articulating design value
Tom Greever has a career as a designer and design leader that spans 20 years, including stints at some very cool companies.
He is best known as the author of the popular O’REILLY book, Articulating Design Decisions – Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience.
“ the difference between a good designer and a great designer”
The book came from a regional UX conference talk I gave near where I lived many years ago. Basically, what happened was that I was working with conference organizers and trying to think about some topics that would be of value to the participants at this conference.
I went through this exercise of reflecting on my career and trying to understand where the value was and what it is that I do as a designer and design leader and what could I contribute back to the community.
I kept centering on this pattern that I had noticed throughout my career that the difference between a good designer and a great designer was in their ability to move things forward, to get things done, to ship products, to get support and approval of their work.
And that often that main difference between someone who could get that kind of support and someone who couldn’t was this ability to articulate their work in such a way that it made sense to the other people in the business.
“ articulating design value.”
Economic value and Functional value, they are easier to quantify. It's relatively understood how we can measure the Economic value in terms of the price and how many people are going to pay it. And the Functional value in terms of how people are using it, we can literally measure that behavior. When you get into the Experiential and the Symbolic, they become more difficult to measure. But what I find is that we don't always acknowledge that those contribute to the Economic and Functional value.
So, for instance, both Experiential and Symbolic value contribute to long term Economic value of a customer because those customers that have a great experience or are using our products for some symbolic reason are more likely to pay more, and to pay more over time. So, there's a very tangible dollar amount associated with making that experience and that symbolism better for the customers.
You could say the same thing about Functional value. I can create an experience for my customers to overcome a missing part of functionality that I don't have for whatever reason. A simple example that comes to mind for me is loading indicators and spinners. I need to keep my users engaged while the system is loading and that has a bearing on their perception. That's a very simple way of providing an experience that overcomes what's missing from the function.
I think we often miss an opportunity to apply that kind of thinking. How can we create those experiences, that symbolism, and acknowledge that we can’t draw a direct straight line to the economic functional value?
It exists and I think we all inherently know that. But then when it comes down to reporting these metrics in a business, people hesitate to draw those solid lines and admit that the kinds of experiences that we create have a fundamental impact on those outcomes.
“ A seat at the table.”
Having an understanding of what's important to that person on the other side of the table is key to getting through to them and helping them understand why we do what we do, why it's important, and how it's going to impact the business.