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.

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.

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For years, our consulting projects have concluded with an unpublished offer for us to remain on retainer to address anything that may come up.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.

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.

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.