What you do ≠ what you are
May 11, 2020
Guilty song confession time: when I'm out driving, I like to listen to the song "What am I" by Why Don't We. It's catchy, easy to sing along to, and good for driving fast. These are the three things I want from a good car tune. I know what you're thinking... Is this post going to be about cheesy driving songs? No, but it is going to as the question the song poses, what am I, and more specifically - what do you do?
Here's Jonathan Stark in one of his emails:
When people ask you what you do, what do you say?
Do you stumble and have trouble answering?
Do you say something flippant or dismissive, like “computer stuff”?
Do you answer differently every time, depending on who’s asking?
We experience the same struggle over and over. To be honest, it doesn't matter whether people ask us about what we do, what our product does, or even what our company does. We have trouble answering in a short and understandable way when put on the spot.
You may be thinking that what you do actually is really simple to describe - that you're a 'designer' or a 'developer'. You may even be more specific and say something like you're a 'Javascript developer for form-dependent webapps'. But, either way, what you're describing is just your expertise or your deliverables. Unless the person you're talking to is someone who is on the hunt for a Javascript developer for a form-dependent webapp, your answer is just talking about you and not the potential client outcomes. Again, all of this is just as true when it comes to products or companies, but let's continue looking at this from a person-perspective.
Jonathan uses an example that's outside of our digital sphere. Imagine meeting someone and you ask them what they do:
Which of these answers do you find more powerful?
“I stretch and manipulate deep layers of muscle and connective tissue to the max.”
“I help professional athletes get back in the game after being sidelined by an injury.”
Just like in Pain, Dream, Fix, it focuses on the client outcomes and the result you can bring them instead of focusing on irrelevant variables. After all, we just tend to throw around variables to make it sound like we're the experts, right? This example from Jonathan offers a clear outcome and fix (get back in the game), for a defined pain (being sidelined by an injury) for a defined set of customers (professional athletes). Most importantly, it tells the story of what they do in a way that is easy to understand and engage with.
The customer is focused on their pain point and looking to the open market to provide them with their solution. Your product isn’t what they want, the end result is. Your customer doesn’t want your vacuum cleaner, they want a clean apartment.Pain, Dream, Fix
Once you know what problem you can solve, you can start to think about how you'll communicate it differently than everyone else and stand out.
Why you?
There's thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people that have a similar knowledge of things that you do. I'm certainly not the only freelance UX-designer and while more and more of the work I do is leading teams, it's still not a differentiator.
Someone who knew that he had to find his own style was Ed Sheeran. Before Ed Sheeran got his first hit, he started injecting rap into his singer/songwriter songs - because it was something he loved. The added effect is that it was something that positioned him differently. There are millions of unrecognized singer/songwriters. Not only did it change his style, but it also changed his context. Instead of playing singer/songwriter nights, he started playing open mic's. In fact, one of his breakthrough moments was when he was sleeping on the Jamie Foxx's couch.
It was like 800 black people, all black, just the best musicians," Foxx said of the show. He explained that his musician friends were initially incredulous that Sheeran would do well in such an environment.
"So all of a sudden I say, 'Ladies and gentleman, Ed Sheeran!' He pops out, with red hair and a ukulele," Foxx continued. "It was just like a movie. I said, 'Well, let's see what the kid has.' And he went out there on that ukulele — got a standing ovation in 12 minutes. And the rest was history."
So... what do you do?
Defining what you do or what your product does is one of the most difficult things to clearly state. It could also be one of the most important things you state. Take the time to think about beyond your expertise and into how you implement it. It isn't that you DO something, it's how that thing EFFECTS outcomes. After all, you're not just a UX-designer... You actually provide solutions for clients that help them connect with their audience through meaningful, thought-provoking experiences. Right?
Exercise: I want to learn more about about you and what you do! Take what I just wrote and apply it to yourself. Describe what you do through this model and let me know the client(s) you serve, the problem you set out to solve, and the outcomes you achieve. Remember to be creative and honest. This will be something you can use to describe yourself and what you do in almost any setting!
You need to confirm your email to confirm your subscription.
