One of my favourite sessions from Config 2024 was the one between Dylan Field and Jesper Kouthoofd (CEO, Teenage Engineering). I watched it online. Jesper talks about how he asked a young designer once to design a musical keyboard and called out that one needs to know how to play the instrument before designing it. The young designer replied saying he didn't have time for that.

I've observed designers obsessing over feature builds than actually spending obnoxious amount of time to try the product, service or whatever they're finally building for the customers to use. This makes them obsess over designs, fonts, notion templates, new tools, making many versions of the features. Years go by and they don't realise that they've now become feature designers. Features that are eventually either remixes or will be remixed.

They forget to build strong user opinions. How exactly is a user going to discover that feature, how are they going to perceive it, will they interact with it or not, will they understand it or not, and most importantly… will they find it simple to use or not.

In 2012, when I was working as a designer at Fab.com, we'd have some monthly allowance to try our own website/apps to buy something as a user. We'd use that to constantly find friction points, errors, improvements and such. That one job taught me so much that till date I dogfood almost everything I build.

How can you possibly design anything without initially becoming obsessed with it? Even traffic signs, for example, require an investigation of what, where, and why. I imagine that the efficacy of a design based on an obsessive investigation will far surpass that of a design based on a less thorough approach…
— Taku Satoh, Just Enough Design

Most learn a bit or two and feel they're user-centric. To become obsessed, you'd need to try things yourself, and go way beyond your day-to-day expectations to observe the tiniest of the friction points and come back to fix them.

If you're a researcher, obsess about how you use your products and how others do it instead of obsessing over research methods, personas, and number of users you interviewed. If you're a content designer, obsess over what & how people would read and consume your designs than what you are capable of designing. If you're a product designer, obsess over how someone goes through each offering of your product than to build a feature capability that can solve 20 other things.

Don't become a tool know-how designer. Anyone who has access to YouTube can become that. Become obsessed to become the designer you claimed in your resume.