Doing good
When we want to get ahead professionally, we typically search for things that give us a competitive advantage. You’ll read up on and try everything from short-term hacks like optimizing your resume to the long-term investments like the relationships you build.
All of which are practical, prudent strategies. But the harder, less sexy advice is likelier to lead to long-term success and a better sense of fulfillment along the way. Things like:
“Put your best foot forward”
“Do the right thing every chance you possibly get”
“Help out the people around you and guide them to success”
We want to explore doing good in your career from a couple of perspectives:
Peers — how you empower and enable colleagues, mentees, and professional acquaintances
Users — making a good faith effort to strike the right balance between user needs and business goals
Empowering your peers
We recently interviewed Olivia Truong, a Lead Product Designer at Hopper the creator and curator of the Product Designer Starter Kit — a collection of resources she maintains to help junior talent more confidently navigate the world of design.
She spoke to us at length about her passion for sharing the insights she wasn’t privy to when she first started out. Even beyond the Starter Kit, Olivia has made (and continues to make) herself available for coaching calls on a regular basis.
We asked (at 33:15) about her work’s impact on personal branding and building an audience.
I never really saw it as part of my personal branding until I put it out there, and starting to realize that people were recognizing this type of thing was really helpful for them.
So I think for me, it definitely helped in the sense of putting my name out there as someone who was very open to helping others… only because that’s kind of what I wished I had more of when I was starting out in my career.
Olivia goes out of her way to distill and share her wisdom with others. Her rising tides mentality is palpable; and she acts on it by trying to teach, coach, and guide whoever she can help.
Our takeaway? She focused on delivering value before boosting her brand, and was able to do both as a result.
Balancing user needs and business goals
Olivia also discussed (at ~19:15) the potential for designers to use their craft to meet business needs — particularly when designers report into business leadership, as is the case at Hopper.
There are times, especially when things are so unpredictable — and COVID is a really good example of this — where you have to think about how the business can survive. Sometimes you just have to think of ideas that help the company sustain as opposed to another feature that could have been very helpful for a user.
She explained how a widespread fear of traveling spurred a need to abandon the existing roadmap in favor of trust-building measures that would retain her company’s customer base.
And hey — who would have qualms with that? Your users don’t benefit if your business goes belly-up after all.
User Experience vs. User Exploitation
The real dilemma is when business efforts cross the line from serving users efficiently and sustainably into hacking user behavior without adding real value to their lives.
Last month, Mark Hurst of Creative Good wrote a piece called Why I’m losing faith in UX. He puts together a timeline of the history of UX within the larger framework of the Big Tech ecosystem over the past several years.
[The following describes] Decade 1, from 1997 to 2007: the golden era of online UX, when companies were willing to invest in listening to customers in order to serve them better. Retail, finance, healthcare, travel, and other sectors all had some interest in improvement.
Things changed in 2008, during the financial crisis, kicking off Decade 2, what I'll call "the slide." Lasting from 2008 to 2018, it was a time of UX teams seeing diminished influence in the organization.
Today’s era, Mark explains, sees “UX” being redefined as User Exploitation. This period will increasingly be defined by the ability of companies to use deceptive practices and meticulously crafted nudges to elicit behaviors to optimize for engagement, increased revenue, and reduction in churn — often at the expense of the customers’ best interests.
To be clear: we’re not denigrating designers who work for these companies, or those who work on efforts to optimize usage of features. Every organization has to balance survival and growth needs against its providing real value to its users.
But it’s worth asking yourself: have you ever fallen on the wrong side of that tradeoff?
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