Your Work, Their Perception
People perceive your expertise based on the visual aspects of your work.
When I was job hunting just right after grad school, I had an interviewer commented on one of my design portfolio pieces as being “old school and not pretty”.
By the web design standards of 2019, those mockups were indeed, not very pretty.
Had I received that feedback five years earlier, I might had been more concerned, but I was relatively unfazed upon hearing it. I spent a few seconds to gather my thoughts then proceeded to calmly explain the story and challenges behind that project. (I did get a call back later on, but I have already accepted an offer elsewhere.)
There were a few possible motivations for that comment to come about. Perhaps that the interviewer was more looking for a visual designer, or the project should have been presented differently, or it could be simply be an offhand comment… Well, at this point of my career, I have come to realize that making beautiful visual designs is not the first thing I wanted to be known for. It’s one of the many tools in my kit that I should keep polishing, but it’s not one that I plan nor want to use the most often. I’m simply more interested in other types of work.
That being said, people aren’t going to change — they will always make immediate judgements about my ability based on what they know and what they see.
People perceive your areas of expertise based on the visual aspects of your work.
There are two key lessons to take away from the statement above:
1. You will have to visually communicate your work no matter what skills you have.
The caveat is that, there is always going to be a subset of your audience who isn’t qualified enough to evaluate your resulting work; the more specialized the knowledge that the work encapsulates, the truer this is. They will make an inadequate judgement of your actual skill, which can go either direction — an overestimation or underestimation of your actual level. And in a vast majority of cases, the visual appeal carries the most weight in the formation of opinions.
2. The above is very often true, even if your work shouldn’t be judged on its immediate appeals.
In other words, you would be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t make sure your work is polished and attractive. The client you are trying to get or the executive you are attempting to convince might not be able to tell how good you are at your work, but they can definitely see how good your work looks. That alone could make or break a deal.
(Speaking as a User Experience professional, I know some of you can relate to this: If the person who is in charge doesn’t have sufficient understanding of a discipline, the candidates that they will pick are often the ones who present the most good-looking work, even if those aren’t necessarily the people best suited for the job.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard from qualified and talented peers lament over the fact that they’ve faced rejections for this very reason, despite their specializations lie elsewhere from visual design. They don’t want to be evaluated as a visual designer, but they lose out on many valuable opportunities if their work isn’t appealing enough.)
Did I say there are two lessons? Actually, both of them hint towards a third lesson, which is likely controversial, but also the more important one:
3. You may have control over what decision-makers think you are capable of, or how good they think you are at anything.
Note that I am referring to decision-makers: those who have the power to make calls, but not necessarily equipped to assses your specialty. There are often multiple ones with different levels of influence and leverage. And based on my experience — again, often, but not always — there is generally an inverse relationship between their seniority and their actual ability to accurately assess the skill level of your expertise.
(However, there is one glaring exception, and that is the role that HR staff plays in most professional recruitment processes. I wonder what is the average percentage of qualified candidates who got filtered out early in the application cycle because of some unknowable reasons. Yes, I’m aware there’s also a logistical point of view to this issue, but I just can't help but wonder how many great talents that firms are missing out on.)
To use a simplified example:
A team lead has to pick between two candidates, A & B, based on their final interview presentation. While he or she is more inclined to pick A due to the candidate’s finesse over certain technical details, the lead’s senior recommended B instead, for reasons relating to the attractiveness of the presented materials.
What would you do? Obviously, there’s too much missing info to make a call here, but if I were the lead in question, I would at least have to consider my senior’s stance.
Alternatively, you can also use this knowledge to minimize any agony that life can inflict upon you. For instance, presuming that visual appeal is one known aspect that will be evaluated upon — you could submit a report with terrible looking graphics because it’s meant for a involuntary and bureaucratic project that you don’t want to take part in any further. (I may or may not have applied this particular tactic in the past to evade politically tricky situations.)
Do use it with care, however, as you wouldn’t want to accidentally throw away an important opportunity, or be known as the person that frequently “screw things up.”
Now, I’m sure some of you non-designers might be asking: so, how the heck do I make my work more appealing? Well, that’s a big enough topic that would warrant another full-length article in its own. (Let me put that on my rapidly growing to-write list, and then perhaps never get to actually authoring it.)
For the time being, I recommend these resources, all of which I have studied and found useful:
Presentation Patterns: for crafting and delivering better presentations.
Storytelling with Data: for any visualization and charting activities.
Butterick’s Practical Typography: for any sort of text-heavy materials.
Refactoring UI video series: for applied web user interface design tips.
(Just be warned that these aren’t one of those “5 Simple Ways to Make XYZ Beautiful in 10 minutes” article or video, and do require you to set aside time to patiently learn and practice along. But I guarantee your time spent will be duly rewarded.)
All in all, those three points aren’t a ground-breaking discovery, but I took a long time to fully grasp their importance, particularly in how they can help influence perception in complex professional circumstances. I tend to think that every problem can be a human problem if you find the right vantage point, and the lessons outlined in this article are merely one of the many solutions you can apply to find success your work life.
Good luck presenting.
Many thanks to Alice, Sagana, Yukun, Manhua, and Travis for their feedback on the drafts.