I got interviewed for 10-Minute Ecom Success, because I’m the kind of person who can sum up a total design worldview in precisely 10 minutes. I think this turned out pretty good! My thanks to Marc for having me on the show.

Last year, I took one look at the 10-day weather forecast in Chicago and booked a flight to another continent, because I’m normal and reasonable and do things that are universally correct. You would do this, too. You work in ecommerce; you went through the holidays; you’re tired; the two-week break was not enough. Holiday closure is not vacation, either, not when the whole rest of the world stops and that’s why you give yourself permission to follow suit.

I, somewhat famously, very rarely take vacation, which is a bit the curse of running an independent business, a bit the fact that I like my job, and a bit the fact that I simply forget to, that living here is great, that vacations often involve trips and rest. I still worked a little in Paris. I did some housekeeping over the holidays. I took intermission from content in October & November, faded back a little. But I still worked that whole time; you just couldn’t see it.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, February 18 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

I’ve talked around the concept of voice & tone in past lessons, but we’ve never stabbed it dead. That happens today.

In short, voice is the essence of your brand’s approach to communication, and tone is how it changes over time. Put another way, your voice is the person, and your tone is the circumstances.

Most brands don’t have these, which sucks for two reasons:

1. Your default voice & tone are not necessarily those of your brand.

2. As you grow, inevitably multiple people will be writing. You want your writing to sound like it’s coming from the same person, and you want that to be a separate entity than the rest of you.

So let’s talk about how to build these for a small team. I’ve done this recently for one of my favorite clients, and I’m excited to share the template we used.

New case study: We redesigned Buttondown, which is both the best way to start a newsletter and the reason why you’re reading this. We’re proud of the work we’ve done, and grateful that it resulted in a 18% conversion rate bump.

If you run a software business and want to make the most of your inbound traffic, get in touch.

I’ve been reading an excellent book by David Baker recently, and one quote feels very Draft-y:

Value-based design is grounded deeply in delegation process, where it’s clear who gets to change the design and when, and it’s clear what happens if someone wants to change the design.

When these processes break down, the value-based designer loads their business’s home page and sees something surprising. Surprises are, of course, signs of low-quality decision making in immature organizations, so in this lesson we’ll talk a little about what happens when you encounter phantom changes – and how to change internal processes so they’re unlikely to ever happen again.

Let’s answer four more of Scott Berkun’s questions today. We already did three. That was fun, right? Four more.

If I know PMs and VPs often know little about design, how can I stop being surprised and disappointed? And instead be better prepared to handle these common situations?

I’m uncertain what designers are being surprised & disappointed about here, but I can guess a few:

• Work not shipping
• Fiat plays
• Terrible questions
• Critiques gone off the rails
• Being fired

Shipping does not conclude design, because only the death of business is able to conclude design. That notwithstanding, there remain deep questions about what happens to design after it’s put in front of customers.

In this lesson, we’ll talk about the measurement, governance, and maintenance of quality design. Both of these are essential forms of design, and they tend to be overlooked in organizations that incorrectly believe that design “ends” once it’s been shipped or, worse, handed off to be built. How do we stick the landing?

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

When we think of spaceholding, we normally resort to a personal context, where we console someone in crisis or grief. Or maybe we’re on a therapist’s couch, and they’re doing the work of spaceholding.

That is not what happens in design. When we speak of spaceholding at Draft, we specifically mean the process of managing the emotional & energetic tenor of others in order to get work shipped. It isn’t a whole lot different from what happens on the couch, but there’s a whole set of mostly-unspoken professional rules around it.

Imagine an invisible grid of boxes superimposed on your site. Tapping each one does something. The rules aren’t immediately clear – you need to create an interface for that. These are your tap targets.

Take a slider. You would think that tapping only the slider would control it. In practice, though, there’s an area around the slider that controls the same thing. You can safely tap white space, control the slider, and never think twice about it.

This separation between control & intent is a key pillar of mobile-first interface design. In this lesson, we’ll talk a little about tap targets, and outline how to use them in your app.

What does the present moment look like for value-based design? There are numerous opportunities for profit generation. Points of leverage always exist for us.

On the more production-grade end, design is load-bearingly critical in down-funnel activities. After all, you can never have a too high-converting checkout form.

It’s also highly useful in the more performance-based aspects of tech work, especially now that we’ve all learned to code & measure our impact. A faster-loading pricing page is likely a better-converting one.

Speaking of pricing pages, design will niche to supporting individual activities. “Pricing designers”, “onboarding designers”, and “checkout designers” will come to exist. From specialization comes real expertise.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, January 21 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Happy new year, y’all. Feels good to be back. Got a fun one this week.

In his recent excellent book The Four Conversations, consulting consultant Blair Enns describes a term called the flip, where a prospective client begins to view you as a consultant, not a contractor.

