First principles, value-based design’s ramifications, UX as therapy

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First, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who wrote in about our latest letter. Things are hard out there right now! About half of my friends are fundraising just to survive. Most people don’t have jobs; many don’t want jobs. People keep getting the stupid virus.

In the pantheon of possible problems, my feeling burnout & heartbreak while my business is in financial free-fall is not bad. My body is safe & healthy; I’m still eating good food; I have shelter. This is more than I can say for the literal majority of people I know. I’m deeply grateful to be alive and a force for good in my community.

At a very high level, I am thinking about what I’ve become in the past two years, wondering what really nourishes me and can help others, and how I can work going forward. I have, perhaps unshockingly, undergone massive personal transformation since 2020, from truly staggering quantities of loss to a strong redefinition of what it is to even show up in remote work.

Ultimately, we’re all interconnected, and so at its purest I view one’s work practice as an opportunity to fit into the human experiment in a way that we all mutually value. This involves accountability (I have to make something others value) as well as inner reflection (I should do stuff I like). The Venn overlap is, ideally, Draft at any given point.

We have done this sort of self-examination thrice before. We did it when I founded Draft at the beginning of 2012, when I launched Draft Revise in 2013, and when we repositioned towards serving online stores in 2016. I think it’s okay – and, given that we’re in the tech industry, entirely healthy to shut the whole thing down every so often and restructure. It’s the opposite of a bugfix release. Sometimes you need a new architecture. Most people don’t work more than a couple of years at any one job in the tech industry, anyway. The only thing that connects my 2012 work and now is the business I’ve built for myself.

Plus, I can become a victim of my own habits. I agree to a framework for myself, something that can guide my days, and I follow that more or less blindly for months at a time. I do this to create work for my membership community, to write text, to help my clients. I do almost all of this during specific times of the day. In short, I come up with a room I can psychically live in, and then I psychically decorate it, and sometimes I invite pals like you into the room and show you around. The room has walls. Walls mean limitation, yes, but also structure. The whole thing should make legible sense, and it should be re-evaluated in a fractal sense, with the overall re-examination continuously repeating at all levels of the creative practice.

So, I am this close to setting the whole stupid room on fire and starting over. Gut rehab. I looked around one day and decided that none of this was enough, none of this was helping people or me, and gosh, why force it? And then I got fired by the source of 85% of Draft’s revenue and threw up my hands, ragestroked for two weeks, and now here we are.

Having a “whale” client is a classic blunder in consulting, yes, but I’ve also tried and failed to hire more clients for the past two years. This is a structural, systemic problem with the business. The only reason you know about it now is because the one thread connecting me to the old practice finally snapped.

So with all of that in mind, I’m trying to find more structurally nourishing pastures. Here are some things I’ve realized thus far:

• I have moved too far away from teaching. This is truly hilarious to say when I’m halfway through writing my fourth book, but it’s the honest truth. I suspect any reorganization of Draft will focus significantly more on new public work around teaching value-based design to others.
• I like working in the background. Despite literally two decades of precedent, I have never felt terribly comfortable being a public person. I like working in the margins, helping others help others.
• I am growing tired of the masculinity problems in my role in ecommerce. Yes, there are non-dudes in ecommerce, but the vast majority of people who value the kind of work we do are bean-countery dudes who think their stores are some sort of video game. I have also had a handful of profoundly transformational experiences over the past couple of years that have made my own feminist allyship incompatible with the values of the people I have come to serve. Tech is a sausage festival, yes, but there are definitely worse-off parts of it than others. I should not have to exist in professional spaces where people come to be shocked that I’m non-binary, voted for Bernie in the primary, or find cryptocurrency to be distasteful. I also should not have to exist in professional spaces where growth hacker bros get more centered than those who know that value-based design is slow, patient work.

None of this is particularly helpful in terms of what I should do, but it pours a new foundation and puts up some superstructure. You need all of that before you build your walls. I know what comes next.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for natural bodycare brand Meow Meow Tweet.
• Our design of the week calls way back to the days of Cadence & Slang, with a very wild design that breaks normative context.
• And our monthly office hours has been announced for Tuesday, September 20 at 1p CDT. Hope to see you!

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

Links & analysis

• I think pretty much everyone wants to quit their career right now, so on face this post about leaving UX isn’t terribly surprising. But still, it’s kind of depressing to see that UX has not overcome its structural issues around apprenticeship, growth, and strategic business value in the 16 years that I’ve been part of the industry.
• Ordinary wins because it’s more familiar; familiarity wins because it’s more convenient. And convenience wins every time.
• Some of these step-by-step list styles are a bit heavy-handed, but many work really well to spice up more educational-focused content.
• Comparison tables are hard. I tend to muddle through hard design problems by sticking to best practices, and then figuring out how I can nudge the design from there. Baymard has more on baseline comparison table heuristics.

This month’s free lesson: What are the ramifications of value-based design as applies to our own values?

In this month’s free lesson, I have one story and one quote for you.

The story is about a dinner that I had with a dear friend recently, who has come to lead some design operations at a consultancy you’ve heard of, for many businesses you have heard of. And we mostly came to trading war stories, talking about all of Draft’s clients who refused their necessary customer-centric mindset shifts, and all of their clients who bought design for theatrical purposes. One story involved a Fortune 100 client wasting a literal billion dollars on something that nobody ever used.

And we both just came to the gentle conclusion that ego is corrosive no matter how large your business is, and toxic masculinity is inextricable from the vagaries of late capitalism. There’s a vast gulf between the desire to buy design and the process of accepting it. People are either going to be psychically open to accepting design or they aren’t.

And alas, I don’t show up to work every day so I can perform theatre. I show up to work every day to practice design with people who actually want me to practice design, and who economically support the business by buying design from us. 100% of the clients who renewed with us knew how to accept design.

I have come to the conclusion that I am unable to teach people about the economic and ethical ramifications of accepting design. By the time we’re talking, you either get it or you don’t. I can’t convince you. In 2022, your willingness to accept design is as archetypally entrenched as your political leaning. That’s it. You get this or you don’t. There’s nothing more I can do for you.

The quote came from a book I read that said, approximately, that people either want to be right or they want to be happy. Applied here, then, if you want to be right all the time, you really shouldn’t be buying design. Design fundamentally undermines your assumptions as a continuous practice. If you’re more concerned with your happiness, though, as well as the happiness of those you serve, then you probably do want to buy design, and you’re more likely to accept what it’s trying to tell you.

To the other designers reading this, I’d invite you to express some careful discernment about what kind of person you’re talking to, and to walk away from relationships that fail to generate the sort of impact you joined this industry for. Your actualization depends on it.

Thanks for the sponsorship, Blink!

Blink is a specialist eCommerce SEO agency, grounded in data science. We know eCommerce – and DTC – inside out, and typically we grow organic revenue by at least 100% with 12 months for our clients. To find out more visit blinkseo.co.uk or follow us on LinkedIn.