Here we start with a story.

Source: Unsplash

There is a couple, Stakeholder and Designer. Previously, they have a wonderful and lovely relationship. But recently, the Designer feels that their relationship isn’t going well anymore. She doesn’t happy about Stakeholder’s treatment to her.

Doesn’t want to lose her, Stakeholder makes a promise that he will change to a better person. Impressed with his gesture, the Designer forgave him.

Time passed, but he still repeating his mistake. Again, the woman still forgiving him, and keep swirling to the toxic relationship. She was blinded by deception.

That story may be a little bit exaggerated, but we can take a lesson from it. Don’t be a blinded designer. What is that?

Blinded designer from my perspective was,

a designer that blinded by their own designs and all its tricks.

They keep making design but they don’t know whether their design was worked or not, pretended to be okay. This is dangerous, it can make the product failure.

How we became blinded designers?

Design without guidance

Sometimes stakeholders want to create a feature/product without strengthened with good data, even though data is important as a reference to what we do next to solve the user’s pain. Not only that, after design execution, they also don’t provide the result metrics of our solution. Is it a success or a failure?

We don’t know the objectives or goals of the features

This related to the previous point, sometimes we don’t curious enough to ask about features that we design, we just received the request and done it. Without asking the purpose of the feature. Is it needed by the users? Is it impactful to them? No, we think ourselves as labor, do whatever was told by stakeholders.

Overconfidence

Although this is rarely happening, sometimes designers were overconfident about their design. It was implemented directly without testing it to users first, what happens next is users leave the application because it was hard to use.

How we avoid this situation?

Do the pre-design researches

This is the most important thing that we should do before we make a feature/product. What is stopping users to reach their goals? As said in Hacking Growth, you can look to your data before you design something, do some qualitative and quantitative researches to strengthen and support your decisions. Your sign up rate was low? Try to check which flows/screens that have the highest drop and follow up by surveys and user interviews.

Make the data as your design base

Got something insightful from your researches? Make the design based on it. For example: From the quantitative research was obtained the user’s sign up rate was dropped in filling form screen, and when you interviewed them, they told you that the form was too long. So, you can shorten your sign up form.

Testing your design and maintain it

After you designed it, make sure you test your design to your user target. We need to know if your design was worked or not. If it was, after the release, maintain your design. Follow up on the result. You can monitor it from analytic tools such as Mixpanel, Google Analytics, etc. Ask data analyst help if it is needed.

Conclusion

Sometimes we will fall to this trap and unconsciously become a blinded designer. To prevent that, make yourself clear what the goal of your project. Why we should make this? Does it provide good data? After you finish your work, follow up on your design. Does it work for the user? Is it answer user pain? Doing this, you can escape from this trap and make a good product for your team.