If you decided to embark on a career as a UX designer, I’d hate to be the one to tell you, you will never achieve this goal. That’s because when you’re in UX Design you’re not a designing for the User Experience, you’re designing for what your assumption of what the User Experience will be.

That means to be a great UX Designer you need to be a philosopher first, and approach every project as a critical thinker first and a designer second. When you design something, your purpose is to solve a specific problem. And to be able to truly solve it you need to fully understand it the why it’s a problem in the first place.

This capacity for critical thinking allows our ideas to stand the test of time. Why are Plato and Socrates such revered philosophers 3000 years later? Because the questions they asked and tried to understand still hold true today. By understanding the nature or the principles of a problem you can address the subconscious issues that a user will never even realize they had.

That’s why Elon Musk and companies like Tesla nowadays hire employees based on their first principle thinking over an university degree. This approach aims to understand a subject at its most fundamental and basic principle. By focusing on the root of a problem and the root of the need for a solution you’re able to apply goal oriented creativity and find new solutions.

“If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it,” Albert Einstein said.

This shows us that Einstein wasn’t only a master procrastinator but he understood the need to define the problem fully before implementing any solution.

Henry Ford once said, “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

If you critically analyze Henry Ford’s statement, you’d realize that the problem wasn’t horses, it was the speed of the horse. And by my point, that problem still exists today and thus still have possible solutions.

How can you start today?

The easiest way to start is by following the famous 5 whys approach first implemented by the Toyota motor company. They say ask why five times and you can get to the root of a problem. But I’d go as far as to say ask why five times for each why you answered five times.

Try saying that five times really fast. Don’t ask me why. 🤪

NNGroup has a great article on user need statements and how to define and align the problem you are going to solve. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/user-need-statements/

The Harvard Business Review also dives into this topic and how to tackle such a huge undertaking as identifying the problem and finding a solution.

https://hbr.org/2012/09/are-you-solving-the-right-problem

That’s why great UX Researchers get paid more than great UX product designers. Both trades are extremely difficult, but one of them involves a lot more understanding.

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