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Welcome to the 21st century, where life and work are less and less about our skills or what we know, and more and more about how to cope with what we don’t know so we can get new answers, learn new skills, find (or create) new knowledge. In HR parlance, this ability is part of a set referred to as “soft skills” or “character traits”. They represent industries’ growing realization that it’s better to hire someone who may not be the most expert at Photoshop, but who is highly adaptable, or someone who may not know as much about html5, but has demonstrated outstanding creativity, persistence or resourcefulness. These types of traits are harder to measure, but résumés are changing as candidates learn how to demonstrate soft skills with “success stories”, while in-person interviews reveal others. According to some experienced tech recruiters, there are 28 character traits employers tend to look for. We don’t all have all of them, so play to your strengths. You may be someone who excels at persistence in the face of obstacles, or who thrives on solving the toughest problems. The key, however, will be your willingness and ability to ask questions. Two powerful ways humans, and designers, ask and pursue questions are through research and experimentation. Research: “What else do I need to know (about the market, the client, the industry, current trends, the product, etc.)?” Experimentation: “Is this true?” (i.e. “Is this true? Our market has changed drastically from millennials to seniors,” or “Is this true? More people will click the buy button if we turn it red.”)
First, the ‘H’ word
Being a good questioner requires humility. This means being willing to ask, “What don’t I know?” And sometimes more specifically, “Are the stakeholders resisting because they don’t feel heard?” or “What should I question about my own preconceived ideas?” It may be argued that the industrial designer, Dieter Rams, moved from design excellence to design greatness when he began asking himself, “Is my design good design?” Humility itself may be considered a skill. It takes time and effort to find a balance between confidence in the value of your ideas and willingness to be wrong about them. Usually, we lean too far one way or another. Overconfidence makes us boorish steamrollers who dismiss the input of others (including our clients). A lack of confidence gets in the way of effectively defending our good ideas when they are too quickly dismissed. From a gender point of view, men tend to err on the side of overconfidence and women tend to undervalue themselves, and therefore, their ideas. There are plenty of exceptions to that rule, but it’s a statistical reality worth mentioning if you’re interested in tackling this beast. In general, it’s not about toning down or trying to lighten one side of the scale, but adding weight to the other side. So if you decide your “overconfidence” is getting in the way of your creative success, keep the confidence (it’s golden!), but find ways to let other ideas in, especially those that conflict with yours. If you have had enough of undervaluing yourself, keep that tremendous receptiveness (which is priceless) and face down the inner critics that are willing to help naysayers trash your ideas. Humility is an essential ingredient for successful research and experimentation. It means your eyes are open to new discoveries, rather than blinkered to simply proving your own points.
This is the age of research
Many professionals call learning how to ask questions the first rule of research (though some make a good case for patience). What are we researching? Everything. Like a Japanese master preparing to paint a mountain, we need to know the mountain first. We need to research the client (their past, and their future vision), the product, its industry, its market. We also need to research new behavior studies, surprise applications (new ways a product is being used, new places and surfaces for a logo, new vehicles for expressing brand), and new web design tech that could prove to be just what the project needs. Our access to information is exploding daily. Research used to be about trips to the library or the government office, it was also about libraries and government offices that required distant travels. Now (to make an extreme point) it’s about finding a place to pause so we can flip open a laptop or thumb through data on a mobile device. Having that kind of access requires us as designers to develop both a research rigor and research style. Rigor is discipline. Having a clear set of questions laid out in advance facilitates rigor and provides a clear path past distractions. We need to pursue research questions down trustworthy paths, and be willing to consider discoveries that are outside our expectations. On the other hand, it’s our research style, developed over time, that inspires us to venture (astutely) down the less trustworthy paths. With rigor, we dodge the rabbit holes. With a style of research that’s ours alone, we learn which rabbit holes may be worth a visit.
Experimentation
Hopefully, as a designer you’re experimenting all the time. You’re doodling. You’re designing the Yahoo! logo that should have been. Or you’ve got a side project going, like a self promotional calendar, a 3D printing quest, a hand lettering project, etc. We may not be aware of it, but experimentation always starts with the question, “Is this true?” Science as a discipline requires a formal hypothesis. It’s a statement, not a question, but the next step is to test it to see if the statement is true. Designers can sometimes play this a lot closer to the hip, because first, we have to design something that looks good to us. In those cases, we are our own “control group”. Instead of a formal hypotheses, we may start with a hunch (which is, essentially, an unverbalized hypothesis) that a certain concept will look cool, or be implemented best with an alternate programming language. We try it out. Meh. We try it from a different angle. Still meh. Hunch/hypothesis disproved, we move on. We may have a hunch that the best coding language for a project is Ajax. Again, we’re asking, “Is this true? If I use Ajax, I’ll get the functionality I need.” We code it (or a representative portion of it), we test it, and we evaluate the results. Being willing to test an idea, to find out that it sucks and to move on to another idea, is one of those skills and strengths that transcends technical skills. At the same time that we’re running these kinds of tests, we also need to be performing more rigorous trials that require tighter controls. Depending on the resources available and the potential returns for a successful site (such as e-commerce), we can potentially take experimentation, and the rigor it demands, just as far as scientists do. In these, you put forward your hypothesis, such as, “If we remove the leaderboard banner ad, improved sales will more than offset the loss of ad revenue,” and then measure the results using the ever-more-sophisticated tools available, from analytics to in-person eye-tracking sessions. Most importantly, in experimentation, not only are you exercising your questioning muscles, but also the muscles that help you hear the real, potentially disappointing (or embarrassing), answer.
Conclusion
Hard skills and knowledge are very important, but a few years from now, you’ll need a new set of hard skills because the playing field in website design and tech will not stop changing. Soft skills, like knowing how to ask questions, will stay. While you’re at it, consider this: identify your three strongest personal traits, and make them stronger. Some good examples: hone your curiosity, get a clear understanding of how you learn best, develop effective tactics for coping with stress and routinely coming to terms with your ego. Consciously developing your character traits is essential whether you travel in salaried corporate circles or run an independent design business. Among them, the mastery of asking questions is a core skill to actively incorporate into your professional design practice. Develop ways to form questions and pursue them. Refine the ways you find answers, create answers and in turn, allow new questions to be born.
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