Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, says that you need 10,000 hours of good practice to master a skill. I would say, for many jobs, that’s about right. What’s important to remember about this is that there are two factors involved: time spent (how much you do) and good practice (what you do). If you habituate yourself to sound principles and practice those, you will have success. On the other hand, if you develop bad habits, well…
That’s the big difference between people who are masters and those who merely have “experience.” I bet you have come across people in the workforce that seem, at first glance, to be “experienced.” However, you soon realize that something is amiss – they often make what seem like obvious mistakes, they seem to evade the hard questions, and they are very slow to adapt, learn, or correct themselves.
We have to admit to ourselves, too, that no one is immune to bad habits, hypocrisy, and stubbornness. To offset this, we must resist becoming complacent. I am pretty allergic to complacency, and I believe this is the number one reason I have been successful in my career. Let me unpack that statement a bit and relate where I started and how I got to where I am today.
Humble, deep roots
I come from a working class lineage, but also from an independent thinking family. I had good models for developing self-respect, a healthy skepticism, curiosity, and a desire to confront and work through problems. My paternal lineage is charismatic, optimistic, and proactive. My maternal lineage is introspective, independent, and creative. This heritage has benefitted my cousins as well, several of whom have become very well-established: one is a branch manager for a large logistics company, one is an air force pilot, one is an engineer for a major industrial concern, one is a brilliant software developer, and several are medical doctors.
As for me, I was a dreamer from an early age. I visited my imaginary world from as early as I can remember. The life of the mind has always been very important to me, and I could read the alphabet before I turned two years old. But I was no egghead – during school I also had plenty else to keep me busy. I had some success in sports, maintained good grades, was involved in music performance, visual art and design, and youth organizations.
I was a dreamer from an early age… and I could read the alphabet before I turned two years old.
My most formative early experiences were choosing what music to listen to, what art to love, what films to watch, and what sports heroes to follow. By the age of 15, I was finding pop culture to be largely hollow, and I sought better fare. Since we had very little expendable income, I couldn’t do what my friends did – I couldn’t easily consume culture, so I had to create it instead. It was then that I began to try and create my own visual landscape to bring what was in my imagination to life.
Choosing art and design
The possibility of creating worlds from my imagination really developed in eighth grade, when I took my first formal instruction in drawing. The simple rule “draw exactly what you see” was, for me, a watershed event. I spent the next three years honing my craft, and I won several awards and received a few commissions drawing portraits, creating designs for events and the new logo for our HS football team. It was extremely gratifying to see my logo design all over town, on the helmets during the season. Many of the players proudly displayed the helmet decals on their car windows after the season.
When I entered college, I was craving more instruction in the craft of design. I had 80% of my tuition covered by grants, scholarships, and loans, and, as I had taken CLEP exams to leapfrog over all four of the available gen-ed requirements, I started college as a sophomore. I was able to dive right in to design classes. It looked like I was going to be a shining star in the department.
Unfortunately, by my sophomore year, I was deeply dissatisfied. I thought I had already exhausted what my small school could offer me. Thankfully, I befriended several upperclassmen who started to really show me the ropes of becoming a professional designer.
We spent evenings in the design studio or in the dorms, doing freelance work, watching foreign and arthouse films, listening to hard bop and prog rock, and generally nerding out over the details that our professors and the other students were skipping over. It was at this point that I realized that if I stayed complacent, “behaved myself,” took the classes that were offered, and followed the conventional advice, I would wind up developing bad habits. I would risk becoming a mediocrity.
If I stayed complacent, I would wind up developing bad habits. I would risk becoming a mediocrity.
I got a part time job at a design shop, I changed schools, I tried to meet more people, go to some live music shows, go to art openings, and in general, spend more time in Chicago – I craved understanding what it might be like to swim in a bigger pond. I had to find ways to get in front of professors who could show me the way.
Hard knocks
I did. I applied and was accepted into the exclusive School of the Art Institute of Chicago. However, I could not pay the tuition. So, I took the next best thing and had an incredible few months learning from some seriously talented professors, several of whom had studied there. However, I soon realized that more school would be the expensive way to learn my trade, and probably would put me in debt for decades. Though this would have been fun, neither going to grad school nor being an academic tourist were in the cards. I needed to just complete my degree and get into the workforce. I had been on track to graduate a semester early before I transferred away, so when I transferred back, I was still able to graduate within the four years.
Basically, for the next few years, I slowly but surely took on better design and marketing gigs, first on the west coast, and then in New York. At first, I did everything that came my way, networked like crazy, and constantly experimented and taught myself new skills. After a couple of stints dabbling in other industries, I buckled down and committed myself to becoming a world-class designer.
Coming into my own
I worked with several freelance agencies and found that my work ethic and focus made me valuable. I worked at Weber Shandwick doing $500K+ RFP presentations. I did multi-million dollar real estate advertising in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal with Rode Advertising and some cool non-profit work for a United Nations affiliate. I had interviews with industry-leading companies in New York and full time offers, but I kept moving. I wanted more household name clients.
