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.

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:

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

Store Design has been sent to the printer. Still on track for a January delivery.

Rest is necessary, of course. In what specific ways have you rested this month?

Draft will be closed this coming Friday in honor of my dog’s birthday. In this moment, I invite you to reply with the specific ways in which you will be reflecting on Basil on the occasion of his birthday. Thank you.

This week, for paid members

• Our office hours are a week from today, Tuesday, November 21 at 1p CDT. Want to talk to a value-based designer about what to do over the weekend? I have a very good stuffing recipe.
• Our weekly paid lesson is about nav reworks. The options you give customers defines how they behave on your store. Are you making the right choices? How do you find out?
• Our fortnightly teardown is for apparel brand Marfa Stance.
• And our design of the week covers a truly curious way of displaying collection text.

Final edits on Store Design have come back. Now I get to final-final edit it and send it off to the printer.

Still on track for arrival in the next few months.

This week, for paid members

This article on the feminization of design and attendant restructuring of “web design” into “front-end development” is an absolutely essential read.

If you’ve been following my letters for any period of time, you’ll find some parallels between what’s happening here and the shift from design to “product” that has happened over the past decade. For almost its entire history, the tech industry has involved women getting into a field, that field being proven to show value, and men taking over that field. This happened to programming itself in the 50s & 60s.

There is materially no energetic difference between what happened then and what is happening to design now. Or how support has turned into customer experience. Take note.

In the department of “things that should happen but won’t,” we have Jakob Nielsen talking about ‘vocabulary inflation’ with respect to design. “UX” is design. “Product” is design. “Design systems” are design. It is all just design.

People choose to label design as something else in order to appease stakeholders in power who incorrectly devalue the outsize economic impact of design as a practice. One of the more minor consequences of design’s structural failure to take a “seat at the table” is that I guess we don’t get to call what we do design anymore. Being disempowered to do our jobs is a bigger issue. Being laid off en masse is a bigger issue. Ending up with stuff like this is a bigger issue.

The answer is not to rebrand ourselves as “product,” and do nothing else to leverage our power. The answer is to understand design’s power, claim it, and learn how to move within business.

Edits have wrapped up on Store Design. Now we move into final typeset, preflight, and then printing.

This week, for paid members

• Our weekly lesson talks about the economic value of customer education. How does one do this well, in a way that separates the best brands from the rest?
• Our design of the week shows the biggest home page fail we’ve seen in a while. And then we show you another one. On the same page. Hilarious!
• And our fortnightly teardown is for carry & apparel brand Filson.

Our editors have kicked off our final editing pass on Store Design, and our work should be off to the printer within the next six weeks. Gosh, isn’t that exciting? I’m excited.

This week, Shopify is rolling out a new checkout system. It’s kind of wild: as a value-based designer I usually find high leverage in checkout improvements. Working on Shopify, I have very little latitude in what we can do with checkout. As this new checkout page rolls out, we’ll have even less latitude. So ultimately, one hopes for the best, and surrenders to Shopify and what they want. Ultimately, I think these improvements are a good thing, although they are clearly more about Shopify’s long-term corporate direction than any palpable improvement for the customer.

There are three sets of stakeholders when Shopify rolls out any change: Shopify, Shopify’s customers (online stores), and Shopify’s customers’ customers (actual customers).

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In therapy lately, I have been processing some feelings about how design is received among the economic buyers of my industry. In short, because design is a form of leveraged power, and because power dynamics have shifted towards more toxic structures, people have consciously chosen to remove the power of designers and create more hostile experiences on the web. Designers are losing jobs, reworking their job titles, or leaving the industry entirely. The pendulum will swing back towards us someday, as it must, but for now things are grim.

Presumably, you read these updates because you want to learn how to practice design better. Or you like what we do here at Draft and want to keep tabs on our business. Or you just think I’m a cool space alien, and you like basking in my piles of words? Either way, I’m a designer, I’m going to remain a designer, and we’ve suffered through design winters before. Draft has so far survived a financial crisis, a fascist uprising, an ongoing war in Europe, and a global pandemic.

And now, blessedly, we are booked through the rest of the year, and so we will be winding down the receipt of new consultative operations until at least February. We are grateful to those who understand the outsize economic value of design, and are willing to act accordingly.

It’s my job to make design legible & understandable to you. It is not my job to manage how you receive what I have to say. Maybe you think listening to customers isn’t a good use of your time, or you think you have better ideas than they do. I don’t agree, of course, but ultimately you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and I’m going to do what I’m going to do.

I finished line edits for Store Design last week. This happens on a printed document, and so the next steps are:

• Type up all of the changes
• Final conceptual pass to add anything that might be missing
• Line edit of anything that gets added (this will take way less time)
• Hand off to someone else to do a final copy edit & preflight
• Get the thing printed
• Get the thing shipped to me
• Get the thing shipped from me to you

This sounds like a lot, but some of these phases are going to be quite short. We’re still on track for a year-end delivery, but this will be my first post-pandemic printing rodeo, and so I wouldn’t be too surprised if this pushes into January or February.

I’m proud of this work. I believe it will act as the definitive statement on store design for at least the next ten years. Preorders continue to be available. Thanks, as always, for your support of our work.

One of the most interesting things about my job has been the tension between evidence & agenda. Does anyone speak of this? It feels like maybe no. We are now here, in this place.

When one comes to the table with an agenda, they must as a rule either fundamentally ignore evidence, or misread it with intent to execute on their agenda. This is obvious, a structure of incorrectly overleveraged power, and it must be named if design is ever to reclaim its authority.

When listening to evidence, one lets go of their agenda and puts the power in the hands of the customer, where it belongs. One must come to the evidence with a clear head, with no expectations, preparing to be surprised & challenged.

Customers are supposed to challenge us. They are supposed to push our business forward. There is always a path outside of the one we think we know.

The last time I chatted with Kurt, he remarked out loud ahead of time that store design is one of the most widely misunderstood profitable practices in ecommerce. And as I’ve written Store Design our the past year, I’ve wondered: why is design so hard to understand?

• Design has an eternal identity problem. We don’t know what to call ourselves, and so people don’t know how to understand us. Many people don’t even know what we do.
• Because design is the strongest form of leveraged power in an organization, designers have become structurally disempowered by business strategists, executives, and other workers.
• We don’t have peers who practice design – at least not as we recognize it. As a result, we don’t know what “good” design looks like, and we lean into “bad” design patterns. (90% of our teardown work exists to identify obvious errors that store owners lack the peer group to isolate themselves.)
• Because online stores incorrectly believe that they are not existing within technology, they don’t know how to hire for design or development roles, and so don’t know how to be discerning with respect to quality talent in these areas. As a result, quality talent often leaves for other industries.

Value-based designers struggle to prove themselves in the best of times, and right now is not the best of times. That’s why our case studies have such outsize value – and why we keep generating them as we get more wins.

If you run a store or know someone who does, and you want to benefit from the outsize economic impact that design is capable of, one consulting slot is available. Reach out and let’s get started.