Reflective Essay: Design Leadership
- Melanie Bauer
- Jan 7
- 7 min read
From one aspiring UX designer to another: read Jon Yablonski’s book
Professionally up until this point my career has been in customer service and the legal field, which makes my personal experience with design leaders relatively minimal. So when given the prompt of reflecting on an admirable design leader, I started looking into design leaders without many preconceived ideas or biases towards any individual. I researched a handful whose careers intrigued me, and I gravitated towards Jon Yablonski’s websites and books. He presents the material in simplified terms with corresponding visuals, and also offers in-depth explanations of the concepts. He publishes articles discussing his approach to design team leadership, in which he emphasizes the importance of constructive feedback and encouraging autonomy within his team. Having trained colleagues and juniors in my career, I appreciate that different people respond better to different approaches and thoughtful leadership tends to bring out the best in people and promote a better workplace. I aspire to practice a leadership style like Jon Yablonski, in which I adapt to the learners’ needs and provide respectful and productive guidance in order to achieve success for the individual and the team.
About Jon Yablonski
I was led to Yablonski’s work through Junhan Sim’s article 7 Design Leaders and Advocators Worth Following, in which Sim describes Yablonski’s work as “provid[ing] tremendous educational value and insights into design, beyond what [a] human sees on the surface, and also [serves] as a reminder we are designing for the betterment of [the] human being.” When describing Yablonski’s first book, Andrés Zapata in the article Laws of UX, Second Edition — an Interview with Jon Yablonski says “its penetrating simplicity blew me away. The book connected classic psychology concepts with how we should design in a way that made a lot of sense.” After reading the second edition of Yablonski’s book Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services and coming through his websites and online publications, I’m inclined to agree with these sentiments about his work; but how does writing a great textbook make someone a good design leader?
Jaakko Tammela says in the article Why are we talking so much about design leadership?: “For me, Design Leadership is more about how to encourage and engage others to create something meaningful, impactful, and new than just a response to the massive (and growing) number of designers and design teams inside organizations.” In that case, I would consider educators very much leaders, and design leaders to need to be educators. After all, good design guides the user to their intended path and all leaders should strive to do the same. Additionally, utilizing psychology in both design and education is tremendously beneficial for the users and students. Yablonski uses his background in art along with an understanding of psychology to encourage intentional designs.
Yablonski’s leadership style
Yablonski published two articles on providing design feedback: Effective Design Feedback and Keeping It Constructive, in which he emphasizes common feedback techniques, like the “sandwich method” in which you layer critical feedback with positive feedback, and then puts it in context for a design leader. Other techniques he includes are “when in doubt, take it out” highlighting the importance of reduction and simplicity, and “ask[ing] questions” to allow the designer to come up with his or her own solution. His insights showcase his experience as both a designer and a leader, and the logic behind his leadership style.
Yablonski’s book, Laws of UX, explains a set of UX rules (or “laws”), providing psychology-based analysis, background context, examples with images, simplified summarizations, and techniques to improve designs based on these laws. He’s careful to practice what he preaches, as you can tell he keeps these rules in mind while designing the book itself. He practices “Miller’s Law” by chunking the different information, separating with clear headers. He provides both in-depth explanations in addition to simplified ones to offer readers multiple methods to absorb the information. At the end of the book, he provides tips on how to encourage design teams to utilize these laws; he also sells posters for the workplace with chapter designs and law names to remind designers to utilize them.
Indeed, Yablonski is a qualified and reputable design leader, advocate, and writer. In addition to his many free resources online and his textbooks, he’s spoken at over 50 events and helps organize an annual design conference called Interaction Design Detroit. In his article Advice for Aspiring Designers, he attempts to answer the questions many new designers face about getting into UX, and talks about his background and how he got into it. His message is encouraging, frank, and honest, explaining the amount of passion and versatility required to get into the field. I will take his advice to heart as I attempt to venture into the field myself, and potentially become a design leader myself someday.
My leadership experience so far…
In several roles over the course of my career, I have trained colleagues. I have never been hired to be a full time trainer, I have simply been good at my job and asked to train newcomers. At least, that’s how my training experience started. I quickly learned how much I enjoyed training, and wanted to do it more. I created visual guides, slideshows, job aids, etc. I also adapted my training style to each person I trained, and asked for feedback on my training style to make adjustments to better suit their needs. Some people liked step-by-step bullet point instructions, so I created those. Some people preferred charts and having the concepts visualized into designs, so I worked with them to create those. Some people needed handholding through the material while others preferred to be left alone to study. The main thing I learned as a trainer was that there was no one-size-fits-all approach to training that would work for everyone. I enjoyed adjusting my own style to meet their needs because their success is my success! This is the type of leader I aspire to be; flexible and adaptable for my teams’ needs.
In my current role, I am in charge of a robust project to update and re-design the procedural guides for my team. This project is mostly completed, as I have already re-designed the guides, created new ones for topics not covered, and kept them up-to-date. My ongoing responsibility is to make adjustments as teammates request them and add updates as procedural changes come down from leadership. The guides were given to me in 2024, un-updated since 2017, so these documents were untouched for 7 years. Since there were a lot of topics to cover, I had to break down the topics and organize them in a way that made sense. My first task for each topic was to collect the updated procedures by sifting through emails, clarifying with management, discussing with subject matter experts, and asking my teammates to describe any frustrations they have had with the current guides; I was also able to eliminate the outdated information this way. I then added how-to step-by-step guides, thesaurus sections, and simplified charts to add plenty of context and clarification, as well as different ways to absorb the material. I was then able to actually design the guides as easily navigable and interconnected resources, with clear headings and organization. Finally, I brought the guides to my team to ask for feedback. For some of the sections, particularly ones I was unsure about, I offered different versions for them to decide between. This resulted in many robust discussions to say the least! There were many different opinions on how the information should be presented and what items were necessary. I also had to tackle what to do when there were multiple ways to do something, and differing opinions on which way was the correct way. However, after much discussion with the team and management, we were able to finalize the items and design (I am proud to say I was able to include the vast majority of the suggestions into the guides). This project taught me patience, compromise, and resilience - but also that I actually really enjoy leading projects! I appreciated peoples’ feedback and I enjoyed trying to find solutions to make everyone happy. To this day, I am excited when I get a suggestion from a teammate because that means they’re also thinking of ways to improve our guides; it shows me that the project was successful not only in terms of accomplishing the task at hand, but also that it allowed the team to think outside the box and realize the potential the project could have.
My aspirations
I hope to be as good of a leader as some of the ones I have been led by; offering flexibility and honesty while still achieving the necessary goals put before me. That being said, I have encountered my fair share of leaders and have yet to find a perfect one (if that even exists). I have had micro-managers who delay work and over-criticize. I have had leaders who simply don’t care and don’t offer any assistance. I have had leaders that are too much of people-pleasers and don’t offer enough pushback. I hope to find myself in the middle, allowing my team to have autonomy and creativity, while also keeping the project on-schedule, within budget, and meeting the project requirements. I intend to keep the user at the forefront of the minds of the team, and offer realistic expectations to the stakeholders. I hope my current and previous experiences with leadership, both as a teammate and a leader, continue to influence my decisions and make me aware of the impact I can have on teams and projects If I ever do become a design leader, I’m sure I will read and re-read all of Jon Yablonski’s work to make sure I’m the best design leader I can be.
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