Veteran industrial designer Jeff Burger explains how to put your ego aside and let the user tell you what works.
With more than 36 years of industrial design experience, Jeff Burger deserves a big ego. Yet it’s those same decades of experience that have taught him to avoid one.
Humility, Burger believes, is an essential characteristic of good designers. He’s spent much of his career at Ohio-based Priority Designs, a design firm that specializes in wearable technology. Wearables, from the simplest protective equipment to the most sensor-rich medical devices, require an especially humble approach to design.
“Remove yourself from your own preconceived notions, your own bias, and walk a mile in the shoes of the people that you’re designing for to understand what they’re feeling,” Burger said to Engineering.com.
It may sound like an easy lesson, but it’s also easily forgotten. Don’t make that mistake. To be a better designer, a better colleague, and a better business partner, you have to be humble. Here are some tips on the importance of humility from one of the best (our words, not Burger’s).
Walking in your user’s shoes
If you’re designing a product to be used by a human, you must keep the human in mind. Nowhere is this more true than in wearable design. A human will not merely interact with your product, they’ll maintain intimate contact with it—sometimes permanently. They may depend on it to save their limbs or life. It must be comfortable, durable and even fashionable. Every person is unique, so it must suit a wide range of body shapes and sizes.
Take, for example, protective eyewear. Burger described a project in which Priority Designs was contracted to develop safety glasses that would connect to a hard hat. This relatively simple idea required careful consideration of all possible users.
“How do you create this injection-molded plastic frame with these lenses that would be comfortable for people with different bridge, nose sizes? Different eye center-to-center distances?” Burger said. And that’s just the fit. “At the end of the day it needs to look cool, because if people think they look dorky, they’re going to be less apt to wear it.”
In this example, it probably seems all-too-obvious to consider the glasses-wearer during design. But as the complexity of a design increases, other design considerations take up increasing bandwidth. Material selection, manufacturing efficiency, budget constraints, marketability, electronic design and component selection, strict certification requirements—the “table stakes” of design, as Burger put it.
“The person that’s wearing that product is sometimes the last person that you’re thinking about,” he said. “I know that sounds sort of counterintuitive and ridiculous, but it really is.”
Remind yourself to keep the human in mind.
Specific and surprising
The best way to keep the human in mind is to talk to them. Whenever their budget allows, Burger and his colleagues will find target users and interview them about how they use a particular device. It’s an excellent way to empathize with your user, especially when designing medical wearables.
Burger recalled one such visit with an older woman who’d been a long-time user of an intimate medical product.
“After we established rapport, she was telling us day-to-day the different experiences that she had,” Burger said. “One time, this particular product failed and it was really emotionally devastating to her. And when she described it to us, it was really kind of shocking.”
If it was shocking, it was also enlightening. That conversation—and others like it—gave Burger’s team concrete ideas for how to improve the product, and in turn, the lives of its users.
“Now we have a very specific person that we’re designing for as opposed to some sort of esoteric theoretical person,” Burger said.
Talking to users shouldn’t end at the beginning of the design process. Burger also recommends bringing design prototypes to those same target users and seeing their response. This is where even experienced designers can easily be humbled. That one special feature you thought they’d love? They may not even notice it. But they’ll sure notice the flaws.
“As a designer, a product development person, you have to be able to be humble enough to know that people are always going to surprise you,” Burger said. “You have to be open to receiving feedback and being able to share that in a transparent way with the client.”
Don’t neglect that last part. Clients may have different ideas than end users, and you must extend your empathy to them as well.
Empathy in all directions
Most designers have to report to a boss who may not share their expertise. Priority Designs takes on projects from a variety of clients, and ultimately it’s the client—not the end user—who signs off on the design.
What do you do when your client disagrees with your design?
“You have to be mindful, as much as you might not like it, that the client has their own set of internal motivations, drives, requirements, necessities that they need to adhere to. As the designer, I have to respectfully challenge that,” Burger said.
The success of such a challenge will vary from client to client. Many are fixated on cost reduction, but a convincing argument in favor of function, beauty or brand could sway them to spend for a stronger design. Burger recalled persuading one client that a 3D knitted version of their wearable was a better choice than the traditional cut-and-sew method, being more comfortable and fashionable despite having a higher cost.
The argument worked because it was the right choice for the product overall. Designers must take this holistic view throughout the process, balancing the needs of the users and clients alike. Trying on both pairs of shoes.
“It behooves us as consultants, as designers, to be able to think and honor both ends of the product development continuum,” Burger said.
This empathy requires humility—but don’t let your humility turn into humiliation. You’re the design expert. If a client is simply seeking validation of their own opinion, it’s not your ego that’s the problem. Watch out for these clients and avoid them if you can.
Your colleagues, too, deserve empathy. They’ll typically encompass different backgrounds, perspectives and levels of experience. Wherever you’re at in your career, put yourself in your colleagues’ shoes to both help them and learn from them.
Remember, no designer is perfect—and even if they were, they would be perfectly humble.
