The Hired Guns Blog

Jeff Gothelf, a user experience designer working for TheLadders.com, blogs for us about project management and UX careers and trends.

Designers want to be heroes.

Let that soak in for a second. It’s true. Design is a hero-based practice.

To be known as the designer who conceived the iPod or the genius behind the game-changing interaction design of Mint.com is an accolade many seek. Those are product designs, but this mentality is even more prevalent inside interactive agencies. Agencies want to win awards because awards attract new business.

Hero-focused design is promoted even further because of the transient nature of employment at an interactive agency. The more successful you are as an individual designer at an agency, the easier it is for you to get that next gig or step up the design ladder.

The problem is heroes work alone. They don’t collaborate or open their work for review. They reveal work only when they feel it’s “ready,” and they typically seek to control the direction of the project very heavily. The stronger a designer’s hand in the project, the theory goes, the more he or she can lay claim to that project’s success.

Working alone can also foster a culture of distrust and finger-pointing–especially when something goes wrong. Like anyone, heroes don’t want to take the fall for a project’s failure. Being able to compartmentalize the portion of the project that you were solely responsible for makes it easier to pass the blame on someone else if a project fails.

There’s a better way: collaboration. Work as part of team and share the ups and downs of the project together. Share your work early. Let the other team members (yes, even non-designers) give feedback. Incorporate that feedback and iterate frequently. Win with your team and lose with your team. The trust and support that team-based projects engender are worth ten times any award you may have won individually. Your work is better informed. Your team backs it up: it’s as much their design now as it is yours, and they want it to win. They will go the extra mile to ensure that every bit of polish is applied to the work to maximize its chances for success–after all, it’s their success as well.

While an award may win you that next gig, team-based collaboration will win you a handful of new advocates and references. Building your reputation as a team player opens up many new doors as well. For example, if the time ever comes where you’d like to make the move to client-side engagements, team collaboration experience is one of the first skills that will be assessed.

Collaborative design also makes you a better designer. Your work is ultimately one piece of an experience. Understanding and working closely with the other elements that bring that experience to life will inform your work and help you refine it to fit the constraints of the medium and the technology. A more refined design can then be more effectively implemented–creating a better experience for your end user and better results for your clients.

The days of hero design are numbered. Collaborative design provides the winning combination that makes you not only more attractive to your next employer but also a better overall designer.