Why would anyone want to be a designer? I‘ve wondered this more than once and even written entire articles around the topic.

From the outside looking in, I get it. What initially fuels our desire to become designers is often far different from what motivates us to remain designers. Many of those in the early stages of exploring design as a career option will undoubtedly be swept up in the flashy glitz we only see as outsiders looking in. But there’s a point early in any design career where the work begins. There is a point where reality sets in.

In Do you really want to be a UX designer?, I explored the reality of being a designer. I wrote that we are perpetually misunderstood, that mastery will always seem to lie just beyond our reach and that we’ll have to learn to face routine rejection while also contending with our fear of designer’s block.

It’s not just design either. Any creative field will contend with these issues.

There are, of course, positive aspects of working in a creative space. But they can often become obscured by the drudgery of our day-to-day struggles as we wade through our grey and hazy subject matter.

A day in the life of a designer is mired in subjectivity. We wrestle with the blank artboard waiting for an idea to come — waiting for our muse. We thrash about in the throes of some sort of creative angst, craving our lightbulb moment.

Having but a fragment of an idea, we rush against our omnipresent deadlines to breathe life into our beloved creations. But the design rarely turns out the way we initially visualized and presented it. The product assembly line is usually responsible as each team with competing agendas adds their touch in the form of requirements.

Sometimes the design morphs in a good way. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you can see the train wreck coming, staring down at your ugly baby. Other times, the product is never released and those designs find themselves occupying the dark recesses of your hard drive. If it’s an ugly baby, you’re thankful. If it’s your magnum opus, you’re crushed.

If you’re lucky enough to see your creation released into the wild, it will continue to evolve. You’ll discover unintended consequences, people will use it in ways you never imagined and customer requests for new features will eventually find their way to your desk. All beyond your control.

Maybe that’s why we keep the design to ourselves for so long. Maybe that’s our way of controlling its inevitable evolution or holding it off as long as we can.

Perhaps it all goes perfect. You end up releasing the design as you visualized it and it’s a smashing success with virtually no negative repercussions. What then?

You might enjoy some mild success. If you’re really lucky, you might win an award or work on a product that reaches a level of fame you never imagined. So, there it will be, for all the world to adore. But it’s all so fleeting.

In a few years, the product will become dated — its aesthetics fading with time and its functionality quickly becoming obsolete. In five years, you won’t even want to include it in your portfolio. In ten years, chances are no one will remember it. If they do, it might only serve as nostalgic entertainment — remember when the web used to look like that? Disposable design.

People don’t look back on an old web design in the same manner as a historical painting or some dated sculpture — at least not yet. We generally laugh at old designs, vintage fashion and the way the world once was. It’s “cute” or “neat,” but not lasting.

Henri Lamiraux, a long-time Apple employee who oversaw the engineering and creation of iOS, had a more philosophical perspective. “I see people carrying their phone everywhere all the time. I’m like, okay, it’s kind of amazing. But, you know, software is not like — my wife is a painter. She does oil painting. When she does something, it’s there forever. Technology — in twenty years, who’s going to care about an iPhone?”

I’m sure no one thinks about any of this before they enter the profession. How could you? You find out along the way. And after hundreds of discussions over button placement, the hue of a color and rounded versus square corners, you start asking what it’s all about. After counting thousands of pixels, authoring dozens of style guides no one uses and ceaselessly explaining what UX is and is not, you begin wondering what it’s all worth and why anyone would want to be a designer.

Recently, I’ve twisted the question a little, asking what initially motivated me to become a designer. I can only remember the spark that ignited my passion for this profession. It had nothing to do with design. It didn’t have anything to do with creating “cool shit” or crafting glamorous interfaces or becoming some digital artist.

It isn’t that those ambiguous desires aren’t important at some level. But I remember a different driving force — one that sparked before I even knew what user experience even was. This was before I was exposed to the glitter and glitz of design as a profession — before I even knew it was a possibility.

I was working in a hospital as a medical librarian observing the workflow of nurses to understand their information-seeking needs. I remember the mixture of emotions I felt watching them struggle through a dozen different interfaces in their daily work, trying to remember passwords as they navigated through poorly designed software.

I felt a mixture of anger, sadness and helplessness as I watched. As each nurse labored to order meds or labs or just document a treatment, it seemed to take them forever to click all the right buttons and make all the right selections. It wasn’t their fault. Even an untrained eye could spot all the problems with their software design.

As I stood there watching each nurse that day, I couldn’t help but think of the patients who were not being treated as a result of those seconds, minutes and hours lost each day. I felt immense empathy towards the nurses, knowing they had long since made these mental calculations.

That’s the moment the idea occurred to me that I might be able to make a difference — that I might be able to change this for the better. My “why” was to help people, to put some meaningful order in the world.

