I’ve just had a whirlwind of the last 5 months. Where I was working before, got absorbed into Highmark and I came on board at work as a graphic designer for the web. Right after that, we had a reorg, and now, finally, I’m in a place where I’ve gotten my feet wet on a couple of projects and the only real hurdle is jumping through the hoops of bureacracy on a regular if not daily basis.

I’ve also been doing a lot of reading and thinking about usability, standards, documentation, etc. because I’ve kind of been forced to. Not forced to in the villainous, “Do ziss or ze girl vill get it” sense, be forced to in that it’s a necessity. And I’ve come to this conclusion.

As designers and design thinkers, we’re should cry for our users.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what books you’ve read, who you can cite as inspiration, where you went to school, who you know, who your dog knows, what your favorite author is, what color tie you have on today but what’s important to your users or customers. If as a business, you can’t rally around this simple truth at the end of the day, then there is something wrong.

My job as a designer is to have so much empathy for the people I’m designing something for, that I literally could be that person. Or know them well enough to anticipate what their needs are. Really only then, can I measure against that, how successful a design is. Couple this with tried and true best practices, and design work isn’t some grandiose oracle-like, mystical thing; it’s a science.

The only way that there will be a sea change in business, is if designers and design thinkers can start to articulate this empathetic critical thinking and start to explain it’s value. We need to realize that business doesn’t know what it wants, it just knows it wants to know, because “something’s not right”. It’s up to us to let them in behind the curtain, let them see the process, and get them to understand their customers and their customers lives.