Design for Value

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Welcome to the Daily Sprint, the podcast for B2B and B2E product designers who want to strengthen their craft and design tangible value into their products one day at a time.

Today, we'll talk about your homework from episode two, and answer the question, “Are you making design decisions which generate value?"

I'm Darrell Estabrook 30 years into UX product design. Yes, that's just right after they invented the pixel, but we're still just getting started.

I'm also the founder of Designy, coaching designers to make design decisions with purpose, in a way anyone can understand, grow your skills with coaching for you and your team when you learn to design with a why.

Find out more and get on board with a free newsletter at designy.com. That's “design” with a ”y” dot com.

Welcome, you're back.

That's great.

If you’re keeping track, it's episode three.

And yes, I am counting them.

So today is a great day to design.

I say that all the time, but is that true for you?

I believe the act of designing is amazing.

And if you think like a designer, it's kind of like a superpower.

So designing is great, but sometimes it gets tedious to try to get design done, especially in a business setting, and that isn't always so much fun.

But that's what we're exploring and discussing here.

It's how do we take that thing that we love to do and how do we get better at navigating those difficult conversations with non-designers?

So the homework from last time, Now, I can't promise you you're always going to have homework, but did you do it?

Episode two.

It was to write down all the things you absolutely love about product design.

Just make a list for in like 2 minutes.

And then go back and afterwards and circle the things that you can do with your eyes closed.

I kind of think that there's like no real effort, so to speak, like it's more of a natural extension of your thinking.

So what did you get?

There's no wrong answer.

It's just a way to see some of these things in front of you all at once.

So some of mine are, there's several.

There's probably I could keep going on, but just a few of these.

I love turning an idea into something tangible.

The thought bubbles a bunch in people's heads.

I love to visualize that, make it something we can all look at.

I love seeing the user use the product and actually get help by it and they get excited.

I love working through designs with stakeholders.

I love clarifying requirements, getting to that purpose.

I love working through designs with engineers or developers, getting that communication setup.

I love exploring the possibilities, and there's so many more things about it, but it's just, I just love it.

Now, were any of those things on your list?

And what if you couldn't think of anything?

I don't know.

That's probably, there's probably something, right?

I would think there's at least one thing. That you love doing about it.

And even if it's a short list, maybe there's some things that I mentioned and you're thinking, well, I can never be excited about that, right?

But there's a lot to get excited about in product design.

And those are things that might put on your list to start digging deeper into because it really is a great position to be in.

And what did you circle as being effortless?

You circle, if you circled anything, I mean, that's that's great.

It might be your years of experience shining through, or maybe it's your natural ability, like a talent, or a combination of both.

Maybe you never thought of it as a talent.

It really, it really is something that, uh, combined with doing, doing it for years can really become something 2nd nature.

And whenever you discover a new talent like that, fan the flames, right?

Lean into it because that's where you'll have the most focus and interest.

It makes it really easy to learn and go deep as opposed to fighting against your talent.

So like one of the effortless things I discovered years ago was I had a mind for process and workflow as opposed to branding.

Now, by mid-career, I had already created dozens of marketing websites and internets and web apps, different clients, different sizes of organizations and all that.

And I loved all of it.

I still love all of it.

All the visual design, all the interactivity design.

Like it didn't really matter what it was.

I just love doing it.

But as much as I loved branding.

And that marketing aspect of it, I had to work really hard at putting together color palettes.

And even then, it was never fully what I wanted them to be.

And it just takes more effort, right?

It's not a, it's not second nature as is to some people, but when I look at a complex workflow for an industry I never heard of, that's like a piece of cake, it just makes sense.

It snaps in my head.

I don't know how to explain it other than that.

And so that's how I niched down into this B to B and B to E, right?

Business to employee, business to business kind of apps, productivity.

And even with all of that.

So there are things that you have that are effortless, that are talent-based, with experience, you know, all those combined, the real question that we want to explore here is, are you today making design decisions which generate value?

Right?

Value is a tossed around buzzword, we always say, is it valuable?

You've been doing value?

Well, that's great.

And it's true.

We should have a mind for that.

But what are we really talking about?

And it depends on who you're talking to on the product team.

But I believe that you as a designer, you're in a great position to provide value to at least 3 kinds of recipients.

Right?

You've got the user, and that value is in the form of real accomplishment.

When they complete a task when they find what they need. That, you know, when it doesn't interrupt everything else that's going around them.

Like that's value.

The engineer, when you're designing the product in the form of scalability and modularity, to name a few things, like that's thinking of those things, that's valuable to the engineer.

And the stakeholder, right?

Whoever the stakeholder is, B2B, B2E, slightly different, but in the, they're the, the product owner or the business owner, the value is in the form of ensuring users are genuinely loyal to the app.

