The Benefits of Building Emotional Intelligence as a Web Designer

You know about book smarts and street smarts. But what about emotional intelligence? Let’s examine this other type of “smarts” and how it can be especially beneficial for web designers to have.

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to one’s ability to understand and manage emotions—not just their own, but those of the people around them.

A high emotional intelligence can be incredibly beneficial for web designers. For starters, honing your EI can help you work more effectively with others. Also, it can enable you to create more effective digital user experiences.

In this post, I’m going to share some tips on how designers can improve their work relationships with coworkers, clients and collaborators through emotional intelligence. I’ve also included info on how to use this skill to create more emotionally intelligent designs.

What Does Emotional Intelligence Look Like?

There are two sides to emotional intelligence. First, let’s look at what emotional intelligence looks like when we turn it inward:

Next, let’s look at emotional intelligence turned outward:

Improving Your Work Relationships with Emotional Intelligence

Here are some ways in which you might benefit from utilizing emotional intelligence in the workplace:

• Resolve conflicts speedily and equitably
• Reduce your own stress and prevent burnout
• Contribute to a healthy, supportive work environment
• Improve productivity and collaboration with coworkers
• Improve the client’s experience and build trust and loyalty in the process
• Develop a positive relationship with superiors and pave the way for greater responsibility and job opportunities

Here are some ways you can use emotional intelligence to improve your relationships at work.

Hit the Pause Button Before Reacting

Something happens that makes you want to react.

A client says they don’t like your designs for the second time without giving any constructive feedback. You get scheduled for a third meeting today despite your manager knowing you’re under a time crunch. The account manager didn’t give you all the details about a prospect and so you misspoke during the initial call.

Your body and mind may be screaming at you to react. You feel stuck.

If you react emotionally and right away, there could be negative consequences. But if you don’t do anything about it, you could be stuck with your emotions running high with nowhere for them to go.

To navigate something like this, you need to be able to pause and reflect on the situation objectively. This will give you a chance to slow down your emotions, consider what led to the situation from the other person’s point of view, and then come up with a logical and grounded resolution.

This also can be a valuable learning opportunity.

We all receive criticism at some point in our design careers. We all make mistakes, too. In some cases, our egos want to lash out or reject any responsibility for the situation.

With emotional intelligence, we teach our inner ego not to feel personally attacked or demoralized. Instead, we accept the role we played in the situation and calmly navigate it with the person who has confronted us.

Talk Things Out

I think one of the biggest problems that came about as a result of virtual work is the growing disconnection we feel from others. It’s all too easy to receive an email or request and to misinterpret its intent.

This can lead to:

• Guessing or assuming what the person meant, and then running with your own mistaken conclusions
• Allowing a (possibly perceived) negative experience to fester and then it turning into something bigger than it needed to be
• Feeling frustrated that someone isn’t getting what you’re saying, leaving you to feel as if you have to just do it yourself

In reality, a five-minute phone or Zoom call could have avoided all of this.

While I’m partially laying the blame at the foot of digital communication, poor communication skills in general can create these problems as well.

So, it’s not just important that you’re able to talk things out with others. You need to be able to listen and really hear what they’re saying. This is where social awareness comes into play.

For example, let’s say a junior designer was just hired at your agency. You’ve given them a bunch of tasks to do. You ask them, “Are you good with all this?” And their answer is …

“Yes? Yes. I think so.”

You heard the word “yes,” so that must mean they’re good. Now onto the pile of work waiting for you.

Is that really what they were saying though? While we expect everyone to be responsible for the tasks they assume, this new hire may have just been too nervous to say “no.” Their first “yes” sounded more like a question than an affirmative. And perhaps their body language suggested they were feeling anxious.

So, be careful not to accept certain buzzwords as the truth. Listen and then talk it out if you feel as though there’s a misunderstanding or misalignment between you and someone else.

