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What is prestige?

When I talk about prestige here, I am meaning a designer's desire for success, their desire for greatness. The desire that we as designers feel to create something of quality. The desire to show the world that we are valuable and become respected by our peers.

Being passionate about your work is important, it is probably the number one quality you need to be great at what you do. The only thing here is that being a great designer has nothing to do with the result of your work, and it has everything to do with the process you follow. It is your ability to form and alter your process within an emerging context that makes your work fit for purpose. This is why the prestige you seek should not lie in showing your excellent design, it should be in your commitment to the lean loop of getting feedback and synthesising it to improve your work.

Where does the desire for prestige come from?

Working as a UX designer today is filled with ‘soft skill’ challenges. These come in the form of unwritten rules, yet they are something that can be felt as strongly as clearly articulated rules.

• You must do the work you are employed to do.
• You must do it fast.
• It must be of the highest quality.

These unwritten rules tell us that we must be excellent at what we do, but who’s judging us? It’s our managers, colleagues and most importantly fellow designers. We have this huge weight on our shoulders in the form of what we think other designers think about us. That’s right, we are all to blame here. It is this culture that we have co-created within an otherwise unforgiving commercial landscape.

The cool kids club

Design culture has a dirty little secret. We tell ourselves that we are inclusive, collaborative and ‘team players’, yet at the same time, we apply strict rules of membership to our ‘designers' club’. This is easier observed from outside the design circle and is often the reason, for example, that developers might find it so difficult to partake in design domain behaviours (such as workshopping). We unknowingly create this identity of what it means to be a designer, and we go out of our way to make sure everyone knows that we as individuals belong to it. It’s not that we are deliberately trying to exclude people, but it is from our own insecurities that we feel the need to project our own sense of identity. To tell a story about ourselves to everyone around us that we are one of the cool kids.

Some examples might be:

• Knowing the most design methods.
• Wearing the trendiest clothing.
• Working at the coolest agency.
• Can solve any problem.
• Can reach out and pull the most innovative ideas out of a cloud.
• Can you think of any others?

It is these norms that contribute to what it means to be a successful designer. Unfortunately, sometimes we lose sight of our purpose and get caught up in the designer identity trap.

Design prestige conflicts with business needs

Businesses and business leaders are usually stressing too much about short-term financial gain to worry about UX excellence, and this creates a conflict of interest within the product development lifecycle. This is because achieving UX excellence requires a long-term commitment to developing and refining a robust and future-proof system. A system that has the power to capture your customers' entire holistic experience, a system that enables your designers to create coherent experiences, and a system that cohesively binds your entire product development lifecycle. The conflict here is that designers are hired to make the UX great, but how can they when their bosses are unknowingly working against them?

More often than not, designers are given some kind of framed initiative and told to make a design for it. It is then up to the designer to reframe the problem and prototype out whatever process they think they will need to undergo to get their work done. This is usually the point where they tell their team that they need to do one month of research before they can even begin as the initiative was so loosely framed that they don’t even know what the problem is. I agree that research is important, and I agree that business leaders really ought to do their pre-discovery work properly, but it is usually this point at which the designer loses the faith of their colleagues and team members. This is because they too have a job to do and the emergent ways that design tends to occur do not piece well into the otherwise engineering-heavy product development puzzle. It is like trying to fit a triangular shape through a circular hole, only that the triangle is constantly morphing into different irregular and asymmetrical blobs.

This, of course, is the billion-dollar question, of how to fit the design into the engineering-heavy product development eco-system. Maybe one day we will have this all sorted out, but until then, we need to remain pragmatic. Most of our work is to communicate ideas, and this requires continuous compromise in order to be effective.

Prestige can hinder learning

As I said earlier, feedback is an important part of the lean loop. The process we as humans follow naturally to improve, but when we let prestige get in the way… well, it breaks the loop like having no air in your tires. If you haven’t learnt and practised the art of taking feedback, then you may take things the wrong way. You might take them personally. Unfortunately, this is a human characteristic that refined itself as we were developing on the savanna. If we get rejected from the group, we die. Today, of course, this won't be the thing that kills us, but it can create the illusion that we need to prove ourselves as competent and skilled. After all, that is the thing we are hired to do right? So we pour our hearts and our souls into creating something magnificent, only to see it be shot down by our peers.

How can we find balance?

For me, the opposite of prestige is humbleness and humility. These are the two ends of the spectrum in which we can operate. I think they reflect well the motivational dualities between social acceptance and social rejection. Prestige is a quest for glory in the hope of being accepted and humbleness is a quest for inclusion and not being rejected. No one will ever sit purely at one end of the spectrum, and everyone will usually oscillate within it depending on the context or just how they are feeling. The trick here is not to necessarily live completely without prestige, as you need to love your work, but more so to find the right amount at the right moment. This balance is not something that anyone else can tell you, it is something you have to work out for yourself as it is ever-changing.

You need to put the hard work in, paying attention to your thoughts and your behaviours. You need to become a master of yourself.

Summary

Being passionate about your work is important, but too often it becomes too much and gets in the way of what your team and organisation need. Tight deadlines and tight teamwork demand pragmatism and humility. Pay attention to how you act and you can turn your Achilles heel into a strength none can rival.

Further reading