InteracTiVoty: We are Shepherds of the Design - Margret Schmidt - MediaBizBloggers

It takes a baby at least six months before he starts to understand that he is a separate being from his mother. It often takes designers years to understand that they are distinct from their designs. When designers recognize that their designs are not a part of them, but an entity for which they have responsibility, they mature as designers and their designs flourish.

Designers do not "own" the design
I don't think a design can be owned. (Just as some people do not believe pets can be owned.) I feel complete and total responsibility for the design, but in many ways it is its own being. My role is to guide the design to be the best it can be, given the constraints of the project (time, cost, technical challenges). I like to think of UI Designers as shepherds of the design – guiding it through the many cycles of feedback and iteration until it is finally ready to be released into the world.

Feedback is not personal
Hearing feedback about your designs, especially the "constructive" kind, isn't fun. It means somebody thinks you didn't get it right. You need to be ok with not getting it right the first time. You need to do your best – creating a design that incorporates your knowledge of users, design principles, and what your "design gut" tells you. Knowing that the design isn't perfect allows you to be really open to doing it a different way.

Share early and often
One of the best ways to become comfortable getting feedback is to ask for it often. Hearing other perspectives will make you a stronger designer, so embrace it. I like sharing designs in ever widening groups. Start first with one or two design buddies and show them what you've got. These can be design peers or a design manager. These buddies should see your iterations once or twice a week, and as a result they will become invested in your project and its success. (You should return the favor on their projects.)

Next, reach out to your product manager and technical lead. At this point you should have a design concept that works within the overall design language of your product, and be ready to determine if it really meets the business needs and technical constraints. I guarantee you will get strong feedback here. Your design may not match how the product manager envisioned it. Find out why. There may be subtleties to the feature requirements that weren't expressed in the product requirements document or they may have a different use case in mind. Dig in, have an open discussion, and understand each other's perspectives. With the technical lead, understand which elements of the design are easy, and which are hard. See if you can change the hard partsof thedesign to make them easier to implement – development will be quicker and quality will be higher. You may even discover new features that are easy to do, but hadn't been thought of!

Now that the core team of user experience, product, and engineering are in sync, it is time to share the design more widely. Whether it goes next to the rest of the UI team, other project stakeholders, executives, or users depends upon your project and culture. Are you most concerned with executive buy-in, user reaction, or overall scope? All of these groups will need to see the design, and they will need to see it more than once. You job here is to build a community of collaboration. They all need to feel a part of the design process.

This is NOT design by committee
If you incorporate all of the feedback you hear about your design, the experience you create would suck. As a designer, your job is to weigh the pros and cons of each suggestion you receive, and pick the sub-set that holds together as a consistent and easy-to-use experience. That means many of the ideas contributed won't make it into the design, yet you still want the team to feel encouraged to give feedback on future designs. To maintain trust with the team, you should enthusiastically embrace the ideas that are great, and gently educate about design principles when they aren't. Sometimes you won't know if an idea is great when you hear it, so tell them you'll think about it. (And then you must think about it and get back to them later.) Whatever you do, don't get defensive about your design.

I've seen designers react to criticism by trying to talk the person giving the feedback out of their opinion. The designer is then seen as arrogant, and not open to collaboration or compromise. Sometimes this is coming from a position of power since they know their design is what will be built. Sometimes it comes from the dread of all the work that it will take to change the design (again!). But most often I think it comes from the fear that a design that needs to be changed means the designer isn't good enough – which just isn't true.

Build your design gut
I think the best designers have an intuitive sense for design built into them. It comes from their gut. While they might have started with deep user empathy and an understanding of design principles, it is how these basics, along with everything they have learned over their design career, that mixes together and allows great design to just pop out of them. These designers build their design gut every time they see a user react to their design in the lab, every time an executive gives them a different perspective on the business, every time a product manager or engineer challenges their assumptions. See every design as a growth experience and absorb what you can from those around you who offer it in the form of feedback on your design. It will make you stronger.

Celebrate the design that ships
There are highs and lows in the process of design, and when needed changes and compromises alter the original concept, it is easy to feel that were you a better designer, your initial design would have been closer to the end result. Don't let that happen. Understand that a design needs to go through these changes, and all these people need to touch it along the way. Your job is to make sure that the design that is released into the world is the best it can be. If it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly takes a company to raise a design.

Margret Schmidt is Vice President of User Experience for TiVo Inc, and has been responsible for the design of TiVo products since 2001. Follow her athttp://twitter.com/tivodesign

Other articles by Margret:

InteracTiVoty: Getting to Know DVR Users

InteracTiVoty: Designing for TV: Keep It Simple

InteracTiVoty: Why We "Test" our TV UI Designs

InteracTiVoty: DVR Advertising for Viewers Who Don't Want Commercials

InteracTiVoty: Webisodes Belong on the DVR Right Next to the TV Show

InteracTiVoty: Using Twitter to Improve your Product & Experience

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