Design through the eyes of an INFJ personality type

As a UI/UX designer, I’ve been interested in researching user behavior, visual cues, and different underlying motivations that can have an impact on the user experience. Lately, I’ve also been curious to learn more about myself as a designer and how personality traits or preferences can play a role in how I work as a designer. Knowing more about yourself can help grow and further improve collaboration with others.

Hi, I’m an INFJ designer.

I discovered being an INFJ personality type by making an online personality test based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). MTBI was developed based on Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types by Isabel Briggs Myers and Kathrine Briggs in the 1940s.

All types are equal and there is no best one — it is about understanding and appreciating differences between people.

Culture, environment, and background can also have an impact on these personality types, and of course not forgetting that each individual is unique. These tests do not define a person but can help to make sense of certain traits and allowing you to view yourself with a set of new eyes.

The actual evaluation is pretty extensive and done by a certified professional, but there are also free modified versions of this test available online, such as 16 Personalities. The accuracy of the results may scare you! I found a lot of the results and further reading on the topic spot on. I’ve made these tests based on the 16 personalities three times over the course of five years and always got INFJ. I guess that’s the one. PS. It is not a test where you select pizza as your favorite food and the test tells you should be living in Italy.

Doing these tests, alone or as a team, are also fun and can spark a further discussion on working style.

INFJ stands for Introverted, INtuitive, Feeling and Judging, making about 1 to 2 percent of the population. INFJs are highly intuitive individuals with a desire for deep thoughts and connections. They have a vivid imagination and a complex character that might be hard to make sense of; even for themselves. INFJs are doers guided by their inner vision, goals, and strong values on striving to do what's right. They can be reserved, quiet and aim to keep a certain harmony, but light up when challenged by things they care about. They are highly sensitive to how others feel and are usually referred to as the advocate, the idealist or the protector.

Let’s dive in.

Empathic

Understanding human nature is a big sweet spot for INFJs, especially digging deep into people’s motivations, feelings, and needs. They live in a world of symbols, patterns, and hidden meanings. No wonder thrillers and books on profiling feel attractive to me. INFJs tend to have a very strong intuition on people and are somehow pretty good in predicting behavior, but the problem is that they find it hard to explain why.

In design, having this kind of intuition and level of empathy is good for creating initial assumptions, stories, and mockups, but usually these would need a bit more background, testing, or backing it up with actual insights. Why it could work? Why did you do it this way? Why would the user do A or B.

Surely, you always have to start somewhere, but saying to a stakeholder that you have a feeling this or that approach might work is simply not enough (even a fortune-teller may get it wrong — having some data to back up these intuitions can direct towards a correct path). It is also one of the basics of design — having a justified reason for a design decision. i.e. Why is this text bold? Aesthetics and usability should compliment each other.

Two examples:

1. I’ve added the item name on the error message in bold, because it feels right and looks clear.

2. I’ve added item name on the error message in bold, because we found that 75% of users seeing the error message do not read the whole prompt. We want to test if highlighting the error in bold will improve readability and help users to solve this error faster.

Which of these statements would be more efficient or persuasive to justify a design choice? INFJs might have had an intuition to make the initial design as described in example 1, but they usually just do not know how to explain this feeling. Along comes data, which then actually starts to have some good reasoning behind the decision. Sometimes, however, there is no data available. In that case, perhaps the example could be revised to say:

I’ve added item name to the error message in bold because highlighting an item among other content draws the focus of the eye and communicates importance.

This could help to convince a stakeholder or the team to make this design choice and test it further. Basic principles of visual design, such as contrast, colors and hierarchy can support a long way in explaining decisions.

Introverted Intuition helps to find out patterns and make predictions. It is about thinking something that could be and not necessarily about something that will happen. INFJs do put a lot of faith in their gut feeling, but just as mentioned above, these gut feelings should have something to back them up.

What’s wrong? Would you want to fix it?

