You Are Not a Real Designer

Photo by Ava Sol on Unsplash

The most frequent question I receive from readers who reach out to me is: “How do you break into UX design?” The truth of it is, I never “broke into” UX design. I inched my way in, working on the fringes of design for 5 years in positions only partially devoted to UX projects. I took the scraps in each position working my way forward an inch at a time before I finally got that title.

But once I had “UX designer” printed on my company business cards, I worked a number of years feeling sure I would lose my current position — that someone would find me out for the fraud I was. Two graduate degrees and no amount of experience could remove that fear. I felt everyone else was better than me. I used to have anxiety attacks before presenting designs. I thought I would always be one step removed from being a “real designer.”

This internal turmoil went on for years. In retrospect, I was smart, knew my domain well and was improving with each position. I had no reason to feel the way I felt. But I spent half my current career walking around with a secret I was terrified someone else would discover: I wasn’t a real designer.

I recently came across an article that has stuck with me over the past few weeks. The article was Does the design community perpetuate imposter syndrome? by Trish Willard and the gist of it was that we are often a profession that creates a sense of insecurity in others. Willard postulates there are many aspects of the UX profession that can create imposter’s syndrome. She notes we are a highly critical profession where comparative measures often denote our worth as designers and we can make many young designers feel as though they don’t belong.

Everything from the articles we write to the forums we hold about those articles to the interviews we go through to conferences we attend, we often find a way to tell someone they’re doing it wrong. Conferences, books and articles can essentially be viewed as a dialogue within our profession. We often quibble back and forth through these dialogues breaking down established paradigms and proposing new ones. It as if we say, in a very passive-aggressive way, You’re not a real designer if you aren’t doing it this way.

I thought about Willard’s article and have read through it more than once. In many respects, I think she is…