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[VBD] How value-based design came to be

Before we go into detail on value-based design, it’s worth talking about how it came to be. After all, it’s not how most design is practiced (yet!) – and by talking about the history, you’ll get a clearer sense of the context.

How design was

The kind of design we’re talking about here was first called “applied art” or “commercial art” back in the days of handmade advertising. Now, design is better defined as shipped work for active businesses that are able to take money for goods and services.

After World War II, the advertising industry revolutionized graphic design. Ad agencies built their success on pitching emotionally driven brand narratives to business, hoping that their work would translate to real business gains – because there was no real way to precisely measure their work’s effectiveness.

What design became

It’s hard to put a price on emotion, and advertising happens entirely before money changes hands. Yet graphic design proceeded to root itself in the precedents set by the advertising industry for the next 40 years – and user experience and product design followed suit.

This situation is changing. It’s now possible to measure the precise consequences of specific, technological design decisions at scale. And it’s already shaping the future of our industry.

At the same time, most people graduate from school – usually, as of press time, art school or a coding bootcamp – and they practice design without much understanding of the context in which they exist.

I won’t mince words: if you want to be on the right side of history, you’ll join the ranks of those who are already practicing value-based design. Value-based designers know what success looks like, and they have little to prove. They work quietly, speak softly, command respect, and make a mint.

Value-based design as response

Design’s purpose is to provide economic benefit for businesses. The best way to do that is by clearly articulating, reinforcing, and promoting the value of design within a business. Design affects how the business is perceived, how a product operates, and how the business’s service is executed.

Every design decision has a corresponding business ramification. And it’s possible to measure the economic impact of design decisions, so that you can make a more forceful case to those with the power to pay for design.

Every time designers fail to do this, design loses its way. Think about a time when you worked on a project that didn’t focus on business needs. (We’ve all been there.) Perhaps it was a rebrand that didn’t measure the effect on the business afterward, or didn’t ask customers what they looked for. Surely there was a business reason for the project: defending against competitors, perhaps, or freshening up a stale design. If the project had no purpose, it wouldn’t have been approved in the first place.

But if there wasn’t a way to assess whether the project was successful, then why did the design team put in so much effort? If there wasn’t a clear motivator for the design direction, how were you able to effectively critique any finished work? Why were design resources allocated at all?

There might be cultural precedent for the importance of design, but that won’t sustain our industry in the long term. We need a new way to approach design that focuses on how it serves others. We’ve developed a practice that’s focused equally on what design is and how it’s received by a business’s customers, which we call value-based design.

My own journey to value-based design

For over a decade, I practiced design like most people do: by taking projects and doing good work. But it was messy, and I, like most of you, struggled to be accepted in various organizations. Why was I doing projects that didn’t have a good chance of succeeding? Why was the work being chosen in the first place? Where did the money come from? What happened to the work after it left my hands?

I never got adequate answers to these questions until I founded a business of my own and grew the practice such that I could sit alongside executives. Turns out, most decisions aren’t made with design in mind, both in terms of process and product. And when you’re a designer watching all of this, you get to wondering how you can meaningfully influence the final product.

After all, even if you have a seat at the table, you can still be ignored at the table.

What will design be?

Think back to our lesson a couple of days ago, where we talked about risk. What do you think people are thinking when they wonder whether to buy design from you? Whether they choose to hire designers at all? Are you a low-risk investment, or an unknown variable?

Design works best when it shows its power & expertise to those with the ability to buy it. Knowing this, we propose an expansion of a designer’s practice to include activities that both connect to design and influence business. Much like the debate over the past decade about whether designers must code – which, for the record, largely got settled in favor of code –value-based design focuses on three main components: research, measurement, and experimentation.

In our new self-paced workshop, we go deep on each of these components, weave them into a typical designer’s practice, and show you the best way to exert your authority & expertise.


This was a draft issue of Draft's Letters. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or view this email online.

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#148
November 6, 2024
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[VBD] On risk – and why people buy design

Welcome to our little mini-course about value-based design! Feel free to reply & introduce yourself. We want to know who’s here and how we can help!


Let's talk about risk.

We'll talk about design, too, but then we’re going to talk about risk again. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go through some first principles about why we’re all here and what makes our work a little different.

Risk

So what is risk, denotatively? It feels slippery. Risk is usually a thing one feels: “oh, that’s risky.” But in business, risk is quantifiable, and it’s defined as the probability that a business will profit from anything that it invests in.

Every single line item in a business’s balance sheet carries some amount of risk, and all investments come with some amount of uncertainty. But many things are lower-risk than others. For example, my accountant is pretty low-risk, since the dude keeps me out of hot water with the government, and he probably helps me save a lot on my taxes. I’m pretty sure that my book printer is low-risk, because every time I write a new book, I happen to make back the cost of them several times over. My editor is low-risk because I always badly need an editor.

You get the idea.

Design

What does risk have to do with design? Well, design is bought. And it’s bought by businesses. There’s someone buying work from you, and they are absolutely doing risk calculations every time they hire you.

This makes the creation of economic value absolutely vital for design to continue existing.

We have historically not stepped into our authority on this. Lots of us get out of art school and we expect to have jobs, to be respected in those jobs, and to get an impact.

