Exposure

Designers spend too much time with other designers. I say this myself as a designer.

It’s not that dealing with designers is bad. They’re cool people. But every hour you spend talking to fellow designers is an hour not spent building relationships that can actually improve the quality of your work.

Designers often pride themselves on being introverts. If we were alone with our work, we would do everything we could to avoid having to talk to anyone. That’s a problem if your work is literally about understanding the world around you. People, companies, markets, economics and everything else.

This also ties in with something designers hear all the time: participate in more research. Test your designs. Meet more users.

Why do people keep saying this?

It’s not a problem for designers. It is a call for designers to be better informed. Better informed. And more often than not, we aren’t.

Design is synthesizing the world of your users into your solutions. Solutions must work within the context of the user. But most designers rarely take the time to expose themselves to the reality of that context.

You are creative when you see things that others do not see. Not necessarily new images, but new correlations. Connections between concepts. Problems that are only obvious when someone points them out. And you can’t see what you’re not exposed to.

Improving as a designer is really about increasing your visibility. Gain different experiences and increase your input of information from different sources. That exposure can take many forms. Conversations with fellow builders such as PMs, engineers, customer support, sales. Or browse research reports, industry blogs, GPTs, view other products, YouTube.

Imagine sitting with a product manager for an hour over lunch and just talking about problems and opportunities in your product. I bet you’ll learn a lot of things you didn’t know before. Now imagine meeting your sales team. They go to customer events, conferences, sales calls… a wealth of knowledge that you are completely unaware of.

How about taking your next coffee break with your technical partner? Maybe with your business partner?

Exposure calibrates your understanding to more points of view. Maybe users aren’t buying your product because of the feature you thought was great because your design friends praised it to death. Maybe your users are churning for reasons completely unknown to you and you’re not even aware of it or helping because you’re busy perfecting the design system.

I recently found out that the feature we were building would make us the market leader in that category. I had no idea. I put a lot more effort into it now than I did originally. A collaboration opportunity I pursued in my product wouldn’t move the business needle at all. I’ve recalibrated my time and energy elsewhere.

I just would never have known these things from my fellow designers.

Exposure reveals the cracks in your understanding.

We live in a multivariate, living, breathing world. Being an effective designer is about bringing the outside in, but also bringing your ideas outside.

You rarely solve a problem well just by talking to designers about design. Your exposure is too limited. Magic happens when you combine your design skills with insights from people who know more than you. Who know differently than you.

• Design + more design = pixel perfect but probably ineffective work.
• Design + broad exposure = effective work that lands.

Have you ever wondered how some designers continue to have good ideas? Why are they creative not only in themselves, but also in the way they actually solve problems better than others?

They are exposed to knowledge and information that is not you. They read something you didn’t read. They talk to more people and understand their work better than you.

Exposure makes the difference. And lighting is much more about people than about pixels.

Increase your visibility.