But I had no idea how I would that at the time.

These days, I am often contacted by students or young professionals coming out of a program. It’s usually someone thinking about “breaking into UX.” They’ll track me down and ask me a series of questions.

I eventually answer their questions, but always respond to their initial contact by asking a single question of my own: Why do you want to be a designer? The most frequent answer I receive is that they want to find more meaning in their work — to change people’s lives or understand the impact of their work. That is probably the reason many of us chose this profession.

That was essentially my reason too. But somewhere along the way, I think I forgot about the reason I was here doing what I was doing. Somewhere along the way, my vision statement became misaligned with my mission statement. And somewhere along the way, the answer to the question of why anyone would ever want to be a designer became more enigmatic to me.

A few weeks ago, I was pondering this whole issue. It was floating around in the back of my mind as I was closing up my makeshift home office for the day. I was answering emails and organizing myself for the next morning when a Slack message came through. It was feedback on a health monitoring system I had helped design.

It’s a system designed to augment multi-channel communication between clinicians and patients. There wasn’t a plethora of interface work to do on this project. But there was the overall design of the flow and copywriting our entire team had to have input and alignment on. It’s a simple technology and that’s what is beautiful about it.

As I read the feedback, I was touched. There were 3 cases profiled where patients were either in distress or would soon be in a dire medical situation and our technology mitigated the situation. One of the patients had even made a point to specifically request that she remain on our service, finding it both educational and helpful. In another situation, our technology likely saved a life.

I’ve had these golden moments throughout my career. The moments where you know you may have saved a life are the pinnacle, of course. But there have been other, less grandiose, moments where the impact of my work was evident.

I once was witness to impromptu applause from users for a design our team had worked and fought hard for — one that solved a problem our users had contended with for years. It wasn’t applause just for the design team, but our entire team of developers, product managers and business analysts. It felt good to be part of something larger than myself — larger than buttons on a screen or a flashy interface.

I once saw a clinician nearly cry when we walked her through the new interface we had designed to replace the 20-year-old software she currently used. She could only repeat, “Yes, yes, yes” as she held her hands to her face. We caught that one on video. So, I watched it replay many times in executive meeting after executive meeting.

These moments are nice. They are, indeed, golden. And they remind me of why I wanted to be a designer in the first place. They remind me of those observations of nurses, their faces scrunched in confusion as they mitigated interface after interface — their looks of defeat contrasted with these golden moments. They remind me that for all of the baggage that comes with a design career, these moments make it worthwhile.

I keep a file of these comments, successes and places where I felt my efforts made a difference in the context of a larger team. I keep a section in there for the failures too. But I find I return to the successes more often. Negativity bias burns the failures into my memory and I tend to more easily forget the successes — the impacts my team and I have made.

I find I need these reminders the further I go in my design career.

We enter our careers on fire for design. We’re young, passionate and we’re going to change the world. Our careers twist and turn as we take position after position. We rack up the successes…right next to the larger pile of failures.

You’re 10 years down when you realize you’re not quite sure how you got here. You forgot why you even became a designer. You, sometimes, question the value of your contributions and the existential nature of your career.

You’re 15 years down and find yourself in a meeting discussing some tedious detail that has little hope of impacting the user experience. You ask yourself what it all means. You’ve lost sight of the value — of what it’s all worth.

But then something comes your way. It might be a comment from a customer. It might be an interview you conduct or a survey response or simply a letter from one CEO to another describing the impact of the product you have spent the past few years meticulously designing.

It might be a life you saved but more likely a life you changed. It might just be the simple joy you helped create in a specific experience. It’s often just one person out of the hundreds of thousands you have designed for in your career.

If there is one, you know there must be more. Each golden moment is a stone dropped into a pond, radiating waves across the surface. Each golden moment is an experience you helped create.

Henri Lamiraux had it right and wrong. The iPhone will eventually become an antique and though it may hold some monetary value with this status, it won’t have the lasting appeal of a painting. A painting provides an experience for all of its existence.

But the iPhone isn’t the focal point. As a piece of hardware, it’s generally worthless. The magic is the experience the hardware provides — the changes it enables, the waves it radiates across the surface of the human experience. Golden moments — millions of them created with a single design. That’s what Lamiraux got wrong.

I don’t think it matters if we make the world a better place for one person or millions. What matters is that we keep making waves. We keep creating. We keep enabling change.

For me, I only need that single golden moment. Just one. That’s enough to get me off the bench and back to my design work, striving to create another. Copy and paste.

Each life I can touch is another ripple and the ripples, the tracks of my career. When all the craziness of being a designer clouds our vision, there is always that one singular representation that encapsulates the essence of our careers. The one we call “The User” and the experiences we can create for them. That is why we exist.

For what it’s worth, this is what it’s all worth.