-
March, 2024
-
February, 2024
-
January, 2024
-
December, 2023
-
November, 2023
-
October, 2023
-
September, 2023
-
August, 2023
-
July, 2023
-
June, 2023
-
May, 2023
-
April, 2023
-
March, 2023
-
January, 2023
-
December, 2022
-
November, 2022
-
September, 2022
-
August, 2022
-
July, 2022
-
June, 2022
-
May, 2022
-
April, 2022
-
January, 2022
-
December, 2021
-
November, 2021
-
October, 2021
-
September, 2021
-
August, 2021
-
July, 2021
-
June, 2021
-
May, 2021
-
April, 2021
-
March, 2021
-
January, 2021
-
November, 2020
-
October, 2020
-
September, 2020
-
August, 2020
-
June, 2020
-
May, 2020
-
April, 2020
-
March, 2020
- Regarding Zoom
- Why wireframes are becoming obsolete
- Get static
- Emotions and work - know yourself
- All books are now free
- Wireframes are too concrete
- Stuck at home
- What Great Managers Do
- From Error to Understanding: The Importance of Brand Voice When Things Go Wrong
- Answering your question - How I design
- The Sliding Scale of Giving a Fuck
- Hard startups
-
February, 2020
-
January, 2020
- Debbie Millman - Time Well Spent
- The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com
- Fathom Analytics
- Redesign to learn
- How putting a price on speed helped one retailer increase mobile revenue in just 2 months
- Accessibility drives aesthetics
- Smart people use simple words to make others feel smart.
- The great paradox of our time: everything is both better and worse than ever before
-
December, 2019
-
November, 2019
-
October, 2019
-
September, 2019
-
August, 2019
- How we work with microcopy
- Measuring UX with HEART
- Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize ‘Install App’ Ads or Avoid Them Entirely
- Analytics are reshaping fashion’s old-school instincts
- What to Do When You Feel Uninspired at Work
- Stay in your lane and outlast your competition
- A Mindful Approach to Technology
- “I Just Knew I Was Going to Surpass These Guys I Was Working For”
- People Are Starting to Realize How Voice Assistants Actually Work
- Fast Software, the Best Software
- Data-Driven Design Is Killing Our Instincts
- Freelance and Business And Stuff
- UX can’t be defined by one set of "rules"
-
July, 2019
- 5 Years - 300+ Posts!
- Superhuman and email privacy
- Why Consultants Quit Their Jobs to Go Independent
- Give them candy: small details make all the difference
- Your inbox is spying on you
- On Modus: It’s Time for a Code of Ethics for Designers
- Frank Chimero on causing ’good trouble’ and re-imagining the status quo to combat achievement culture
- Advertising: contextual vs. behavioral and why it matters
-
June, 2019
- Citrix improves UX and cuts costs by 65%
- Delight Comes Last
- Tim Cook’s Stanford Commencement Address
- You care more about your privacy than you think
- The Cost of Lies
- Let’s assemble like the Avengers and... do work
- Big Mood Machine
- Simplicity is a war
- How Notion Is Going After Atlassian and Why It Just Might Win
- Hiring a Management Consultancy for Digital Is a Mistake
- Just write: why Product Designers should write, and how to get started
- Dos and dont’s on designing for accessibility
- I’ve redesigned my website and it looks exactly the same
-
May, 2019
-
April, 2019
- Scapegoating User Experience Design
- Clip sharing with Overcast
- Why don’t we just use Material Design?
- Accenture sued $32m+ over website redesign for Hertz
- Venture capital money kills more businesses than it helps
- Creating a UX Strategy
- The elegance of nothing
- Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa
- Working as a UX-lead
- Gumroadday: Get my books at -17% discount
-
March, 2019
- Working as a UX designer
- Meet Q: The First Genderless Voice
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
- How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure
- What’s the meaning of work?
- Wireframes are becoming less relevant — and that’s a good thing
- Neurodiversity and the Digital Divide: how our neurological differences shape the way we experience the web
- Accessibility, a powerful design tool
-
February, 2019
-
January, 2019
-
December, 2018
-
November, 2018
-
October, 2018
-
September, 2018
-
August, 2018
- Living among baby robots
- Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind
- Voice Input’s Effect on Social Norms
- How I kicked my email compulsion
- Facebook's struggle to moderate itself
- The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is Idleness
- Google Employees Are Organizing To Protest the Company’s Secret Search Engine
- Why Small Teams Win
- Back to Work!
- The Bullshit Web
- Nikhil Sonnad on the banal evil of Facebook
-
July, 2018
- Five questions UX employers should be asking
- Just keep at it
- Yes, Alan, There Is An ROI For UX Design
- High Fives, AI, and Connecting the Dots: MailChimp’s VP of Design on What Business can Learn from Design
- Rands Information Practises
- The Race to a Trillion
- What Elon Musk Should Learn From the Thailand Cave Rescue
- Cheap Shower Curtains
- Tech Sector Values are Broken?
-
June, 2018
- Confirmation Bias in Design
- Rise of the machines: has technology evolved beyond our control?