That's kind of what it boils down to.

And designers are really good at creating screens.

So we sweat the details, like layout, composition, readability, even elegance, efficiency, and I put cleverness, because, you know, we like, it's like literary, uh, foreshadowing and, you know, those sorts of things.

We like, we like, play on, uh, you know, references and things like that or, or, um, you know, just nods to other forms of things.

We like that.

That's all part of the whole thing.

And as we're seeing, AI can do a lot of that, creating screens, and someday, maybe, maybe that's all AI does.

I don't know.

But that's that's not the core of it.

But that those are some of the things that we're very passionate about.

And we can get caught up in these precision details and miss the purpose for the product.

So think about it this way.

The user says, if the product doesn't help me or isn't worth the cost, I won't use it.

That's pretty, pretty strict there, but right?

We don't we don't want to use it.

If it's not efficient, eh, we won't use it.

The engineer says about the product, if it doesn't work, we have no product.

Right?

So they're, they're always looking at how this thing is going to function because at the end of the day, they're going to push code and it's got to be in the hands of the user.

And the stakeholder says, if it doesn't get more users, we have no business.

And that's, from a subscription perspective, if there's purchasing that way, if it's internal, it's adoption, it's efficiency, it's funding.

Right?

If it's not getting a bottom line lift.

There's no reason to have the product.

So they're really focused on it.

Designers, we like to say, generally, look at the symmetry.

Look at the consistency.

Look at the amazing complexity of this feature.

You know, look how he tied it all together.

Like we're really focused on these things.

But designers need to balance these 3 things with every design decision.

So think about that, every design decision.

Does it have tangible value for the user?

Is it an elegant function for the engineer?

And does it drive business growth for the stakeholder?

Those 3 things.

Here's the relationship between those.

So at the end of the day, the business growth is necessary because it funds the other two.

Right?

And the elegant function lowers the cost of building new features and speeds up learning. Learning about the app.

We can push things out faster.

That sort of thing.

And the tangible value for the user is really what drives the business growth.

So we have a nice circle of business growth being necessary.

But the user finding it tangibly valuable.

That's the hook, right?

That's the thing that they're going to come back for.

Or propel forward in their job when they're using the productivity of it.

And if designers miss this, what happens?

Well, design spins in meetings, we end up pushing pixels to chase symptoms.

Try it again.

Try this.

Try that. Something else.

The solutions end up getting complicated.

We might end up in long periods of research or go deep, deep in the flows, and maybe not even get questions answered, just kind of leave unanswered questions hanging out there and solutions get developed.

And then users waste their time or leave the product, right?

There's unneeded features, too many features.

They can't navigate all of this and you're like, but features, we have features.

Look at our features.

And stakeholders want outcomes.

So depending on the product, This is, they're commonly looking for outcomes in the B to B, even B to C.

It's about retaining customers, right?

The longer they stay, the longer they pay, if that's the model there.

And then the B to E products, it's about reducing friction and increasing accuracy.

If the tool maximizes a little bit of their time instead of wasting a lot of their time, and it's trustworthy to base actual business decisions on, that's a great outcome.

We want to fund that product.

We want more of that product.

And stakeholders might want this user satisfaction, but they don't know what it looks like.

So they'll kind of say a few things or react in a few ways.

Like they'll react to visuals.

They'll, you know, they'll have examples or they'll just react to what they see and not think beyond the screen.

They'll think to associate other products features that work well for them.

So I saw it in this app.

It worked well in there.

You know, we want to lift and move it over in our app.

And they'll assume that more features means more satisfaction.

More features.

We've got we've got come for our features.

And designers are thinking about, you know, about all of that.

It's kind of like in the back of our mind, but we don't really communicate that very well.

So think about it this way.

When a stakeholder is driving to prescribe features for the sake of driving business growth, They're not necessarily considering the simplicity of the solution or the tangible value to the user.

They know there's a user.

They want the user to be satisfied, right?

And that those are definitely present, but that's the connection of this feature for that satisfaction.

It's really the business growth that's driving it.

And you can think about it this way and kind of like this fictional approach, right?

A stakeholder says that they want to have a feed of insights to this user dashboard.

Everybody has a dashboard.

But, you know, we go on to add fees.

At a feed. Insights are very helpful.

So making the front and center will be something that they can market it.

They can promote it.

They could, how, even if it's internally promoted.

We've got we've got that.

The low value designer might react with the best of intentions and say, oh, the feed is going to clutter the dashboard.

Maybe they don't say it, but maybe they think it.

But like the feed, this is going to really add another thing.

And if that's said or you're discussing with a stakeholder, they might see that as a frivolous aesthetic issue, right?