Be Honest with Yourself and Others

Honesty is a big thing in emotional intelligence. You can see in the example above how dishonesty (no matter how innocent it may seem) can create a lot of problems for a web designer or their team.

When working in collaborative environments—with coworkers or with clients—honesty is critical. And it starts with yourself.

Rather than allowing your ego, fear or other emotions to make decisions for you, have an honest conversation with yourself first.

Let’s say your boss is really pleased with the job you’ve been doing as a senior web designer. They would like you to move into a creative director role by year’s end. The job comes with much longer hours. You’ll also have to complete a few courses between now and then with certifying exams.

You’re excited about the promotion and the increase in pay. In the moment, you want to accept the job, agree to whatever they want and immediately share the news with your partner.

Instead, you ask them for 48 hours to think about it. It’s not that you’re not thrilled about the opportunity, but there are some things to think through.

For starters, can you manage to commit more hours a week? Your partner is already stressed about how much time you work. Plus, the two of you were talking about having kids someday. Would that kind of schedule really be fair to all of you?

What’s more, do you even want to be a creative director? Will you find the work as fulfilling as what you do now? Does money matter more than job satisfaction or fulfillment?

An emotionally intelligent person wouldn’t betray themselves by making a hasty decision or one in which they have doubts. They would consider the matter from all angles, and then be honest about their needs, desires, limitations and so on with others.

Applying Emotional Intelligence to Your Web Design Work

Once you’ve learned how to wield your emotional intelligence on a personal level, you can leverage this skill to create emotionally intelligent digital experiences.

Let’s go back to the idea of emotional intelligence turned outward.

On one side of the coin, there is social awareness. This looks like:

• Recognizing how other people feel
• Empathizing with their situation
• Owning your role in the situation

On the other side is relationship management. This looks like:

• Providing a stable and consistent response
• Adapting your behaviors and reactions to other people and situations
• Being a beacon of responsibility and dependability, so that others feel safe in trusting you

While we can use tools like Google Analytics to tell us what happens on our websites or apps, they don’t help us understand the users’ emotional journey. And without that empathy or understanding, we can’t create digital experiences that are consistent, adaptable, helpful, trustworthy and ultimately satisfying.

To create these types of experiences, you can use:

User Psychology

User psychology can be a useful first step in emotionally intelligent design. For instance, you can use psychology to help you choose colors for your digital experience. It’s a helpful tool, for sure, but it can’t be the only one you use as it really only gives us insights about a generic “audience.”

User Research and Testing

User research methods like surveys, interviews, focus groups and usability tests give us invaluable insights about users. Instead of seeing users as IP addresses that interact with certain pages or screens, they become real people that we’re serving.

With this information, you can go on to develop user personas, empathy maps, user journey maps and content strategies built around your target users’ needs, preferences and challenges.

Feedback Collection

Once your product is live, it’s important to solicit feedback from your users from time to time. The feedback could pertain to their experience with:

• Using the website or app
• Contacting support
• Something they purchased

Feedback isn’t always constructive. Look at any reviews page online and you’ll see people leave one-star reviews with no comments. But if enough people feel passionately enough about an experience, you’ll start getting some really valuable input about what your users like and don’t like.

Iterative Design

In an ideal world, we’d start every web project off with a minimum viable product. This would allow us to deliver just what our users need without wasting too much time on things they might not.

Websites, apps and omnichannel digital experiences can and should continually be improved upon. Whether you’re able to begin all your projects as MVPs or not, iterative design should be part of your process.

When we use critical thinking, empathy and active listening, iterative design goes beyond the superficial. It allows us to really understand our users on an emotional level and to enhance their experiences based on what we learn about them over time.

Wrapping Up

Emotional intelligence is an incredibly valuable soft skill to have as a web designer. Not only can it make things go more smoothly for you at work, it also gives you the ability to design from a more empathetic lens.

Instead of navigating your job as a checklist of things to do, you start to see how your choices and actions affect others—both positively and negatively.