Learning the Floor
A design mistake at a flooring retailer led to an unexpected lesson: sometimes the best training isn't a manual, it's proximity to the people who use what you make.
When I started designing for Flooring Liquidators, I didn't know anything about flooring. I had an office in the back of the store, which suited me fine. I could focus, get work done, and not think too much about the product itself.
About six months in, the owner, also named Steve, asked me to design something. I put real effort into it. It looked good. But the information was wrong, because I didn't actually understand what I was designing about.
His fix wasn't a training session or a manual. He moved my desk to the front counter.
I hated it at first. No privacy, no quiet, just customers asking questions and sales staff answering them, all day, every day. But I started absorbing things I never would have learned in the back office. What customers actually worried about. What questions came up again and again. The words salespeople used to explain a product, and the words that made customers' eyes glaze over.
I wasn't being trained. I was just listening. But it worked better than training would have.
Years later, that's still how I think about design work. You can't design something well if you're sitting apart from the people who use it. Proximity teaches things that research doesn't.