By the time I arrived in the Detroit market, I had established myself as a top creative talent, and I had entertained leads at major agencies in both New York and Chicago. But within a week of landing a full time job with Digitas near Detroit, I realized that it was time, yet again, to make a change.
From Art Director to User Experience Designer
The website project I came into had a big problem. My new employer was the creative agency of record for two major automotive brands, so I had expected the work to be campaigns, photo shoots and pitch work. But in the interview, I was asked if I new Sketch. I realized right away that this was going to be very website focused. I did have some web design and development experience, but after the first week, it was clear that a UX problem solver was needed, and this would be my ticket to ride for years to come.
When I started, the agency was primarily traditional creative. As a result, they did not have enough people with the skills to govern the work stream for the website. They were blindly taking instruction from a competing agency who was the digital agency of record, tasked with website authoring. The results were becoming a mess – lots of broken pages and a lot of content that needed to be refactored to align with the new design system. My supervisor was already committed 100% to one of our brands, and they needed someone else to manage the other brand.
A UX problem solver was needed, and this would be my ticket to ride for years to come…
I took one look at our process and realized that, in order to have our partner agency build the pages correctly, flat design comps were not enough. A traditional “art director” was not going to be able to hold his own by designing a static layout and just throwing it over the wall. The results would never match what we designed. Instead, we needed to do responsive designs, pixel-perfect, then index and correctly name every instance in the style guide for every existing component, and essentially write the CSS every time anything diverged or any new configuration was required.
Necessity is the mother of Beast Mode
What emerged was an even bigger remit than I initially thought. Our agency had a seat at the table when design system decisions were being made. My manager couldn’t keep tabs on every detail by himself, so I also started attending weekly meetings to ensure that the infrastructure our partner agency was building would still work for our designs. Also, any time new components and pages were being built, we had hours-long sessions working hand-in-hand with the partner agency, inspecting their authoring work. It required a lot of HTML and CSS, and, at times, it was intense.
During the first few meetings with the other agency, if we didn’t have an answer, we had to stall. We didn’t ever want to get steamrolled by the competing agency, especially in front of clients. Besides, I am naturally competitive. So I made sure to come prepared. I picked up every book on UX and read every blog and website I could find, searching for solutions whenever any problem arose. I always wanted to have an answer ready.
This preparedness really paid off. Eventually, I became so proficient that I was coding examples of the CSS and HTML ahead of the developers. I had an intimate knowledge of the competing agency’s style guide that rivaled any of their own staff. And I began to advocate for, and build live prototypes of entire sections of the website to demonstrate new functionality without having to rely on the competing agency to demo the build. We were no longer on the road to losing scope, we were gaining it.
After a few months of going far beyond art direction and doing UX, I had my role officially changed, from Art Director to UX Designer.
Still a designer, but now: half robot
These days, I don’t do as much traditional design. While it is bittersweet, it is, professionally speaking, a good thing if you want to stay relevant and competitive. Traditional design is a shrinking field. I have personally been affected by the growth of stock image websites, artificial intelligence assisted design, globalization, and market saturation. If I had been complacent at those crossroads in my career, I would have had to scramble to find work for a lot less pay. Also, I would not have discovered an entire other side of my skill set.
The idea of design has become for me less about aesthetics and “decoration” and more about organization with intent. User experience design is all about preserving your intent and designing so that people, assisted by technology, can achieve their goals, which, in turn, helps you and your clients achieve yours.
Design, for me… is about organization with intent.
I often tell junior UX designers that the product is not the focus. The users of the product are the focus. Pretty things are meaningless if they don’t work well. We can’t only speak in terms of copy, images, fonts and colors. We must also speak the language of the devices people use to interact with those elements. We have to go beyond graphic design and learn how the technology shapes how we reach our audience. Our job is to do the hard thinking to make the interactions seem effortless. It is only then that we can impress, influence, and inspire.
The road less traveled
I can hear what you’re thinking:
That’s nice, Zachary. But how, HOW do I dive into UX myself? I want to be prepared for that UX role, too.
You can start today. I have distilled the methods, resources, and insights from over 15 years of creating websites into a book. Building Better Sites is the best way you can download my UX brain.
Sure, I’ve read Don Norman. But I’ve also read Aristotle, Tim Berners-Lee, Max Wertheimer, Daniel Kahneman, and Dave Barry. It took a while, but it was worth it.
I liked some of their ideas so much that I applied them to surviving the travails of tangled website design projects and dealing with unruly team members. I’ve taken the research work out of it for you, and believe me, that’s worth the cover price by itself. If you practice what I describe in detail, chances are, in 10,000 hours, I’ll be eating your dust in the UX marketplace. Get your copy here.