Stop evaluating Product Designers like we’re Visual Designers
I cannot count the number of jobs I’ve been turned down for because the hiring manager was looking for someone with “more visual design chops.” It’s infuriating and I want to unpack why.
1. Visual Design is Only Part of the Job
I remember my first UX job and assignment very clearly. It was in early 2015 at an online ticketing company. I was tasked with adding a privacy setting so users could choose whether or not to share their contact information with venues. I remember looking at the settings page.
It was hideous. There was a horizontal menu that was maroon red with options literally overflowing across it and wrapping onto a second line. Under that, there was a rectangle that was the color of masking tape. On that rectangle, the text was Arial font… jet black #000. There was no clear typographical hierarchy or grid of any sort. There was an inconsistent and improper use of simple form controls. Even when I looked at the code, it was a jumbled mess of CSS and HTML. It had the marks of an engineer who dreaded having to design and build a frontend page, rushing to get back to work on the APIs. I remember thinking, “I could do this whole thing so much better.”
…and so I did. I presented this to my manager:
I showed that expecting to be crowned as some newly exalted designer at my company. I thought I was about to blow their minds. Instead, I got chewed out. Frankly, I deserved to be chewed out.
My job was to add one thing to an existing settings page. I came back with a complete redesign of the settings pages.
My Manager: “What the hell? This is different than all of the other settings pages…”
Me: “I was thinking we could redo all of the other settings pages too. Apply this same visual treatment to all of them.”
“…”
“…well?”
“We have one engineer working on this and it needs to be added by the end of next week. Do you even know how to implement these custom form controls across browsers? Just go add the new section and make it look like the rest of the page.”
So, I got hit by the reality of product design very hard.
Yes, the page I was working on was visually awful. However, I do not have the capacity nor the responsibility to change every bad visual design I see or inherit. This is not the job.
What’s worse, and even more clear to me five years later, is that there’s so much more I should have considered as a product designer than visual design on that particular assignment. What are the ethical tradeoffs? Certainly this feature is more in the interest of venues than users. Do users ever even want this? Why does this need to be done next week? Should it be on by default? What exactly is being shared to venues and what exactly are the venues doing with that data? How can users trust that their contact info is safe with venues? What are the consequences of violating that trust? What if users stop buying tickets through us because we violated privacy without their knowing?
Even if I was allowed to redesign the settings, is it really just visual design that makes that page a bad experience? Is the information architecture properly considered? Had my company considered some of the scenarios where a user might find themselves on these pages? Is it easy to navigate to and from? Is the copy clear and concise and consistent with our brand? Are the form controls consistent and recognizable across pages? Is the page responsive? Is there error handling or other conditional things to consider across these settings pages? Is there the right level of visual feedback so users know a change was successfully applied? Do we have analytics on this page, and are users interacting with it how we expect? Have we ever even run a usability test on this page? What will users do if they can’t find the setting they want? Can we help them get in touch with customer support when they need it? For that matter, can we give them the right settings controls so they don’t have to call support so often? Should every user get the same settings page, or should we customize it based on the persona that’s landing on it? ALL of these are considerations a good product designer should be making when working on a settings page like this.
Visual design is, quite metaphorically, just the tip of the iceberg. One would think experienced design hiring managers would recognize that, but who can fault them for seeing visual design first when they’re looking at dozens of portfolios each day, spending no more than a few minutes on each one? Visual design is so…visual. The hard part of the job is nuanced and hard to convey.
Good product designers make all sorts of little considerations and tradeoffs. They communicate with a lot of people and explore a lot of options. They test their design and measure the success of it. They sweat details, but those details aren’t always visual. They understand the needs of the business and the user. All of that work is incredibly difficult to communicate to a hiring manager in a case study, especially when those hiring managers are busy people.
I’ve heard more than once that the best design is the design you don’t even notice. I mostly agree. So many of my favorite designs or interactions are incredibly subtle. Design is usually much more about establishing patterns, playing on the beat, and finding little opportunities. Most importantly, it’s about communicating and listening to others, especially users. It is rarely about creating something stunning.
Everyone thinks hiring a good product designer is like hiring a lead guitar when in reality it’s more effective to treat it like hiring a good drummer.
Every time I see an “<X> Redesigned” post, I tend to roll my eyes. They’re meaningless. Sure, maybe the designer has good visual design chops. However, playing solo means nothing. They didn’t have to work with product managers to define the scope or what would matter most. They didn’t talk to users or validate their ideas on them. They didn’t have to convince stakeholders of the value of the design. They didn’t work with engineers or make compromises when their vision became impossible to achieve on the basis of budgets or deadlines. In fact, if you look at any of the redesign case studies closely enough, you’ll see all sorts of flaws…Naturally you’re going to be inconsiderate of users if you’re blindly designing the music app you would prefer to use. These posts are the antithesis of good product design. They rarely consider any of the hard parts of product design that I enumerated above. I’m not saying I’d never hire a designer who makes a Redesign post, but I’d be highly skeptical of them. I’d be grilling them on user-centered practices from the minute they walk in the door. However, they are the ones that get good jobs. I’d say I’m envious but I’m mostly baffled and feel like the industry is completely miscalculated.
