It’s About More than Pixels: Redefining "Designer"

It’s About More than Pixels: Redefining
“Designer”
By Ben Hernández
https://by.dialexa.com/more-than-pixels-redefining-designer

Dialexa
We are on a mission to make every company
a great technology company.
We work with organizations to define and
execute digital transformation strategies to
improve business operations and customer
experiences. Our services include:
• Multi-Year Technology Roadmap
• Platform Engineering
• User Experience Design
• Custom Software Development
• Hardware Prototyping /IoT

Business professionals
of a “certain vintage”
have a tendency to
misunderstand the role
of design.
Get the full write up of this slideshare at https://by.dialexa.com/more-than-
pixels-redefining-designer

They’ve looked at designers as disposable or
simply nice to have.

But now, digital
transformation is
pushing us into a
brave new business
frontier-

-one where product expectations, unique
business needs, and advancements in
technology require a new way of thinking.

These new circumstances are pushing designers to
focus more on the invisible rather than only the
tangible.

In this new business world, human-centered
design will shape as our discipline evolves
toward an ever-present sense of empathy for
our users.

The Specialist Problem in
Design

As a young
designer I
was very
concerned
with creating
pretty pixels.

Although my job in many cases was
to be both UX and visual designer,

The work that mattered to me and to many
of my peers was centered around how
something looked rather than how it
worked.

It was hard
to find a
visual
designer with
UX design
chops and
vise versa.

such as
information
architects, UX
designers,
visual
designers, etc.
Design teams
in those days
were often
broken down
into
specialties…

And from there,
companies
perpetuated the
ideas of hyper-
specialized design,
further narrowing
the skillset of so
many design
professionals.

As design proves increasingly important for
driving business value,

You’ll start to notice that
hyper-specialized has
weakened the design talent
pool and created a great
rift between business and
product-

-two issues that require a
new definition of
“designer” to overcome.

Tomorrow’s Designers will be “T-Shaped”

Human-centered
design requires multi-
faceted designers.

The way we like to think
of modern designers is as
“T-shaped.”

Being “T-shaped” means designers have 3 core
discipline strengths- research, user experience,
and visual design.

For each designer,
one of these
disciplines will be
strongest and act
as the center point
of the “T.”

When you look at a well-rounded design
team filled out with “T-shaped” designers,
you’ll see a spider chart of skills.

Everyone will have some combination of the core
skills and fill in each other’s gaps.

User experience
and visual design
are traditional
values for the
discipline, but
research is what
really sets us apart
from simple pixel
pushers.

Design can’t just be rooted in a gut feeling- we
have to be data-driven if we want a seat at the
strategic table.

The Designer as
Anthropologist

For design to prove that it’s more than simply
an art, we have to make research a critical
part of any project.

Once you recognize the importance of design
thinking, you can start asking the right questions of
both users and the business.

The crux of any successful product is
empathy for its’ users’ experience- why are
people using the product in the first place?

If you can understand the “why,” you can do
more than just design a good experience, you
can truly democratized design.

Anyone can install Photoshop,
but not everyone can leverage
the design toolkit that includes
research, observation and data
analysis.

If there’s no intentionality
behind our designers, we
can’t blame business
professionals for
dismissing the discipline.

But if we act like strategists-not just doers- we
can defeat the long-standing stigma and make
sure that businesses are truly design-led.

Getting Back to the True Meaning of Design-Led

The true meaning of “Design-led” has been
muddles by misguided claims that a company is
a “Design First, Design Thinking Company.”

But design-led doesn’t mean that a designer
has to be a CEO or that company is only
focused on form before function.

It means that from the top down,
everyone in the organization is
making purposeful decisions that
balance the needs of human
customers with business objectives
and technological realities.

We may have lost sight of the human
interaction portion of design in favor of pixels
in the past, but designers must bear the
burden of making sure it’s not just
meaningful pixels that we’re creating.

Designers must ensure
that the underlying
processes and
interactions within the
project are both
purposeful and optimal.

Saying that
designers must
drive empathy in
an organization
isn’t anything
new- and yet the
discipline still
doesn’t have a
seat at the table in
many companies.

Today’s designers
have to be evangelize
the human-centered
way of thinking and
prove to executives
that the discipline
brings more to the
table than pixels.

P R O P E R T Y O F D I A L E X A L L C © 2 0 1 7 - C O N F I D E N T I A L & P R O P R I E T A R Y
Doug Platts
VP of Marketing
marketing@dialexa.com
If you are looking to undertake
a digital transformation
initiative, contact Dialexa today
and see how we can help make
your company a great
technology company.
Get the full write up of this slideshare at
https://by.dialexa.com/challenges-cios-face-as-
companies-change-rapidly-and-what-to-do-
about-them

It’s About More than Pixels: Redefining "Designer"

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It’s About More than Pixels: Redefining "Designer"