- Good product writing is conversational
- Retail is Not Dying, But it Has to Evolve
- The Netflix Binge Factory
- We are all trapped in the “Feed”
- Stop “feeding” your users
- Turn off your push notifications. All of them.
- From the Drawing Board to the Board Room
- Think inclusively at every step
- No classes, no professors: the alternative to business school
- Designer Ethics & The Moral Implications of our Apps
- Conversion optimization with A/B tests
-
May, 2018
- AI Ethics - A New Skill for UX-Designers
- Netlify now shows your deploy status on its favicon
- Let them eat cake
- Netflix Culture
- Skype
- How do you learn UX?
- The New Google Assistant
- What Happened to Apple’s Whimsy?
- Who would you trust more with your data, Apple or the government?
- Unfoundered
- Microcontent: A Few Small Words Have a Mega Impact on Business
- Twitter logged all user’s passwords in plain text
- Requests for Personal Data From Apple, Google, and Facebook Compared
- What’s in a pattern name
- GDPR is ruining my life
-
April, 2018
- A Modest Guide to Productivity
- Google Debuts a Standalone To-Do App, Google Tasks
- Apple Should Make an Instagram Clone
- Vanity Metrics
- Tech is not Neutral
- Facebook to exclude North American users from some privacy enhancements
- Netflix has to "produce great content, market it well, serve it up beautifully."
- Sen. Blumenthal: “Your business model is to maximize profit over privacy.”
- Productivity
- My #1 Piece of Advice to Freelancers: Lean Into The Moment
- Design Systems: Better UX through Defined Standards
- Tim Cook - We care about the user experience
- Europe’s tough new data-protection law
- The Real Technology Problem
- Why Small Teams Win
- Whose risk?
- Phone Bored
- Karim Rashid
- Creative Class is open
- Dieter Rams
- Being cash-free puts us at risk of attack: Swedes turn against cashlessness
- What’s a ‘User Experience’ Anyways?
-
March, 2018
- Fake News is spam
- Bleeding Out
- How Tech Giants Design For Transgender Users–Or Don’t
- Don't use the F word (freelancer)
- Dropbox
- Conversational Design
- Everyone Is Going Through Something
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
- Flight Crews Don’t Decide Where To Fly
- New Tools Don’t Always Equal Productivity
- The seat at the table
- Why Can Everyone Spot Fake News But YouTube, Facebook And Google?
- Cuba
- Bye bye Facebook
- Why I hate your fake redesign
- Givenchy
- Diversity in the design industry
- Your competitors don’t matter
- Apple’s "Sound on the Go" Strategy
- The Most Important Design Skill For An AI-Dominated World
- Love letters to trees
- Amazon has a fix for Alexa’s creepy laughs
- You have to make sure that you’re focused on the thing that matters.
- Voice Input is the Next Big Thing - Or is It?
-
February, 2018
- Specialize
- Pricing Philisophy
- AMP for email is a terrible idea
- Is this Finnish school the perfect design?
- The #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change
- A Year of Learning and Leading UX at Google
- C.A.R.E - A simple framework for user onboarding
- Inside Facebook´s Hellish Two Years
- A better user experience...or?
- Personas
- Reflections on working on an iPad
- Everything Easy is Hard Again
- How to succeed at freelancing
- The iPhone X is Apple’s underrated masterpiece
- Make me think
-
January, 2018
-
December, 2017
-
November, 2017
-
October, 2017
-
September, 2017
-
August, 2017
-
July, 2017
-
June, 2017
- The Why before the Why
- No Share Buttons on Mobile Sites
- Groundwork for Creating Great User Experiences
- ARKit
- 4 Reasons Why Your Body Text Should be Bigger
- Now that Apple is talking about AR and VR, should we be too?
- Think like an artist to create better designs
- Investing in businesses and products
- 10 Reasons Why All Designers Should Start Writing More
- Become a better UX-designer with these three words
- Vox Media Accessibility Guidelines
- Writing for UX: some practical tips
-
May, 2017
-
April, 2017
-
March, 2017
-
February, 2017
-
January, 2017
-
December, 2016
-
November, 2016
-
October, 2016
-
September, 2016
-
August, 2016
-
July, 2016
-
June, 2016
-
May, 2016
-
April, 2016
-
March, 2016
-
February, 2016
-
January, 2016
-
December, 2015
-
November, 2015
-
October, 2015
-
September, 2015
-
August, 2015
-
July, 2015
-
June, 2015
-
May, 2015
-
April, 2015
-
November, 2014
-
April, 2013