Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Adam Toda

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. It’s important to be confident in what you do and what you know, but still be open to opportunities to learn and grow

The beginner’s mind

Before I started a career as a designer, I was interested in becoming a professional musician playing a form of Japanese percussion called “taiko”. When I was in university I was fortunate to be a part of the Stanford Taiko group, a completely student-organized group with no teacher and no single point of power. Everything was decided by consensus, an example of how the group relied on the strength of group rather than the strength of any individual. The group relied on the collective efforts of everyone to be self-sufficient; sewing performance costumes, writing repertoire, and even building drums. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts.

As a part of Stanford Taiko one of the prevailing mantras taught to us from the nearby San Jose Taiko was the “beginner’s mind”. As a beginner you are open to new ideas, even those that oppose your own. You try to understand why things are they way they are. You ask questions and want to learn. In short, a beginner is empathetic and curious. As we gain more experience in something it is easy to become arrogant and to begin shutting out the ideas or the opinions of people whom we don’t deem our “peers”.

When I joined Stanford Taiko I had the rare disposition of growing up playing taiko. I played since I was 6 years old, and having so many years under my belt, I was cocky and arrogant. I didn’t want to listen to feedback because I felt that I didn’t have anything to learn from everyone else. I always thought people were doing things “wrong” and that my knowledge and understanding of taiko was somehow superior. My arrogance isolated myself from the group.

While other members in the group may have had less taiko experience, they had experience in other types of music, performance, and art. Only when I began to embrace the beginner’s mind was I able to see the parallels between other experiences and taiko. The only experience that mattered wasn’t just taiko experience, but any experience. There were people who had experience with classical music, jazz, dance, theater, roller skating, and more. There was something to learn from everyone in the group, and embracing this fact signifcantly expanded my view of what taiko was and my development as a taiko player.

Designers operate in a world of unknowns

As designers we operate in a world of unknowns. We deal with problems that relate to human experiences and emotions. These are complex problems. We know the desired outcome, but don’t know what will get us there. Our guess is as good as anyone’s.

To assume that we know the answers would be arrogant. The detrimental side effect of arrogance would be looking only for the results that prove our beliefs and dismissing everything else. As designers, we must maintain a beginner’s mind to be open to feedback and to challenging our own assumptions and beliefs. We must admit what we are assuming versus what we know, and that what we assume may also be wrong.

There is much to learn within the feedback of our users and stakeholders. The willingness to listen will help us understand if our users don’t understand a particular interface or what their real problems are. Listening will help us understand what our stakeholders and clients don’t understand and what they care about. Listening will help us be more empathetic. Empathy will help us design better experiences for our users and build better relationships with our clients.

The confidence to operate in the unknown

Operating in a world of unknowns not only means we need to be humble about what we don’t know, but also find the confidence to create clarity and find direction. We must be confident in our teammates, ourselves, and our users and stakeholders.

Have confidence in your team

The old saying goes that two heads are better than one, and we admittedly don’t know everything that someone else has in their own knowledge and experience bank. When crossed with an admitted unknown, having the confidence in your teammates to help or teach you what they know not only builds teamwork and trust, but also provides perspective on alternate ways of viewing the unknown you are trying to solve. For example, another designer on your team could provide you with an alternate approach to the UI you’re creating or an engineer could provide insight on the technological limitations to keep in mind. Even if someone else might not have the answer, they may be able to show you a new door to open.

Have confidence in yourself

Have confidence in yourself to try something even if you don’t know it’s correct. In the world of complex problems we don’t know if anything is correct until we try it. We have every right to be confident in what we do, because no one has all the answers. The best we can do is try to find the path to the right answer. That takes trying, learning, and trying again.

Have confidence in your users and stakeholders

Your stakeholders and users are not your enemies although it may sometimes feel they don’t “understand” or are “getting in the way” of making a great product. In the end, the product is only good if it fulfills its purpose and helps people. Those “people” are your stakeholders and your users. Both parties will give you feedback about your creations and assumptions. Whether that be in the form of praise, actively using the product you’ve created, criticism, or even not using the product you’ve created. These forms of feedback can help you learn about the business goals or user problems. Feedback is one of the fastest ways to learn more about the industry or business you are designing for or about the real problems a user is having. Our stakeholders and users are part of the team. Whether it be through interviews, observation, or sharing the results of our work, we should involve them in the product design process. We don’t have the industry experience that our stakeholders have, nor do we have the same every day experiences as our users. However, by seeking and being open to their feedback we can find greater clarity and direction toward the desired results.

Be confident in what you do

The biggest difference between a good performer and a great one is not perfect execution, but confidence. Mistakes are always made in performance, but the confidence to brush them aside and keep moving forward or to even use the mistake as a springboard for inspiration is what creates a seamless performance for the audience. A confident performer communicates what they are doing to the audience because the audience can feel the conviction in the performer.

Whether it be music, user experience design, fine art, product design, or performance, we design experiences that involve human emotions that we cannot predict, but only hope to communicate to and understand. Designers are scientists with a hypothesis about human behavior. We must have the confidence in our hypothesis to test it as well as the confidence to challenge it. Research, hypothesize, experiment, observe, analyze, repeat. As designers and creators, we go through this very process to learn and improve. The confidence to try helps us learn; arrogance can only blind us.

Be Confident, But Not Arrogant was originally published in Prototyping: From UX to Front End on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Be Confident, But Not Arrogant

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