Whether it's a hard or soft skill, and whether you're a designer or someone who works with designers, what do you think is the most underrated skill or quality a product designer can bring to the table?
Designing for the shitty use cases
Integrated design. Most designers don't think about how their product is used with other products or actually test it rigorously.
Getting buy-in and having your actual design built not a design by committee compromise instead
Having the audacity to implement that lower hanging useful thing that everyone else thought was too obvious or simple.
Reading between the proverbial lines. To design with the intention of responding to people’s unstated motivations. Time and again designers go for the “wow” factor and try to be Apple—gorgeous visuals, “delightful” narratives and show-and-tell bullshit—and miss what users are actually trying to do. This is not a criticism of Apple by the way, I think their move to services is going to pay off and I’m an investor. Most users, like ~100% of them, want things to work quickly and effectively. They want to be confident that whatever they input leads to the expected output. Nobody wants to use your product, they want what it enables them to do. Thus much of the best design is invisible. Yelp does design pretty damn well by the way. I imagine some users are developing a little more “sponsored ad” blindness but you gotta make a buck and overall the app works.
Tbh I'm finding myself using yelp less and less on mobile, but probably more due to accessibility of Google search on Android and the lower latency to get to reviews.
I can believe that. We still typically use Yelp when searching for a place on weekends. Girlfriend used it to find some awesome movers too for our recent move. How they’ll battle Google Maps is gonna be interesting though.
communicating the product experience and pulling engineers' heads out of the golden sand success in a team is not just about SWEs showing off their promo-worthy backend skills and complex designs - the average user matters too, and sometimes a simple or even "dumb" solution is the best