At its best, well-supported design is a way of exerting power in an organization. In practice, though, the overlap between design & impact is not a circle. This is because:

  • Most people make design decisions in every organization, regardless of role, and regardless of whether they call those decisions “design.”
  • Most designers are expert in design, but not in the soft power that’s necessary to make sure that high-quality design ships & is governed well.
  • Organizations are complex. Design is frequently unsupported by those who aren’t the buyer or project champion.

We do a great job with design. I’m really unconcerned about designers’ ability to design well. I don’t even remember the last time I wrote a lesson about design qua design. What I am concerned about is the fact that designers don’t know how to make work that is actual, how to get an impact, and how to be respected in their roles.

Risk again

Reducing the perception of business risk is a solid first step. The more we convey to teams that we’re a good return on investment, and the more we consciously back that up with the work we perform, the more likely we are to flourish as a profession.

Designers can have real business impact by:

  • Understanding & responding to the felt needs of our customers.
  • Experimenting with our work to make sure that we’re not creating any harm, either to the business or our customers.
  • Measuring & sharing the ongoing impact of our work.

We’ve put together an approach to design that anyone can practice, regardless of their design know-how or existing role – and right now, we’re offering a workshop that teaches you everything you need to level up your game & get a seat at the table.

In the coming days, we’ll walk you through what you can do to get the authority you deserve. Stay tuned!


This was a draft issue of Draft's Letters. You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or view this email online.

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#147
November 5, 2024
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[VBD] On risk – and why people buy design

Welcome to our little mini-course about value-based design! Feel free to reply & introduce yourself. We want to know who’s here and how we can help!


Let's talk about risk.

We'll talk about design, too, but then we’re going to talk about risk again. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll go through some first principles about why we’re all here and what makes our work a little different.

Risk

So what is risk, denotatively? It feels slippery. Risk is usually a thing one feels: “oh, that’s risky.” But in business, risk is quantifiable, and it’s defined as the probability that a business will profit from anything that it invests in.

Every single line item in a business’s balance sheet carries some amount of risk, and all investments come with some amount of uncertainty. But many things are lower-risk than others. For example, my accountant is pretty low-risk, since the dude keeps me out of hot water with the government, and he probably helps me save a lot on my taxes. I’m pretty sure that my book printer is low-risk, because every time I write a new book, I happen to make back the cost of them several times over. My editor is low-risk because I always badly need an editor.

You get the idea.

Design

What does risk have to do with design? Well, design is bought. And it’s bought by businesses. There’s someone buying work from you, and they are absolutely doing risk calculations every time they hire you.

This makes the creation of economic value absolutely vital for design to continue existing.

We have historically not stepped into our authority on this. Lots of us get out of art school and we expect to have jobs, to be respected in those jobs, and to get an impact.

At its best, well-supported design is a way of exerting power in an organization. In practice, though, the overlap between design & impact is not a circle. This is because:

  • Most people make design decisions in every organization, regardless of role, and regardless of whether they call those decisions “design.”
  • Most designers are expert in design, but not in the soft power that’s necessary to make sure that high-quality design ships & is governed well.
  • Organizations are complex. Design is frequently unsupported by those who aren’t the buyer or project champion.

We do a great job with design. I’m really unconcerned about designers’ ability to design well. I don’t even remember the last time I wrote a lesson about design qua design. What I am concerned about is the fact that designers don’t know how to make work that is actual, how to get an impact, and how to be respected in their roles.

Risk again

Reducing the perception of business risk is a solid first step. The more we convey to teams that we’re a good return on investment, and the more we consciously back that up with the work we perform, the more likely we are to flourish as a profession.

Designers can have real business impact by:

  • Understanding & responding to the felt needs of our customers.
  • Experimenting with our work to make sure that we’re not creating any harm, either to the business or our customers.
  • Measuring & sharing the ongoing impact of our work.

We’ve put together an approach to design that anyone can practice, regardless of their design know-how or existing role – and right now, we’re offering a workshop that teaches you everything you need to level up your game & get a seat at the table.

In the coming days, we’ll walk you through what you can do to get the authority you deserve. Stay tuned!

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#146
November 4, 2024
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Join us, get your seat at the table, and profit

We’re going to take a brief intermission from intermission to chat a little about value-based design, and provide something we almost never do at Draft: a discount for something.

If you want in, answer this one-question survey:

Thanks so much for your support, and please let us know if you have any questions!

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#145
November 4, 2024
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Notes from intermission: airplanes, mini-courses, beastmodin’

On week 4 of intermission and we’ve got the following left:

  • write some new text bits
  • plot the launch of our new course on value-based design, then do it (starting next week?)
  • conclude some technical fripperies with the membership migration

Which, gosh, thanks, time zone difference! Turns out when you get on an airplane for 7 hours and then consistently wake up at midnight in your home base’s time zone without telling anyone you pondhopped, you get a lot done.

I think the heaviest psychic lifts that I do ever are:

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#144
November 1, 2024
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Notes from intermission: cleanup, introduction, workshop

We’re through the clean-up-everything phase of intermission, and now it’s on to the create-new-things phrase. This is tripartite, involving:

  • writing some new pieces for the book
  • editing & firming up the introductory course
  • creating a marketing strategy for the workshop.

Once that all is done, we’ll be past the meat of intermission.