This is essentially a matter of positioning: you view yourself as an expert, talk about things that promote yourself as an expert, and hopefully the client views you as an expert, too.

One does this a few ways:

• Teaching everything they know on their mailing list (hi)

• Podcasting

• Guesting on others’ podcasts or blogs

• Writing books (also hi)

And then hopefully your prospective client comes in the door already knowing your whole deal. For the rest of them, there’s this lesson. Here, we’ll talk about the role of consultative positioning, and why it’s vital for the future of design to work in a consultative capacity.

Intermission is over. I emerged from deep rest, deleted all of my unread email, and now here we are. I hope you had a good few weeks.

First, I wrote some text about a gift I gave to myself, which was a long time coming.

When I wasn’t cooking on the aforeposted gift, I spent most of deep rest reading. Of the topics I circled around, the most Draft-pertinent regards the ongoing structural remediation of design.

The past two years have witnessed a significant collapse within contemporary design. A few hundred thousand of us were laid off by businesses who chose to abandon design. By abandoning design, businesses became more hostile towards customers. A few high-profile incidents occurred, and a term got coined, but we are really only witnessing the beginning of tech’s find-out phase.

When a team size increases past 1, it’s necessary to create a source of truth for coordination, delegation, and ongoing reference. That includes:

• What needs to be done
• What’s already been done
• Conversations around how to execute on what needs to be done
• The results of any learning or research

This is 101-level business practice, but we see organizations messing things up in key ways. In our final paid lesson before we enter deep rest for the holidays, we talk about how to create & manage sources of truth in any organization.

I got interviewed on Step by Step Business. Parmesan is also depicted on the aforelinked.

Scott Berkun is smarter than me. He wrote the book I wish I had written in this moment. His work pushes us to be better designers. And recently, he wrote a post that asked eleven questions that should be in every designer’s browser history.

While I don’t know if I personally search the web in complete sentences like that, the questions are excellent. They’re also kind of hard! Some of them likely have book-length responses, or they involve practicing design for decades. At least one of them has a really spicy answer. Another is probably answerable with therapy.

Continuing from last week’s lesson, we’d like to go deep on what happens when you start on a new team: what power you have, how you can change behavior, and how you can gather power going forward.

Power is the most important component of design. After all, learning design is pretty easy, but how do you get it shipped? How do you measure its impact? How do you get an impact?

Things are, broadly, bad. They are bad in the tech industry and bad in the world. They are bad for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that we keep using software that happens to be run by bad people.

We don’t intend on doing this. We all started using the bad software with good intentions. In this post, I’m going to outline why this happens at a very comically high level, and then I’ll leave the “actionable steps” to all of you, because you’re smart adults who can be left to their own devices.

As a disclaimer, I’m about to diss a direct competitor of one of Draft’s clients, but it wouldn’t change what I’m about to say here.

The newsletter

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, December 17 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time talking with designers about the dynamics of leveraged power. Since design is a form of leveraged power, it’s important for us to understand how power is created & worked with in any organization.

Done well, this allows our designs to ship with minimal interference. Critique goes easily. People trust you more. And you get that “seat at the table” with less mess.

When people are in the market for something, they come to your site, browse around, and have opinions. Since the fundamental question of the web is “why wasn’t I consulted”, it is necessary for us to understand what those opinions are and what we can do about them.

When someone has a conception of your business’s offerings that might hold them back from purchasing – and I mean purchasing, where money exchanges hands – we call that an objection. If the objection isn’t addressed right away, people are likely to bounce at the point of maximum interest in your product.

It’s our job as designers to understand what those objections commonly are, and how we can address them before they cause us to lose customers.

Before the internet, it used to be that you would more easily understand what the objections were – and how to head them off. People would come into your business, ask questions, and you’d use your own skills to answer them. Maybe you’d even adapt what you offer to meet their needs.

I’ve really enjoyed how thirsty stores are this Black Friday season. It’s a whole season now! I always track the first time when I see the first mention of Black Friday on any store, and this year it was September 20. It wasn’t even fall yet, and someone came out and provided early access to Black Friday, in defiance of god.

Does anyone believe this? Black Friday primes the consumer. Everybody comes in, buys at once. This is notionally good for consumers (one day, thank god) and it sucks for everyone else (imagine your warehouse, delivery networks, etc over the following week). Stretching Black Friday is notionally good for customers if and only if they believe they’re maximizing their deals.

One of my clients put up early access to Black Friday a couple of weeks ago, and they wondered why sales slowed. There are two theories:

• People don’t believe it’s the actual sale yet. They think they’re likely to get bigger discounts on Black Friday itself. Priming them for Black Friday is giving the opposite effect of what’s intended.
• America is fascist and everybody is afraid to buy stuff.