The product design industry overvalues aesthetics. We spend our design budgets making a pretty login screen, and then we wonder why our apps have retention issues. Maybe it’s because we didn’t spend any budget understanding the user onboarding experience or what motivated them to download our app in the first place?
2. Visual Design is (Mostly) Inherited
I love good visual design. I love good interaction design too. I appreciate it when I see it. I value my colleagues who do it well. However, I’ve never had the privilege of joining a company that had exceptional visual or interaction design. I’ve also never joined a company where I had the luxury of creating the entire visual design language from the ground up.
Based on my experience and that of colleagues, the overwhelming majority of us product designers don’t do much direct visual design. We inherit a design system, and we work within it. We build features consistent with the design of the rest of the products we work on. A designer’s attention towards consistency is a skill in itself. Let me reiterate: the day-to-day of product design is more like drumming than playing guitar. When the visual design language of a product is bad, a designer is especially disciplined and skilled to work around that and solve whatever problem they were tasked with. I still find it hard to ignore bad typesetting, but I know damn well I can’t just fix it on one page. I have to size the problem up and convey it to others, and make sure it’s fixed everywhere at once. If I’ve been at a job for a year, I’m lucky to have improved the visual design of something as simple or as fundamental as the buttons. Yet, that’s the first thing a hiring manager notices when they look at my case studies…the bad visual design I had no role in making.
I’ve worked with incredibly thoughtful designers who deserve to be at better jobs, but they will find it exponentially harder to land there because of the visual design they’ve had to work with. The main reason I’m writing this post is that it’s incredibly unfair for hiring managers to pay so much attention to an aspect of the job most of us don’t control.
The product designers who are good (and lucky) enough to work at Google, Facebook, or Spotify inherit beautiful visual design systems, and they also work within them. Some of them make small contributions to those design systems, but most of them do not. However, it’s easy for them to create a case study for a feature they worked on and blow a hiring manager’s mind with visual design they had no role in creating. I don’t want to pick on any designer in particular, but I’ll show this example from a case study I saw from a designer who worked on Spotify’s Shared Playlist feature.
The UX case study for this goes into a lot of detail about how this designer worked with a team and did thoughtful user research to truly discover how music listeners wanted to collect and share playlists. They designed the feature around that. All things considered, Spotify playlists are well designed, and this is a great study. If I were a hiring manager, I’d definitely at least interview them.
However, does a hiring manager really focus on the UX decisions when they see this screenshot? No matter how hard they might try to be unbiased, Managers will be influenced by the beautiful visual design that this designer had absolutely no hand in making.
Had this product designer put just as much thought into building a feature for an app with lackluster visual design, and used that product’s design system to build out the feature, this whole study would be a flop. Hiring managers would skip right over them and say “we’re looking for someone with more visual design chops.” That’s my point. That’s the problem with the industry. We love talking about how we’re above the fray of Dribbble culture, but we’re not.
3. If Visual Design Is So Important, At Least Give Designers A Chance to Prove They Can Do It.
I think what stings the most about those rejections on the basis of visual design, is that I never got the chance to show I could do visual design at the caliber they want to see. It’s the equivalent of not getting an audition. I showcase the work I’ve done on my portfolio. I present it in the best and most concise light possible, and I don’t get to talk to a hiring manager because the design systems I’ve worked with are meh, and the companies I talk to have beautiful design systems (I could unpack why a company with a beautiful design system would find it efficient to hire more good visual designers instead of filling other gaps in their stack, but I’ll leave that topic for another day).
One might propose redesigning the screens for the features I’ve worked on in order to paint them in a better visual light, but let’s make something clear:
I will absolutely never showcase a design unless it was shipped and approved. Anything short of that would be dishonest.
I could improve hundreds of things about the visual design of any product I’ve worked on if I wanted to paint my visual design skills in a better light. I’ve come to loathe the flaws in the visual design of every product I’ve worked on. However, I loathe a lot of things about those products, visual design is just one of them.
Fixing the visual design of a screen is like putting lipstick on a pig if that screen was never considerate of its users in the first place.
The truth is, I DO have some visual redesigns in my back pocket for all of the products I’ve worked on. I’d be happy to show them if anyone asked. I’d be willing to do a take-home challenge to prove my visual design chops if a manager doubted my ability in that area.
Still, those designs never saw the light of day, so I don’t see the point in showing them. Maybe I speak for myself, but I value an architect who gets their buildings built much more than an architect sitting on a stack of beautiful concepts that never broke ground.
I think it’s entirely distracting to focus on the great visual design that never got approved and built. I think it’s silly to back myself into a corner and have to explain how the design I just showed wasn’t the real thing. I don’t have an answer about how the visually preferable design resonated with users, or how engineers built it, because it’s a facade. I do have answers about the things that shipped though. They may not be stunning, but there’s a compelling case about how they solved problems. Doesn’t that add more value to a product?
Transparency is a much more important part of the job. In fact, explaining why the nicer visual design wasn’t executed (inconsistencies, tradeoffs, scope, etc) is something I’d really appreciate if I was interviewing a candidate. We work with stakeholders who don’t always see the value of our favorite designs. What did we learn from that? How did a designer persuade or compromise in light of those conflicts? That tells me much more about the effectiveness of a product designer than whether or not they were lucky enough to inherit a beautiful design system. I wish the industry would take note of that. If you already have a beautiful design system, you rarely need more visual design talent.