Membership

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#143
October 29, 2024
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Notes from intermission: positioning, curation, structure

One of the wild things about intermission is how many people have been interested in my shutting up for a while. “Inspirational.” “Awesome.” “This is the best move.” I don’t quite know how to take that, but thank you! Everything I do is good, in fact, including intermission. If you have any suggestions for what I should talk abut or focus on in the coming months, please let me know.

In the meantime, we’ve made a lot more progress. Let’s talk about it!

text book

First, I’ve compiled all of the essays that will go into our next book. I need to edit everything, then typeset it, which will take the bulk of my time. The book will be published a little unconventionally for us, which I’m excited for. It might be the most Draft-y book I’ve ever done?

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#142
October 22, 2024
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Notes from intermission: content, directions

I’m writing this two days into intermission and I’m already questioning large parts of the business, which is precisely what one wants to happen.

Most of the initial work involves what emails get sent and when and to whom. I love this list, but I often get stuck in my habit of weekly publishing, and I don’t zoom out as often as I maybe should.

How do we introduce people to Draft?

We need to find a way to give people a good first impression when they join this list. That’s my first challenge. But I don’t particularly know how to go short on what we do, you know? We do a lot. We have a strong point of view. You either possess ideological resonance with our mission, or you’re vaguely bemused & horrified about everything I write.

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#141
October 8, 2024
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Intermission

Sometimes you simply write over 500,000 words on the practice of profitable, value-based design and then you look back and have no idea what to do with all of it. It’s a universal concern, really, shared by everyone, so you understand, then.

I reached my own personal moment of reckoning last week, when I realized that half of Draft’s resource library was out-of-date. On top of that, we’ve reached the definitive conclusion of quantitative research, and alas, we’ve written a lot about the topic that will be scrubbed from the record. And we also have this other list where we’ve written enough to make another mid-career essay book.

It’s time for another intermission.

Those of you who have been around since the beginning know that we used to pause all of Draft’s operations for a month in order to get the headspace to try something new. That ended when we came out with our flagship consulting service, because it did so well that we ended up paying our student loans, buying a house, putting two dogs in the house, and flying to 26 countries.

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#140
October 1, 2024
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Profitable qualitative research, customer archetypes, search query types

What is the role of value-based design now that we have reached the functional conclusion of quantitative research? We answer this at length in our new workshop, and we spend a lot of time talking about it in our retainers. Here, we’ll discuss the embrace of profitable qualitative insight, as well as some next steps for you to take in your own practice.

Qualitative research is a competitive advantage

In contemporary tech’s history, the bar has never been lower when it comes to consumer satisfaction. That makes your ability to focus on customer needs an outsize competitive advantage. Put another way, if you’re able to truly listen to what customers tell you, and then respond through your operational decisions, you’re far more likely to generate profit & outcompete in the current climate.

This is unlikely to change for at least the next five years. We exist in a generational shift with respect to how technology is received & perceived. Technology is now ubiquitous; there are few truly useful places it has not yet conquered. The internet is now starting to be regulated globally. And the era of free money is ending.

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#139
September 24, 2024
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LAUNCH: The self-paced Value-Based Design Workshop

Today is our final major launch of the year.

If you’ve been reading these for the past year, you know that we ran a successful value-based design workshop with Badass.dev near the beginning of the year. We’ve spent the past few months refining that work into a standalone workshop, and now we’re launching three things: a self-paced workshop, a one-day intensive for your team, and – for the first time ever – on-site workshops where we’ll fly anywhere in the world.

You’ll get everything from our standalone workshop, as well as a raft of evergreen resources for practicing value-based design, a year of paid membership, and access to ask me questions anytime you need as you grow your practice.

Take a look at our self-paced workshop today. We’d be honored to have you join us.

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#138
September 17, 2024
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More on Value Retainer – and another big launch coming next week

Thanks for your interest in Value Retainer last week. We’ve answered a lot of fun questions about it, and watched a few people join us, which rules.

One of the biggest questions that’s come up as we negotiate new Value Retainer projects is: what do we do? We provide a list of what what we do at base on the aforelinked, but that’s still a fair question, since I think people want to get a clearer understanding of their specific outcomes and they want to know if we’ll, like, design anything.

Let’s talk about the latter first. The seam between “fits into Value Retainer” and “would be a separate quote of new work” is fuzzy. This is by design. One knows a big project when they see it. And I don’t think I’ll be letting people in the door who boiling-frog us into working outside of alignment.

That’s because the rest of our paid activities are well-defined. Want interviews? There’s a paid offering for that. Usability tests? Same same. Generally speaking, if you’re on retainer with us and you want us to do something that’s ever been on our proverbial rate card, you’ll pay extra – with a 10% discount, of course, because we like you.

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#137
September 10, 2024
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LAUNCH: Value Retainer

I’m tremendously excited to launch Value Retainer today.

Over the past few months, we’ve talked, on and off, about the trust that our clients put in us to provide clarity in their strategic direction while using design to generate outsize profit.

We’ve also been sold out of new consulting work for two years. And we’re well aware that a full-blown consulting project might not be for everybody.

For years, our consulting projects have concluded with an unpublished offer for us to remain on retainer to address anything that may come up. Virtually everyone takes the offer. Now we’re publishing it. If you’re a business owner, marketing director, or value-based designer who wants to level up their game, we invite you to join Value Retainer, a new offering from Draft, the creators of value-based design.

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#136
September 3, 2024
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Inventing the future, working with developers, what we share

What happens when your industry is done inventing the future, at least for now? That can be okay, right?

