UX leadership insight #2: Vague or specific?

(See my earlier posts for introduction to the series.)

As a design lead you will be working with different kinds of designers. You naturally want them to be able to use their skills to the max, to contribute as much as possible to the success of the project.

As discussed earlier (#1), you need to set the design direction for the team and for each designer individually. And just like all the people, designers are all different. Some are experienced, some are fresh; some need very little direction and some need more.

As a design lead, you cannot design everything yourself. Possibly, you don’t have time to do any design work at all! You simply must get most of the design work done by your colleagues in the design team. I have always tried to work with people that are much better designers than me.

I have always felt that directing the design work of individual designers, there’s a dilemma of how precise steering you want to give. If your guidance is very vague – let’s say you ask for something “magical” – you might get back brilliant designs that you could have never thought of yourself.  Or, you could get nothing, if the designer simply didn’t understand the open ended direction setting. On the other hand, if you grab a pencil or a whiteboard pen and start drawing sketches about what you mean, you will probably get your own sketches back drawn nicely on a wireframing tool. When that happens, you have failed: the result is only as good as you can design yourself. If you need to do this a lot, the whole end result will be mostly designed by you. Compare that with the situation that you have got brilliant designs, much better than you could imagine, in all areas of your design. That’s true teamwork in design!

To summarize, as a design lead you need to balance your daily design direction to the designers appropriately between being vague and being specific. Be sensitive with the design team: designers are different in this respect.

Main image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/torley/ (c) Creative Commons