All-or-Nothing Perfectionist

INFJs want to get to the heart of everything, explore at a deeper level and avoid surface level things. They put their whole attention, energy, and focus on creating the best possible outcome. This can mean doing extensive research on a subject before starting a project. Research is important for any design project — how much research is enough? When do you know what is enough? A problem with INFJs is that they tend to be very intense on this, and can easily forget time, scope, and resource constraints - leaving them stressed. I have found the best way to work with this is to set scopes, priorities and timelines.

INFJs have a vivid imagination, which is especially useful when creating initial assumptions and user stories for a project. It is a very exciting part of any project as you get to imagine all the different possibilities. INFJs take into consideration the bigger picture and look towards the future. It sounds great for design, though just like with the research example above, one of the problems is the all-or-nothing and perfectionism kind of mindset of taking things to the extreme.

Perfectionists not only for the details but also in looking for meaning in their work. High expectations of themselves can also lead to more anxiousness as they rarely settle for “it’s alright”. INFJs are in continuous self-improvement. When they’ve completed a task, they are already thinking about the next. While writing this, somewhere midway, a new topic already came to mind. I made a small outline for it to start working on it later, ok, there are 4 now in total.

Personal projects can be great. I challenged myself in to the DailyUI, creating one UI prompt a day for 100 days with the goal of learning After Effects. It was quite a challenge and during the course of this also began to create a font. Perhaps this is INFJ style? It is not really about not having focus, but more on wanting to learn new things — I saw it through the 100 days and not giving up and finishing it did feel great.

Sensitive Outsider

Critique, feedback and testing are important for design. Most people do not like to be criticized and this is very true for INFJs who try to avoid confrontation as much as possible. INFJs aim to keep a certain harmony among people as they are very sensitive to other people and do not want to offend anyone. INFJs will defend their ideals when challenged, though they might find it hard sometimes to put their thoughts into words as they can be running several scenarios in their head at the same time. They are overthinking every word and action, and will keep thinking it long after it was happened — for example what was said in a design review.

Design reviews are great sessions for gathering feedback and improving designs based on multiple points of view. However, design reviews can also easily seem daunting and attacking, which in turn can make the effects of the exercise limited. Removing these potential limitations can be possible by creating an environment where critique, or communication on design is regarded as more a free discussion and all ideas are welcomed. A discussion on what was done, why and what could be.

How to approach this exercise is also important. Are you approaching it as if you were presenting to a superior hoping to get a passing grade? Will this kind of approach help in the end? Or to a team on why you what you did? There is a lot of talk about critique, and the environment this is made in can make a big impact on how it is perceived, how people will interact and how much you can get from it.

I enjoy testing methods where you observe the user interacting with the product. Trying to make sense why the user did something or why they didn’t. INFJs are pretty good at reading people, and even focus in detail to the direction of the mouse cursor as it can provide new insights and behavioral patterns.

For example, the user scrolled downwards, paused for a moment, then went back up — why? INFJs are sensitive to other people’s emotions. They are introverted outsiders who love people.

INFJs crave for a purpose and try to make sense of the world. One of the reasons I like design is that it is always about creating something, learning new things and creating valuable things for people. Design is about solving problems and this fits quite well for INFJs as they enjoy solving problems and dig deeper into the meaning of things, and most importantly in the field of UX, into people.

There is also an orderly chaos in the lives of an INFJ. What may seem very organized on the surface, it might be big battlefield inside due to the introverted nature. They might be hard to open up and can seem reserved when first joining a new team.

INFJs want to improve the lives of others, but often forgot to take care of themselves. If you know an INFJ — check if they are ok?

INFJs need some form of routine, but also like to keep things flexible. In addition to needing a sense of purpose in their lives and at work, INFJS have a strong need for closure. This goes back again to the all-or-nothing mindset and that INFJs are doers. They work hard to accomplish a task they started. Case closed.

Are there designers out there who can relate? An INFJ wondering.

Many thanks.

Further reading on INFJ and the personality types:

• Myers & Briggs Foundation
• 16 MBTI Types Description
• 16 Personalities (includes an online test)
• INFJ: The Advocate
• 8 Strange and Peculiar Traits of the INFJ Personality

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