Everybody has a tiny computer in their pockets that can summon cars, get objects in two days, connect us to a distended social graph, and radicalize us. Maybe we’re in a position, societally, where we need to figure out what that all means and how we can all deal with it before we go off inventing anything else? The future is already here. We exist in this moment, reckoning with the messy human side of everything. It’s only been 16 years since the first smartphone came out. We don’t know what to do with any of this yet.

And yet all people want to do is invent another future, capture another pot of gold, be the next person onstage holding up a product that will change all of us. Tech has become obsessed with that idea. Optimism (which is problematic in its own ways!) has given way to unchecked greed.

Design is bound up in consciously envisioning the future of technology. “Future,” in this case, can simply mean what happens next. Because there’s going to be a tomorrow, that tomorrow is probably going to involve a glowy screen, and we should probably take responsibility for what shows up on it. Mercifully, there is another way forward.

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#135
August 27, 2024
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Building expertise & creating the future

I ran into my friend (and one-time collaborator!) Nick (no relation) the other week, and we sat and chatted about design. I talked a little bit about a tattoo I had recently gotten. In addition to the usual things you ask an artist for (size, location, what you want), I handed the artist a creative brief, set some intentions for what I think it should express, and said that I surrender to their process.

Which means that whatever they make is going to go on my body, roughly. And that’s precisely what happened! My feedback was very minor: shrink this slightly, move this over here, add one tiny thing, and we’re done. The first & second revisions were not materially very different. You would look at the first revision and think yeah, that’s good enough.

Was I expecting the final result? No, because there is no way to conceive of what another person will make for you. When allowing another person to manage the process, all you can really do is be clear about what you want, set a focused intention, and get out of their way.

We’re not naturally wired to do this. We want to feel some sort of agency. We have our own preconceived notions of what the work might end up being. We want to feel like we have control. We want a sense of power.

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#134
August 20, 2024
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How to run an experiment

I’m going to be writing a lot more about design’s role in leveraged power dynamics over the next few months. What questions do you have that you’d like me to answer? Nothing is too small or tactical!


Brief one today. Last, we’ll talk about the third pillar of value-based design: experimentation. Experimentation is the application of measurement to a specific design decision in order to de-risk its implementation for your business’s customers.

The third pillar of value-based design measures the economic impact of design decisions through experimentation. The reasons for this are twofold:

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#133
August 13, 2024
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Designers will measure

Remember back when there was this huge roiling debate about whether designers would code, and then all of the designers who refused to code got laid off and now designers code? You may wish to anticipate the next wave of expansion to the design practice: designers will measure.

Measurement will happen whether you’re part of the process or not. Designers will measure or be measured. Designers will measure the impact of their work, and then they will adapt their work to improve their impact. Because design is a form of leveraged power, in order to exert that power there must be measurement.

People hire value-based designers with the fundamental expectation that they’ll economically benefit the business. And measurement, which is the process of determining the effects of design decisions, is a natural extension of the value-based designer’s business focus.

Primary metrics

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#132
August 6, 2024
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The elements of profitable research

In last week’s letter, we discussed the three pillars of value-based design: research, measurement, and experimentation. Over the next few letters, we’ll go deep on each of these pillars to talk about why they’re essential to your design practice, and how to begin working with each. First up is the most profitable component of design: research.

Research is best separated into both qualitative & quantitative components. Qualitative research tells you what customers say, and quantitative research tells you what customers do.

Quantitative research methods include:

  • Analytics
  • Browser & device analysis
  • Heat & scroll maps
  • Behavior recordings
  • Heuristic evaluation
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#131
July 30, 2024
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How the three pillars of Value-Based Design might save our industry

Design is in crisis.

Designers are being laid off en masse in a broader power grab amidst a major economic downturn. The former aforelinked shows over 535,000 people laid off since the beginning of 2022 – which, granted, are not all designers, but.

Our field became commoditized as buyers misunderstood the process & impact of our work. Incompetent people in power think they can practice some form of unresearched “design,” and then they make machines do it for them. Fortunately, there is a better way, and that is to restore design to its original purpose – which fundamentally can’t be automated.

Since our publication of the evergreen Value-Based Design five years ago, the kind of design we practice has only become more urgent. Tech writ large has focused too much on power & vibes, and not enough on creating durable business. Communities do exist that fight against all of this, but they’re few & far between. People are learning the true purpose of design, but slowly, gradually, in small places.

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#130
July 23, 2024
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What was machine learning?

New developments in machine learning are quite funny to me, because they do not address the thinking, only the comp. They are comp generators. By their nature, they use other comps to build the comps. Since comps are usually copyrighted, this is effectively legally untenable in most global jurisdictions. The most notable example just got turned off after it clearly ripped off Apple. And yet people think that this technology is the savior of design, or the next era of design. See? Hilarious!

Design is not the comp. It never has been the comp. It is incumbent on value-based designers to reinforce this idea from the jump, or buyers will incorrectly think they are, in fact, buying a comp. They are not buying a comp, have never bought a comp, and will never buy comps, when they buy design.

Design is researched thinking made into concrete action. You are always buying the thinking, not the action.

For those who sell their thinking, in what specific ways are you bolstering your own expertise to ruggedize for an uncertain future?

