “marketplace”, along with tweaking some of the buttons and iconography to use design conventions from e-commerce sites. If I had never listened, I would’ve never asked, and if I had never asked, I would’ve never known. We would’ve shipped with massive font sizes for the prices, completely overlooking the real problem at hand.

Speaking of asking the questions, the second big shock of how often I do something was the act of simply inquiring about things. In the beginning phase of a project, I’ll blast a ton of questions out at the team. “How many touchpoints can we work with here?,” “What notifications has the user already seen before they see this one?,” and even seemingly dumb ones like “Is this default Android behavior?”. Turns out it’s best to get these answered really quickly or at least get a conversation started about it, because if you don’t, there’s a higher risk of people working off of their own personal assumptions, many of which will be different and incorrect from that of the rest of the team’s. For instance, maybe it’s default Android behavior on the latest two versions of the OS, but we’ll need some crazy workarounds to make it work on the older ones. In our case, it depended on our userbase fragmentation (by Android version) and it required us to get that data before moving on. These inquiries act as the forcing function that gets people on the same page, and I’ll gladly take that over the risk of potentially sounding stupid or uninformed.

And finally, this self-reflection has shown me how much I really don’t know. I’m constantly pitching ideas that are well-intentioned and based on the successes and failures of past experiences mixed in with industry best practices, platform standards, user research, and feedback from my design peers. But a lot of the times, I’m flat out wrong. Watching real users use the products I’ve designed has proven this repeatedly. I’ve successfully pitched and built interaction models that I know are intuitive and copy that is comprehensible, but nothing tells you how little you actually know like watching user testing participants completely fail to use the product the way you want them to. You can either slam your head against the desk or complain about how the users are stupid and don’t know anything, but none of this will work. The trick is to just accept this as part of the process and use it as a tool for growth.

Go back to the drawing board and simplify the concept. Remove the things causing confusion and keep the stuff that’s working. Iterate and tweak the layout so that the most important thing is conveyed first, and only then dive into the details about the rest of it. Even as I do it today, I’m stunned at how often I have to re-do layouts that are dead simple: carousels, list views, pop up modals, or push notifications. There’s always an added layer of cognitive processing when any person sees it for the first time, and simplifying your designs down into the most basic components in a good way to go about it. Just accept that you know nothing and that you’ll always be learning. This will only help out in the long run.

And this doesn’t just apply to creatives. It applies to anyone doing anything. I genuinely believe that the world would be a more self-aware and informed place if more people adopted this mindset instead of constantly feeling the need to put more of themselves out in the world. Introspection in general is a highly undervalued and underrated activity that more people should make a part of their daily habits. Look at your own actions and behavior and how they affect the people around you. Adapt and modify it to be better. Listen to what people are really saying. Ask the right follow-up questions. And keep learning from the mistakes you make. It hasn’t failed me thus far and I seriously believe that these traits are the wind beneath my (still young) wings. Here’s to hoping I can keep working on them well into my career and deep into my lifetime.