hi! ever feel like you're not the best designer in your field worry not i got
you you might wonder oh is she going to say i should start learning to code or do copywriting
or be great at analytics and marketing do i need to be a unicorn and the answer is no
the only thing you need to be to be a better designer is the ability to listen and ask
thoughtful questions to peel the problem and understand the business goals that's all you need.
let me tell you a story first. when i was a junior designer and whenever my product manager came to
my desk and asked me to design and implement his solution for example a login and register
button on the home page my only questions were oh did you say blue which blue do you like
when do you need this done by and i very quickly executed their solution in photoshop showing them
two to three options with different shades of blue buttons and then i asked for feedback and then i
coded it. and it was done. I didn't even question anything because I thought they knew better than
me. obviously this is not my proudest design career moment but as a junior ux designer if we
just started out i was happy as a monkey about his tale to have a job in tech so maybe you can relate
especially if you start out in this field and it took about 12 to 18 months to have my very first
light bulb moment and things changed instead of executing immediately i started to ask questions
to uncover the real issue i asked for space to think about a problem and possible solutions
for example i don't just do it when someone comes to me to design a new onboarding flow i
ask for research both qualitative and quantitative analysis i am not the type of designer who would
like to do everything on my own so if there was a research done prior i would like to leverage
that i don't need to do my own research all the time if the research is still valid and it still
represents the current market then i am more than happy to reuse that i am certainly not going to
reinvent the research wheel i am going to spend a few hours studying the research and drawing
insights from it to base our solution on if there is no prior research then i'm going to propose
a quick research just to understand the customers better so i will push back to the business
and challenge their thinking and solution i also ask questions like this to understand
what are we trying to achieve with the new onboarding user experience why doesn't the
current experience fit for purpose what works and doesn't work in a current experience what
are the technical constraints why i'm asking this if you're only starting out you might be surprised
how often technical constraints can change the design flow so it's essential to be aware of the
limitations. Another question that i ask is how many customers complain about the current experience
and requested a change. are we trying to solve a real problem of a customer or do we only try
to find a problem to the envisioned solution. this often happens to you and finally do we
have a baseline already established for kpis to measure the new solutions success failure progress
i would encourage you to ask thoughtful questions to understand where the business and product
stakeholders are coming from ask as many questions as you like to completely understand the problem
and the goal of the business before taking any action on the project or making decisions based
on limited information. then to the best of your ability summarize what was said what you heard
preferably in writing add research insights to it if possible and propose next steps
which might be different than what product managers imagined first. but that's okay. we
are hired to think, not only to execute. this step helped me tremendously in my career. please
don't hate me for the clickbait title this step might make you 20 times better designer
or maybe a 2 times better designer. twice is still better than staying stagnant.
let me know if you try. if you enjoyed this video please give it a like so that other people can
find it on YouTube as well. and as always thank you for hanging out with me. i see you soon. bye