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#129
July 16, 2024
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Notes on the practice

Thanks to everyone for their warm reception to our newly opened slot. I am mildly terrified about it! I am more-than-mildly dreading it! I am out of practice with sales, and very much in a position where I want to just find a person who gets it and has a problem I can solve.

This is, of course, not how it goes. One does the hustle in order to make the work. I have done this for twelve years now. I should theoretically be used to it by now, right?

One adapts because they must. Questions are asked in the process, of course. How is design bought now? How much must one emphasize research versus execution with prospective clients? In what specific ways can we center the most economically impactful aspects of our practice? What is the current relationship between those who are able to buy design and those who are able to help? Given that this post is probably universally correct, how will we move towards specificity?

The answers to these questions may require reconsidering what we do or how we do it. I know for a fact that we’re often hired to do production stuff, and then once we gain the trust of the organization we work on deeper topics like culture shifts, high-level acquisition, and our most important tool, given the current state of tech: spaceholding. How is all of that made legible to people, or is it at all? How do we get the trust of stakeholders to do this sort of work? How do we evaluate its overall impact?

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#128
July 9, 2024
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Opening a new consulting slot

A few of you have waited for this for a long time. I’m excited and more than a little nervous to announce that for the first time in two years, we’re opening a new consulting slot for kickoff this coming September.

From stores that make over mid-seven figures to software businesses that convert over 250 new customers a month, if you’re interested in growing your profit through value-based design, you may wish to hire us. We don’t open slots very often because we are almost always sold out, because the clients who hire us tend to keep us for long periods of time. After all, there is always something to do beyond only experimentation or research. We’re profoundly grateful & honored that we get to do this work for so many smart, wonderful people every day.

I personally hate sales. I always want to get back to the practice, which is sacred. And it’s always some amount of work to find structural alignment with our method, which is consultative and culture-shifting by definition. Our primary source of new work is referral and we don’t do unpaid software, so I deeply appreciate your taking the time to spread the word about this with your own network.

And if you’ve appreciated our writing and think it’s resonated with you over the past months & years, and you exist in a position where you might be interested in buying design, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’d be grateful & honored to hear from you.

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#127
July 2, 2024
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The balance between tactics & spaceholding, experimentation reporting, “mixed methods”

I’m in the middle of a new project, and it’s been interesting balancing what to focus on.

On the one hand, people want tools & techniques to improve their careers. This is obvious. Everybody knows it. You lead with the value, and then you keep hammering away at value.

On the other, it has never been a more important time for spaceholding in design, for offering people the subtler lessons in leveraged power that are necessary for us to navigate an unstable industry. Normally this is a terrible thing to include in any informational content, but things aren’t normal now, and they probably won’t be any value of “normal” for the rest of my career.

And so new questions appear. How will we help each other? How are we creating value in our work? In what specific ways will we be working on the inner resourcing that is necessary to navigate our collective future?

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#126
June 25, 2024
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Design, execution, QA

These letters are always a reflection of where my head is at with respect to the business. Abundance comes & goes. Ideas evolve.

A couple of years ago, I felt really down about our prospects. We didn’t have enough clients and were losing money fast. Nobody wanted to hire us, and our promotional work wasn’t really landing. When we did get people on the phone, it never went well. One prospective client went with a dashboard bro instead. Another got mad that we don’t work for free. Another straight-up screamed at us(!) that our method is wrong and we don’t need to research anything. There were multiple times when I wondered if I should stay in this industry.

It is funny to consider this now. We haven’t had to worry about “sales” in over a year. People just come through, pay us, and the world sorts itself out. We are effectively booked solid through the summer.

I’m writing to you from a world where design – actual, honest-to-god, research-driven design – is respected, acted upon, and profited from. It still exists! And you can find it, too.

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#125
June 18, 2024
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Profitable qualitative insight, post-taste, mentorship in UX

We’ve slightly reworked Draft’s home page. We’re also in the process of removing all quantitative information from our resource library, beyond our case studies, in order to focus on the most revenue-generating aspects of our work: qualitative, customer-focused insight.

This week, for paid members

  • This week’s paid lesson teaches you how to emphasize profitable qualitative insight over less-profitable quantitative work. Essential!
  • Our design of the week shows you nav on the bottom. Does it work? Do they care?
  • Our monthly office hours are scheduled for a week from today, on Tuesday, June 18 at 1p CDT. Join us!
  • And our fortnightly teardown is for housewares brand Block Shop.

Want in? Join us now – named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

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#124
June 11, 2024
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“Too much” research, filter order, design density

Why do designers care so much about research?

  • Because research is design. You cannot design without researching. If you do, you’re just drawing pictures.
  • Because research is broadly denigrated. It’s economically undervalued and ignored once it’s released.
  • Because research shifts the balance of power from stakeholders to customers. That can be threatening to many people who wish to hoard their power!

Appearing to “overvalue” research is a compensatory move against buyers who fail to understand why they are buying design, or what design even is in the first place. They read the Tim Brown book, look at old Steve Jobs keynotes, and think design happens in their heads.

It doesn’t.

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#123
June 4, 2024
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Speaking design, discounting, onboarding

I’ve found a thing that is extremely, genuinely funny about psychospiritual impoverishment that is currently afflicting contemporary direct-to-consumer ecommerce. I know it’s mostly depressing & predatory! But this, oh this.

