 How does someone know they're not good or how does someone know that they're good? So in order to be good at something you need to practice that skill But in order to judge whether you are good at something you just kind of need experience So if you work in software development for a long time and you don't exercise your design skills You can still Understand that you are bad at it over time like you get a more and more sense of just how bad you are Whereas if you actually exercise those skills, you will you'll get even more experience and you will see how Bad you are compared to your idea of perfection What do you think stops developers from really wanting because I mean this is a common thing Why don't you do design? I'm terrible at design or what like when we do design sprints It's like you tell people that at one point You have to sketch and everyone panics. I can't draw but it's like you can if you try a little bit I think that is the the gap between skill and experience if you work in software development you will Come to understand what a good design looks like just by working with designers who are good You will see designs that work see designs that don't work You'll get a good feel for what works and then if you try that Yourself it won't be as good you'll know from your experience that your that your design is not is not good enough and Or at least feel that it isn't good enough and that will put you off from trying the future. There's no point I can't design. You know, I shouldn't I shouldn't even bother so the The thing that a developer needs to do if they want to be if To be able to do the design at the same time is Just practice just do it do it even though you know that it's bad Because over time you will get good Yeah, and you might still think you're bad, but that's fine You're in the practice of doing it even though you think you're bad, but at some point in your sort of development career I mean, I don't know had you feel you're a good designer bad design Do you have a sort of view on yourself? I feel like I'm a really bad designer And I think that's because I have a lot of experience and I have never personally really taken that leap in Progressing my skills or at least on certain kinds of design So like laying out a web page. I like I know how to Mechanically make the web page look like a design that I've been given, but I couldn't produce that design like I I I don't have that visual Imagination, but I know that that's because I haven't exercised that skill and places where I have exercised the skill in things more like user interaction Those places I feel like I do a better job, you know, I I know I'm not an expert, but I also know that I'm better than Not being done by anyone if you know, yeah Yeah, I mean again It's I suppose the thing which still frustrates me is that you're a developer you've done development stuff for quite a long time You know the process of learning It's like once you've learned something you realize that the kind of mysticism and magic that takes to being good At something It's just time right and time and effort. So as a as a developer like I don't buy that I'm not creative like writing software is a creative process It just uses very different techniques to visual design or user interface developed design so It's not the creativity that I feel that I like it's just that time served Doing the designs seeing what was wrong and going back and doing it like, you know, just practice practice practice. So I mean, yeah I do agree that Creativity like there's all creative encoding, but it's like what is that thing that I? Stop someone from wanting to explore So there are several reasons why I might or might not want to go on to be the designer Or one is just like practicality if you have a designer that you can lean on, you know Why not? I mean that that is a that is a perfectly valid choice Say, you know, I don't have the skills and rather than spending time getting those skills I can just take someone who does have those skills and we can build a symbiotic relationship I don't think that's necessarily good long-term in your career. You should have some design skills You should have at least an understanding of what the designer is doing. You should do some stuff I also know that I my time is limited and I could spend the time honing my craft as a developer or as a designer and For a lot of people The choice will be just to stick with what you know. It's it's not even about like natural ability I think it's purely about comfort zone. So, yeah, I I know that I will get better as a designer if I try and For me, it's just been that I've never particularly had the impetus to try at least on visual design Though more recently I have been actually trying to be a better designer in Less visual things like the VR stuff you've been working on is more interaction design exactly so working with web VR I have to place things in a scene so that they Will make sense to the viewer when things could be out of your line of sight You need you need to draw people's attention to the correct things You need to make things sure that things it's obvious how to interact with things You need to design your experience understanding the limitations of Like the hardware and things you don't have someone spinning around too fast You don't want to have someone moving too much if the if the headset isn't going to record the movement Because there's a lot of things that will just make the the user feel ill So you have you have design constraints as well as technical constraints and you have to work to those I guess the trick is just to plow on when you asked when you're bad and It's easier at the beginning of your career because you don't understand that you are bad And also you've got the so much patience in the beginning and at the end you think well There's more to this stuff You have a few bad habits as well Yeah, and I guess you also need the the the feeling of safety to put yourself out there with something that Um, you're pretty sure isn't going to be good But to be able to put that design out to your team And say look here's what I came up with and we can work on it in the future Without feeling like you're going to be mocked or ridiculed by your teammates. Yeah. Um, so just having a supportive team Can help Because I think so much of design is so much it's problem solving, right? So So many people Forget that when they think of design they think of the finished product But there's so many different stages of how you got to that finished product