I cannot count the number of jobs I’ve been turned down for because the hiring manager was looking for someone with “more visual design chops.” It’s infuriating and I want to unpack why.

1. Visual Design is Only Part of the Job

I remember my first UX job and assignment very clearly. It was in early 2015 at an online ticketing company. I was tasked with adding a privacy setting so users could choose whether or not to share their contact information with venues. I remember looking at the settings page.

It was hideous. There was a horizontal menu that was maroon red with options literally overflowing across it and wrapping onto a second line. Under that, there was a rectangle that was the color of masking tape. On that rectangle, the text was Arial font… jet black #000. There was no clear typographical hierarchy or grid of any sort. There was an inconsistent and improper use of simple form controls. Even when I looked at the code, it was a jumbled mess of CSS and HTML. It had the marks of an engineer who dreaded having to design and build a frontend page, rushing to get back to work on the APIs. I remember thinking, “I could do this whole thing so much better.”

…and so I did. I presented this to my manager:

I completely redid the settings pages based on what I thought was good visual design. I’m not saying I’m proud of this visual design today. In fact I’d improve this 100 different ways today, so I’m happy to see my progress. However, this was me trying my best at my first product design gig, in 2015. Oh, and I was the only designer there.

I showed that expecting to be crowned as some newly exalted designer at my company. I thought I was about to blow their minds. Instead, I got chewed out. Frankly, I deserved to be chewed out.

My job was to add one thing to an existing settings page. I came back with a complete redesign of the settings pages.

My Manager: “What the hell? This is different than all of the other settings pages…”

Me: “I was thinking we could redo all of the other settings pages too. Apply this same visual treatment to all of them.”

“…”

“…well?”

“We have one engineer working on this and it needs to be added by the end of next week. Do you even know how to implement these custom form controls across browsers? Just go add the new section and make it look like the rest of the page.”

So, I got hit by the reality of product design very hard.

Yes, the page I was working on was visually awful. However, I do not have the capacity nor the responsibility to change every bad visual design I see or inherit. This is not the job.

What’s worse, and even more clear to me five years later, is that there’s so much more I should have considered as a product designer than visual design on that particular assignment. What are the ethical tradeoffs? Certainly this feature is more in the interest of venues than users. Do users ever even want this? Why does this need to be done next week? Should it be on by default? What exactly is being shared to venues and what exactly are the venues doing with that data? How can users trust that their contact info is safe with venues? What are the consequences of violating that trust? What if users stop buying tickets through us because we violated privacy without their knowing?

Even if I was allowed to redesign the settings, is it really just visual design that makes that page a bad experience? Is the information architecture properly considered? Had my company considered some of the scenarios where a user might find themselves on these pages? Is it easy to navigate to and from? Is the copy clear and concise and consistent with our brand? Are the form controls consistent and recognizable across pages? Is the page responsive? Is there error handling or other conditional things to consider across these settings pages? Is there the right level of visual feedback so users know a change was successfully applied? Do we have analytics on this page, and are users interacting with it how we expect? Have we ever even run a usability test on this page? What will users do if they can’t find the setting they want? Can we help them get in touch with customer support when they need it? For that matter, can we give them the right settings controls so they don’t have to call support so often? Should every user get the same settings page, or should we customize it based on the persona that’s landing on it? ALL of these are considerations a good product designer should be making when working on a settings page like this.