The best feedback I ever got as a designer
How one piece of blunt feedback shifted my focus from polished visuals to designing with empathy and impact.
Feedback that changed my perspective
One of the most formative pieces of feedback I’ve ever received came early in my design career. I had just presented an onboarding flow I was particularly proud of. The screens were polished, the interactions smooth, and I thought the story held together.
After I finished, a senior designer leaned back, paused for a moment, and said:
“You’re designing for yourself, not for the people who will actually use this.”
It was a short sentence, but it landed hard. In that moment I realized that my design, however elegant, was based on my own assumptions rather than evidence from real users.
The power of reframing
That moment redefined how I thought about design. With a background in graphic design, my instincts led me to obsess over balance, hierarchy, and visual polish. What I needed was a shift toward understanding behavior and context.
This critique became a mindset shift: design is not self-expression, it’s service.
How it changed my practice
Over the years, I’ve seen how that one piece of advice has shaped my approach:
Lead with curiosity. My graphic design roots taught me how to shape things beautifully, but research taught me how to make them meaningful. Now I start by listening: user interviews, usability studies, or even quick feedback sessions, to ground my work in real perspectives.
Share early, not just polished. In graphic design, you’re often expected to present finished pieces. In product design, I learned the value of sharing half-baked sketches and rough flows. Critique in those early stages can be uncomfortable, but it’s where the biggest insights emerge.
Design for what matters. A beautiful interface may impress, but real success comes when people feel supported, capable, and confident in what they’re doing. For me, the question is always: did this design make life easier, clearer, or more rewarding for the user?
Why it matters for design leaders
Design leaders aren’t just custodians of good craft as they’re responsible for creating conditions where teams design with empathy, evidence, and impact. My own journey from graphic design to UX showed me how easy it is to get caught in surface-level polish. The best leaders help others look deeper, beyond the pixels, and ask: does this actually make life better for the person on the other side?
A note of gratitude
I’m grateful for that moment because it taught me something bigger than how to fix a flow. It taught me to design with empathy and evidence at the core. It’s a mindset I carry into every project: we are not the users.
That single piece of feedback didn’t just make my design better, it made me a better designer.