For every business that rips off the cool kids, beastmodes a dashboard, operates by fiat, and unintentionally runs a toxic burnout-culture work environment, there’s another that truly understands the assignment with respect to store design and provides structural nourishment to the work. In doing so, they are eating the lunches of the cool kids – and they’re doing so quietly, without many people noticing at all.

I keep watching this happen. I’ve seen the 20th confirmed instance of it this past week. And I think it’s really funny! Karma is funny. The old way dying is funny, especially when you’re being proven right the whole time. Store design is practiced by stable, durable businesses who possess the luxury of intentionality. But they got to a focused, intentional place precisely because they recognize that slowness is how you win.

A colleague posted this to a group chat recently, and: yeah. (I assume the depicted person is pan-gender.) You’re not getting replaced in that situation. You’re being given the resources you need to succeed, and the business is winning.

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#122
May 28, 2024
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Workshop questions, systems, returning orders

When I put together the latest edition of our workshop, I asked participants what they were hoping to learn, and almost everybody said they wanted to learn how to run an A/B test.

Very reasonable! I’m putting together the next iteration of our coursework, and I’m curious what you want to learn. In addition to that, is there anything that we practice that you want to hear more about? Specific research methods? Prioritization? Messy human questions? Hit reply and let us know.


This week, for paid members

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#121
May 21, 2024
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Analytical alternatives, the sound of software, behavior design

One of the nice consequences of ecommerce’s current state is that I’m getting back into software a bit. As of this writing, I’ve kicked off with two studio projects, helping software businesses increase their revenue using design.

We have little to report now, but it feels great to be back in a space where we are structurally nourished. More soon.


This week, for paid members

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#120
May 14, 2024
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Color, metric strategies, minimum sample size

Go read this essential post on No Best Practices now. I think it’s insightful, it taught me a lot, and I have thoughts.

Ok, did you read it? Great.

I love this post, and it got me thinking about a lot of the things I do to determine whether a certain experiment – or experimentation at all – is a good idea. Yes, below a certain point, you should buy a teardown and run with it. Past a certain point, you should hire a value-based designer to run experiments.

From what I’ve seen in my work, the cutoffs between each of these are a lot fuzzier. For the purpose of a blog post, it probably makes the most amount of sense to say “if you make $X, do this,” but we can go deeper here. So I’m writing up a little bit of clarification here to show the art that goes behind a post like this, in the hopes that it may cultivate your own intuition around what to do and when.

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#119
May 7, 2024
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LAUNCH: Draft Teardown × Lianna Patch

Y’all, I’m so excited for today’s launch. I’ve been planning it for a little while with a dear friend of mine, and now it’s time for us to do a thing. You love it when we do a thing, right? Let’s go.

If you want to skip past the story: I’m doing joint teardowns with my friend Lianna Patch, where I pick apart your design & she does a copy audit. We’ll coordinate our work so we can give you something maximally actionable. And you’ll get $100 off of buying from us separately.

I pinged Lianna about this a couple of months ago, after I kept encountering clients that could benefit from some really focused copywriting. Tonal, confident copy is the single biggest conversion boost I can think of. Yes, everything else is important, and in aggregate it’s why we’re able to get the results that we do. And I’m pretty good at writing copy, but it’s been more appropriate within our consultative work than Draft Teardown.

Lianna is the kind of person who is fairly modest about her achievements, so she will be horrified to hear that I am telling all of you that she is an absolute legend in value-based copy. Her client list is cooler than our client list. Her website is better than our website. She has way more pets than I do. And her work will make our work better.

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#118
April 30, 2024
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Resistance, care & feeding, buyable design

So, the links are pretty grim this week. Sometimes they’re useful, sometimes they’re grim, sometimes they’re both. This week you get grim. I’m almost sorry; blame the vibe weather.

Design loves to feel bad about itself, and we respond to getting fired by moping. I don’t do much of that here, not only because we’re doing great, but because moping does not do anything actual.

In my progressive circles, when we face a setback – and we have faced many, many setbacks over the past two decades – there is a process that we follow. First, we grieve. Then, we plan. Finally, we act.

Grieving without action is not resistance. It allows us to internalize the pain of a setback while creating the psychic conditions for future action. It is our first impulse to grieve, but it must not be the last. We are often rudderless in the face of grief. We forget to act. We must remind ourselves to act. Action takes work.

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#117
April 23, 2024
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Leveraged power, review design, fuller stack

Because design is a form of leveraged power, our highest priority should be to understand the existing structures of power, and then to claim that power for ourselves. This is, in 2024, the only way we will practice & ship impactful design.

In practice, this takes a few steps:

  1. Understand power. In what specific ways is power already leveraged in the organization? Who makes decisions? Whose decisions ship in practice?
  2. Understand incentives. What are the built-in incentives of those in power? What drives them in their careers? “More money” and “more prestige” are two big ones. In what ways do they get recognition, promotion, and progress?
  3. Get small wins. You begin creating the ability to leverage power by clearly showing the economic benefits of design. You cannot do that by redesigning the product wholesale. You need small, easy wins that ship to real customers.
  4. Make the case. Point to the wins in front of those with power and provide a strategic path forward. Then, own that path and start practicing design.

Remember that as a designer, you rarely possess power right away. Your goal is to convince those in power to embrace design, so you can gain power & leverage it. Or, find an organization that already respects design, and work there.

