A hill to die on
When do we stand up in a design review, present our case, and say “this is a hill I’m willing to die on”?
I love to talk about designing with constraints. So much of the life of a UX professional is evaluating and compromising technical limitations, time limitations, and even other designers’ ideas. But at the end of the day, our job is really to advocate for the user. When do we abandon our willingness to compromise in order to commit to our idea of the “correct” design?
When do we stand up in a design review, present our case, and say “this is a hill I’m willing to die on”?
Impostor Syndrome
In order to pick a hill to die on, you first have to surmount another, often taller or more challenging mountain: impostor syndrome. For the unacquainted, impostor syndrome is an anxiety that develops out of feeling intimidated by one’s peers. It’s the feeling that you’re not qualified to be in the seat you’re in, that everyone else in the room is smarter than you, or that you’re not deserving of an opinion on a given topic. I suffer from imposter syndrome often. As a consultant, I have a lot of short and varied experiences but I’m rarely the most tenured contributor on the teams I support. I also know what a dangerous pitfall it can be.
Working on a design team doesn’t just require collaboration and humility toward our own designs; it also expects us to have opinions, speak with conviction, and provide helpful and constructive feedback to our colleagues. If you fall into a place where you feel like your opinions aren’t worth those of your teammates, then you won’t contribute your fair share of feedback to the team.
It’s important to remember that you’re in the seat you’re in for a reason. You learned the requisite material to qualify for the job, you compiled a resume that impressed someone, you got yourself an interview and talked your way through it. While you may have some extremely talented colleagues who impress you, they didn’t get their foot in the door by doing anything you haven’t already done. And you won’t get to be where they are until you believe you belong on the same team as them. For more information and techniques to overcome impostor syndrome, check out this great article.
Recognizing a bad design
The most recent time I had to hold firm on a design decision was in an audit of the interaction design patterns my product uses. The web portal we’re designing has a header bar with three buttons: a notification icon, an informational icon, and a user profile icon. Clicking on each of these expands a right-side panel with detailed information. Clicking on the icon again collapses the panel, returning the user to its original state.
The portal also has a modal interface that appears when the user needs to edit content on the main page. This modal appears in that same right-side space as those expanded header elements. Because they are modals, they can’t be dismissed without either completing or abandoning the action.
You can probably guess where this is going. The problem occurs when you mix these two interactions. The header elements were designed to replace one another so that if you have the notification pane open and then select the information icon, the information pane replaces the notification pane. That interaction makes intuitive sense. But when you have this modal editor window open and then select the notification icon from the header bar, the notification pane slides out and replaces the modal. It just disappears. This does not make intuitive sense.
Throwing down the gauntlet
The team I work with is extremely talented and most of them are more experienced than I am. We unanimously agreed that the design pattern as it existed was flawed. But at one point, the conversation diverged with options to improve usability while leaning into the same pattern. For example, one idea that surfaced was to add a confirmation dialog so that when the modal editor is open and then the notification icon is clicked, the user would confirm that opening the new panel would lose their unsaved changes. Yes, this would prevent the user from unexpected data loss and be an improvement on the current pattern, but this is where I became steadfast in my design opinion. There is only one solution here: these header elements need to exist on a separate level than the modal pane and stack on top of them. It removes the unexpected interference of these two separate page elements that simply should not interfere.
This was the hill I was willing to die on.
I know we have more design work to do for this interaction, but I stubbornly swear that the first step is to separate these layers. This example is only a minor design decision, and perhaps that was why I was willing to break out of my comfort zone and argue my case so strongly. And, to be honest, there wasn’t a lot of opposition. But when I saw there were multiple approaches to solving this problem and I felt so strongly about one of them, I felt compelled to mock up the different interactions in Figma and use them to strengthen my case. I’ve had enough other design-by-committee experiences to know that if I don’t jump on these decisions early, the compromises become increasingly convoluted and the solutions get watered down.
Are you “coaster sure”?
Among my bar trivia friends, we have an inside joke about being “coaster sure.” One of my now-dearest friends was new to this trivia group, invited along as another friend’s guest, and therefore didn’t know the rest of the group. A question came up that stumped everyone else on the team, but this friend knew the answer. The team had mistaken her shyness for lack of confidence, so after a few rounds of “are you sure?” interrogations she emphatically stood up from the bar table and declared “if I’m wrong, I will eat this coaster.” The team finally listened to her, wagered the maximum points, and sure enough, our friend was right. “Coaster sure” is now our code for “I know this and am confident enough to stake my reputation on it.”
I’m not suggesting that you should be willing to ingest a disc of cardboard in order to assert your design opinion, but the concept of coaster sure is a good thought exercise you should employ before you fight your battle. How sure are you that your design is the best? What are you willing to give up? Are you arguing with your peers or with a higher-up design exec? Even if you don’t end up eating a coaster, you might end up eating your own words if you turn out to be wrong. Luckily, in most cases the stakes are low; just do your due diligence to make sure your case is solid before you throw down the gauntlet.
Being a good designer means having good ideas and good opinions. But those ideas and opinions will never leave your sketchbook if you don’t accompany them with enough confidence to convince others that your ideas are good. Sometimes that means going to bat for your own idea when it’s been overlooked in a design review. That said, don’t mistake confidence for overconfidence. Be prepared to accept that some of your ideas simply aren’t the best in the room, but do believe in yourself enough to take a chance every once in a while. Don’t agree with me? Well too bad. This is a hill I’m willing to die on.
Editor’s note: If you’re trying to overcome impostor syndrome, I highly recommend writing articles on Medium in your spare time. You’ll surprise yourself with how many topics you feel comfortable writing about, even if you’re not an expert. 😉