They may even insist that the feature gets built anyway.

And we go, wah, wah.

There, there goes that.

But the partner designer in kind of partnering with this, the high value designer might react.

So if we add a feed to the dashboard, what outcome do we expect?

So you could kind of play this scenario out?

And the answer might be from the stakeholder to increase users to the pro plan, right?

Or to increase the adoption of the app?

The designer can now say, well, that's great.

Because now we have the purpose, right?

That's really what we want to do.

What if we look at ways to bring the insights to the user in a way that makes them feel smarter and accomplish this specific task, whatever that may be in that case?

Now you're thinking with purpose and starting down that road of designing tangible value.

Because it's going to accomplish both things.

Getting the user to accomplish that goal and adding this insight to it will increase adoption. And other business goals.

And the good thing about this is you may not even have if that was a real conversation and you're you're talking about, well, what are the solutions?

Well, hey, that's the moment we say, hey, we're going to explore that.

And design is the cheapest way to explore this value, I think, in the grand scheme of all of the software cost.

And that's the 1st business impact right there.

If you're not working with a designer, you're likely building features at risk. Overspending to find out something about that feature.

And there's a point you rapid release, put live software out there and see what happens for sure.

But design is a great way to do even scrappy research, just enough research to quash this stakeholder uncertainty about a new idea, right?

We've we've designed some options.

We've talked with some users.

We're getting a directional nod.

That's great.

You can, even in design, right, you're trying before you build it.

I like to say design is free when you compare to the cost of engineering a solution and maybe even the fallout of bad user research.

You got options and experiments, all sorts of things you can do.

And this other aspect of design kind of being a cheap way to explore is design is considering these seamless experience of adding this feature instead of just bolting it on.

That's huge.

When I was building or designing my house years ago, we were drawing up the architectural plans, and we moved a wall of one of these connecting rooms, like 2 feet in one direction.

It's like, hey, we want this room to be a little bigger.

Let's move that wall 2 feet.

It affected like 3 other rooms and made those unusable.

It was like incredible.

Like, why, why would that happen?

But that's the whole thing with our products.

You're not just hiding more options in the menu.

All right, you could do that and maybe there's a space for it.

It's appropriate.

There's definitely times to do it, but is that appropriate in this case, right?

And you may have to move other existing elements and flows in order to deliver this seamless experience and make sure you're accomplishing their goal, the users delivering tangible value to the user.

So all of this kind of goes together, and I think this is a aspect where designers really have the opportunity to expand their skills beyond just the tools.

And that's a lot about the daily sprint.

When you can translate design in terms that stakeholders, engineers and users understand, that's a skill beyond the tool, right?

If you're able to champion defining features with purpose over prescription, if that becomes 2nd nature, that's a skill beyond the tool.

And all of that is going to add up to making design decisions that generate value.

It's really exciting.

And when you see that start to get traction, it just builds on itself.

So, I ask the question where do designers learn this?

Well, I learned it on the job, the long way.

That's a long journey.

We do it all the time.

We're always learning.

We're, we're, Experimenting.

We're coming up against new challenges every day.

And eventually, you know, we'll get there.

And I wrote about that on designy.com.

I'll share that link of how long it took?

The other things that we do too, like conferences?

And I think those are fine.

They're expensive. And they're not frequent, but they're really energizing.

I learned a number of good things, even critique and other techniques from conferences.

So they're very good, but they're, you know, far and few between, you can't always go to them when you need them.

And then there's books and videos and courses, like the self-serve way.

And those are fantastic too.

I think they, all of these things have their place and they're probably all in combination over time as you go through your career.

But the one thing that they have in common is they're always detached from your problem at hand.

There’s something you are working on a specific product, and you may have a book, a video, chorus conference that aligns generally to it.

It might even be specific in some ways, but the real value is in something else.

Have you ever considered individual coaching for you or your team?

So think of detached advice that takes a while to understand and apply, and think of individual coaching as real-time answers for your specific problem and your product, and leveraging an expert in product design.

This is what I do.

And a lot of people see results in, I mean, in weeks, because we're really focused on what is going on specifically with you and your product.

And on more on that, if you're wondering how individual coaching might benefit you.

Take a look at designy.com/getcoaching.

And there's a link in there where you can schedule a free one hour session with me and we'll talk about where you are and how I can help.

So other ways you can get involved with The Daily Sprint.

You could follow and subscribe right on whatever platform you're listening to right now.

If you have any questions, you did the exercise, you did the lists, you, I said something maybe here that you like have a question about, go to designy.com/ask.

And while you're there, sign up for the free newsletter at designy.com. That's “design” with a ”y” dot com.

So thanks for listening to The Daily Sprint today.

Remember, today is a great day to design with a why.

See you next time.