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#116
April 16, 2024
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Change management, where to focus, imagined futures

I read something recently about a person who headed design in a very large organization. In their practice, design worked across business units and discrete teams to solve a broad array of problems.

Since they couldn’t work on every design problem in a large enterprise organization, they had to be discerning about what to take on. They said they chose projects based on two criteria:

  1. Does the team involved love design, want design, and know how to act on design?
  2. Is there an abject disaster at play, where design is possibly able to salvage that arm of the business?

Everything else was declined.

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#115
April 9, 2024
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Framework caching, size filters, familiarity

One of the nice things about having a book out is that you can promote it as much as you want. Writing & publishing a book is the climb to the top of the mountain; promoting it is your way back down.

There are a handful of reasons why I’m not promoting Store Design as much as I normally would for a book of its stature:

  • I already have an audience here. You are part of it. Most of you have bought it.
  • I already sold most of the print run through preorders, and I won’t be printing this again.
  • I don’t think Store Design’s wisdom is ready to be received by those who have the power to buy design.

Expanding on that last point, I have spoken frequently of the deep issues that exist within direct-to-consumer ecommerce that hold them back from leveraging profitable store design. Owners believe they are saviors, that their ideas are worth forcing on others. They do not listen to customers in a wide, structural sense. Why would I sell store design to an audience that will not take the practice of store design seriously?

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#114
April 2, 2024
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Discernment, researching filters & sorts, pinball interfaces

In advance of another major launch, I wanted to talk a little bit about the role of discernment in our work.

It’s important to negotiate new work from a psychic position of abundance. Even though the work may result in life-altering sums of money, even though the work may be the difference between making a mortgage payment or not, you still must arrive to the discussions of that work as if you can take it or leave it. Prospective clients know otherwise.

Discernment blooms from this position. You’re able to see things as they really are. You’re able to know whether the client is fully present & attentive to the work. You’re able to understand whether the client wishes to co-create that work. And finally, you’re able to understand whether the work is something that will nourish or harm you.

The goal, of course, is to avoid work that is likely to harm you. High-end consultants are on permanent strike from toxic work environments.

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#113
March 26, 2024
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Value-Based Design Workshop: Don’t miss out

It’s happening soon: our first-ever public workshop is in two days. We’re going to close registration shortly, so now is your last time to join us.

In the meantime, if you have any final questions about the workshop, please hit reply!


This week, for paid members

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#112
March 19, 2024
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Value-Based Design Workshop: Last call

Our first-ever public workshop is next week, and time is running out for you to join us. I made a couple of minor changes to the outline, based on initial feedback, and I’ve spent most of the past month writing new content for the workshop. I think it’s a good distillation of what you’ve already been learning in Store Design, with a lot of real-world application and group discussion.

If a full day is too long for you, or if the timing doesn’t work out, remember that you can always sign up now, come through when you can, and get the full recording, with subtitles & transcript, after the workshop is done.

If the fees are too high, remember that this is an investment in your ongoing practice. The hope is that the skills you learn in our workshop will provide outsize returns for the businesses that you serve, which will in turn allow you to demand higher fees for your own work. And since it’s our first rodeo, the fees will never be this low again.

I’ll admit it was hard for us to distill everything in a value-based designer’s job down to only five hours, but this should give you a good start. Remember that I’ll always be around to answer questions & provide resources on other research methods.

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#111
March 12, 2024
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Payment for services, core agitators, color spaces

I can’t believe that I felt motivated to write this in 2024, especially after the kind of year we had, but here we are.

Draft is a business. (I know, right?) Like other businesses, we sell things that we believe to possess intrinsic economic value. And we’ve made enough money off our work over the past 12 years to think that we might be onto something, especially considering all the money that we’ve made others in the process.

In design as in the rest of life, you get what you pay for. That’s the whole point of design as an investment, one that is provably low-risk when executed appropriately.

In short, if you want a free unresearched “audit” that will make you feel good about yourself while hurting your business, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would be happy to oblige. If you want something that will reliably make back your investment because it’s grounded in real-world evidence, you know where to go.

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#110
March 5, 2024
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Store design, boundaries, store design

I’m grateful for everyone’s interest in our Value-Based Design Workshop that’s happening in a few weeks. Today, I’d like to talk a little about why I think this is important, and what designers can do to sit more in their integrity.

We are, rather obviously, in design winter, but I think even more is at stake than our jobs. More fundamentally, we’re dealing with a collective religitation of the purpose of design among those who buy it. Organizations are asking: should we have design at all?

This is an existential question, and a tremendous opportunity for us to define the conversation. Will we rise to the challenge? Not change anything? Quit the industry?

If you want to start getting answers, I invite you to join us in a few weeks.

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#109
February 27, 2024
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LAUNCH: An all-day workshop on the practice of value-based design

In 20 years of working in design, I’ve never seen the sort of existential handwringing that pervades our industry right now. Unfortunately, feeling sorry for ourselves won’t get us anywhere. Taking action will. We need to embrace what we’re capable of, step into our own authority, and own our power.

It’s in that spirit that I wish to share a new offering. For the past couple of months, I’ve been working with my friends Joel & Taylor at Badass Courses to give you something truly special. Presenting the Value-Based Design Workshop, an all-day course that will change the way you think about & practice design.

On Thursday, March 21, I’ll be leading a five-hour workshop that will teach you the fundamentals of value-based design, with a heavy emphasis on group activities and hands-on work. It will not be a series of boring lectures where I dramatically read one of my books to you. It will be value-packed, full of examples that will help you level up your design careers now.

