Designing with intent: the benefits of active listening
Enhance your design skills by developing your ability to listen actively, empathetically, and with intention.
“Most of the successful people I’ve known are the ones who do more listening than talking.”
— Bernard Baruch
Listening is a crucial skill for designers, yet it’s not always given the attention it deserves. Effective listening can help you understand your clients’ needs and goals, collaborate better with team members, and create designs that truly resonate with your users. Sure, we’re all accustomed to empathy when it comes to the end-users, but it is also especially important when working as part of a team.
The ability to listen and take on feedback is almost a non-negotiable to anyone that’s new to the industry. You’re fresh, you want to impress and soak in as much information as you can. Naturally, you’re more inclined to take every single piece of feedback on the chin. You understand how little you know, how much there is to learn and how much more experienced all the voices around you are.
As you progress within your career however, it is important to not negate what you see for what you hear. What I mean by that is, after a certain amount of time, lessons and feedback; you get to a place where you’re really confident in what you do (rightly so). As such, you tend to become a bit more attached to your designs because, well, while it took you a couple of hours maybe even days or weeks to complete, in actuality that took a couple of years to learn and master. The mistake though is settling in the satisfaction that comes with competence and thinking you’re now above listening or having someone give recommendations on your work. There’s always more to learn.
It’s why I love our industry so much, it’s always shifting and changing — things which were a norm a few years ago are suddenly deemed primordial, as social and cultural norms evolve. You always have to stay on your toes, and that becomes a lot harder to do if you try go it alone.
Your product doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the users
As a designer you do yourself such a disservice by becoming defensive about your work. It’s worth remembering you’re designing for users, not for yourself. We’ve probably all been in a meeting or review where a colleague’s work (or your own) was being assessed by key stakeholders. I’m yet to sit in one of these meetings where a design that’s presented to the group is entirely perfect and no one has anything to add, and that’s not a slight on any of us as designers, there’s just no such thing as the perfect design as far as I’m concerned. At least not in the initial stages.
You’ll always be better placed if you can appreciate that those around you are trying to help make your design better and not tear you down when they comment on your work. After working on a design for a while, you’re bound to develop some blind spots the more you stare and adjust your piece of work. That’s why it’s advised to take a break every now and then, either to focus on another project momentarily or by indulging in a short walk. These blindspots only grow the more work you do and by the end what you will deem as a complete product or feature has failed to take some key fundamentals into account.
Don’t be that guy that sits in design reviews stubbornly disagreeing with feedback, or trying to justify why your way of designing it trumps what your colleagues may suggest. It’s one thing to defend your design in the interest of accessibility or a core design fundamental, it’s another when stakeholders shed light on some fundamentals you have failed to consider but you prefer your layout because you feel it just looks better.
Detach, it’s not about you — it’s about the user, and always should be.
Listen to understand, not just to respond
I’ve been trying to participate more in UX/UI communities on LinkedIn, part of this has been interacting on posts by fellow designers, joining groups and reviewing the work completed by others. It’s one of those things I wish I started doing earlier because it’s amazing how much more you learn by expanding your window of influence beyond your current project or role. You don’t know what you don’t know so sometimes ‘exposing yourself to the elements’ is a great way to up-skill.
One particular LinkedIn post that caught my attention was written by Nick Ugre, a designer based in Georgia. Nick Posted his take on a re-design for the increasingly popular chatGPT opening himself up to feedback and critique. I reached out to Nick, and with his permission he allowed me to share the work in his post which you can see below:
His post helped me in more ways than I could imagine. Firstly, it allowed me to appreciate the benefit of vulnerability as a designer, and having your peers assess your work. But also, this exercise showed me that I also have quite a bit to brush up on myself. Now I’ll say again, as I have said before, I’m by no means an expert — I’m very much still progressing, and I probably always will, and this post made that evidently clear.
On first inspection, my initial thought was that the design was great. I liked the improved contrast, better use of colour and re-design of the chat box (who am I kidding, I still do like it). What’s more, I know I wasn’t the only one. To my surprise though, a few contributors pointed out some very valid points to question the design.
You can view the original post here, but I’ve included some interactions I found quite insightful below as well:
As shown above, some key questions were asked, particularly the value added in the redesign or problem solved, but also around the use of a primary button twice. These are both questions and points I’d initially not considered in much depth myself, but what struck me more was the manner in which Nick responded to this feedback. Rather than go on the defence and come up with some defiant waffle, justifying why he made his specific design choices, he was aware of some oversight, took feedback onboard and even went on to ask for more insight and advice.
This is how you listen, this is how you should take on feedback. He, as well as anyone else that has come across his post (myself included) have all left the experience with a bit more knowledge to keep in mind for our next design.
Growth isn’t a set destination
One of my more familiar points, there will always, always be room to grow as a designer. Being able to listen to feedback and learn from the thought’s and actions of others only make you a better designer. Even when you reach a stable level of confidence you can always brush up a bit more.
This was illustrated brilliantly by Vy Alechnavicius in his book ‘Get into UX’, where he used the Drunning-Kruger effect to illustrate the journey in learning UX:
Naturally, the more you are exposed to a new and complex subject, you enter with a naively blissful air of confidence before ultimately reaching the peak of Mount Stupid where you realise just how much you don’t know. This sends you crashing down to the Valley of Despair where all hope seems lost and you realise just how big of a task you have ahead of you. It’s here where it is especially important to open yourself up to feedback and remembering to always listen.
Slowly but surely you will progress into Enlightenment while your confidence and competence grows before reaching a sustainable level of experience where you can now be considered an expert. But even then, it’s especially important to keep listening. You’ll be doing yourself a disservice considering yourself impervious to feedback and critique, you’ll only stagnate and be left behind.
Constructive feedback is never personal, getting your back up when colleagues or peers offer alternatives will alienate you from your team and keep you designing bad products. You’ll never grow and your career will ultimately stagnate.
I learnt a lot from Nick, not only from the feedback he received but also how he took the feedback on — aim to always be learning.
I use my page to write about my experiences working within Product Design, things I wish I heard myself when I first started. For more info, contact me on LinkedIn.
