UX Planet — Medium | Tarun Kohli

If there is a chance that you are leading a team and you still haven’t read Ben Horowitz’s Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, then I would urge you to take a leap of faith, click on the above link and read it right now. It was written twenty years ago but every word stands true till date.

In the same spirit, taking inspiration from Ben, I spent time thinking what separates Good Designers from Bad Designers.

Here’s my take on it, explained with the help of sketches-

Empathizing with users

A good designer gets married to the users’ problems. A bad designer gets married to his own solutions.

Asking questions

A good designer asks questions to uncover the problem. A bad designer is afraid of seeking “Why”.

Coming up with ideas

A good designer crafts multiple design solutions. A bad designer selects the first one they discover.

Designer’s focus

A good designer focuses on creating the most usable designs. A bad designer focuses on following the latest tools.

Seeking feedback

A good designer seeks critique. A bad designer runs from critique.

Regarding planning

A good designer believes that “failing to plan is planning to fail”. A bad designer believe in the guessing game.

Making Progress

A good designer is disciplined about making progress. A bad designer works whenever “he is in the mood”.

Ownership

A good designer believes that their job isn’t done until they have validated their design against user analytics data. A bad designer believes their job was done the moment they submitted the design to the development team.

About mistakes

A good designer learns from failures and improvises. A bad designer doesn’t believe in failures.

Transparency

A good designer is honest in sharing the credit for her design inspiration. A bad designer hogs all the credit.

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This is a part of a design series where I write to share my learnings while working with our design team at Quovantis to build user experiences for innovative startups . You can find my earlier writings here –

• Being HIPPO is ruining your design decisions
• Default to simplicity to design better user experiences
• Why Lorem ipsum is the word we don’t talk about anymore

Good Designer, Bad Designer was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.