Three years in the making, this is the first time I’ve ever offered a workshop like this, and I hope to do so again in the future. As a result, the pricing for this course will never be this low. So take a look and sign up today. I’d be grateful & honored to see you there.

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#108
February 20, 2024
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Owning your value, buying design, leveraged power

The first round of Store Design has mostly been delivered domestically. My favorite quote so far:

Holy shit this is a gorgeous book. I had high expectations but the subtlety of it all needs to be experienced in person.

And:

It's clear that you don't just read business books and are actually literate, making for a refreshing read.

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#107
February 13, 2024
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Technological collapse, custom forms, notifications

Store Design continues to be available. Tell literally everyone.


I was chatting with a client recently about how the new analytics software is bad, and how there seems to be no real alternative.

This is a different energy than what happened when the big experimentation framework went away. When that went away, it went away. It wasn’t replaced by anything. This is replaced by a simulation of something that approximates the old thing, but is not the old thing and does not function like the old thing.

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#106
February 6, 2024
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Store Design is out now

This is our 400th letter. Our first one went out to 18 people, 7 of which remain. Regardless of whether you’ve been here for 1 week or all 400, we’re grateful for your support.

Store Design is now available & shipping. Tell everybody.


Shipments will be paused and Draft will be closed this Thursday, February 01, which is my birthday. How will you be celebrating?

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#105
January 30, 2024
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Alignment, Store Design, alignment

If you preordered Store Design, we’ll be reaching out to confirm your shipping address shortly. Copies should start shipping out this week. Don’t sleep!


This week, I’d like to discuss what it means to be aligned with the sort of work that we perform here at Draft. Yes, we generate lots of revenue – but we only really work well if there’s deep cultural alignment with our work practice, which is sacred. Given the current conditions, this idea feels worth reinforcing.

We’re not a sack of money button. We have a very specific and clear sense of what it means to generate revenue through the practice of store design. We possess a close perception of leveraged power as it applies to one’s work in this industry. And we disengage from all structures that provably fail to nourish us.

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#104
January 23, 2024
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Form validation, screeners, badge design

Printing of Store Design is now finished. Next up, the printer ships all the books to me, and then we ship to preorders, friends & family, and then everybody else.


We’re proud to support our clients with additional usability-focused heuristic research from Baymard Institute. To bolster our work on this front, we’ve thought about getting certified. If and only if you’re a store owner, hit reply and answer the following yes/no question with a “yes” or a “no”: would such a certification matter to you when considering whether to buy design from us?


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#103
January 16, 2024
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Human work, Store Design update, interface quality

Welcome back, everybody. Deep rest was useful for us; we’re fired up and ready to start a great new year. We’ve got so much cool stuff in the hopper that we can’t wait to share.

First up, of course, is our next book, Store Design. Proofs have been approved and the printer is producing the book right now. Once we get copies, we’ll ship to preorders, then friends & colleagues, then we’ll formally launch our onsale, and then after a little bit the price will change to reflect Store Design’s outsize value. Order now & don’t sleep!

This week, for paid members

Our first weekly paid lesson of the year is a comprehensive, evergreen response to Jakob Nielsen’s post. There is another way forward that Nielsen doesn’t immediately recognize. In it, we describe how to expand one’s design practice to be creative in a way that contemporary machine learning models can’t reasonably mimic. Who is the human behind your work?

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#102
January 9, 2024
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Year-ahead planning, tools, semantics

This is our final letter of the year before we go on break for the holidays. Thanks again for your support, now & always.

Store Design’s proofs have been approved, and book production has begun. Soon, soon.

This week, for paid members

  • Our weekly paid lesson is about how to plan your value-based design work for the following year.
  • Our design of the week is the single worst default we’ve ever seen. Sorry to end the year on a bummer note?
  • We’re throwing our last office hours of the year on Tuesday, December 19 at 1p CST. Share your glazed ham recipes! Or just talk about design. I don’t care!
  • And finally, our final teardown of the year is for Baymard 1%-er REI. You may have heard of it.
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#101
December 19, 2023
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Winter design, process & structure, care

What store design activities make the most sense to run over the winter? A few come to mind:

  • Card sorting. Remember all of that drum-beating that I’ve been doing for members about how important your nav is? Card sorts are how you rework your nav thoughtfully & profitably.
  • PDP updates. Now’s a good time to finally build that swipeable, full-bleed image gallery that you’ve seen around. It’s also a good time to fine-tune your upsells. Nothing is off the table.
  • More ambitious reworks. Now is a great time to make bolder changes that you’ve been putting off, up to and including re-theming or re-platforming your whole store. Deeper changes are lowest risk after big sale periods, because there will be reduced short-term impact and a higher likelihood of long-term optimization work. Plus, most of you did make a lot of money this past month, right?

You should probably also do what I’m doing and take some time off. You earned it.


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#100
December 5, 2023
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Design documentation, collection page heat maps, filter priority

Quiet week.


This week, for paid members

  • We held our monthly office hours, where we debated what sides to serve and nothing else.
  • Our weekly paid lesson is about how to read heat & scroll maps on collection pages.
  • And our design of the week shows that none of you learn when it comes to z-indexed elements. I know, right? During this week?
Free post
#99
November 28, 2023
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