How design is received, design authority & leveraged power, tracking changes

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.

Draft tends to reconfigure itself lightly during the winter, always a time of hibernation, reflection, and rest. I am excited to witness the specific ways in which the business turns towards structural nourishment. After all, we have no other option.

Line edits for Store Design have been typed up. Final editing comes next.

This week, for paid members

• Our design of the week shows a minimal buy box. How is this buy box governed? How are decisions made to change it?
• And our weekly paid lesson discusses design authority. Who has the ability to make decisions, settle debates, and manage the process writ large?
• Finally, our monthly office hours have been scheduled for Tuesday, September 19 at 1p CDT. Turn up and ask questions!

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Links

• I’ve found Visualping to be useful as of late for defanging the toxically masculine trend of making design decisions by fiat without the value-based designer’s knowledge. Train it on every key page in your funnel, set it to ping you on any sort of change, and make it check every hour. You’ll find out if someone incorrectly overwrote your masthead or headline pretty quickly!
• As one moves their value-based design into a more consultative realm, they’ll slowly find that they are managing more of the therapy side of executive work. Towards that end, this deck of cognitive biases is useful for uncovering how teams may be thinking – and what we, as a collective, can do to grow past them. (Scroll down for a Miro template.)
• Once again, Baymard confirms what we’ve been saying for a while now: you should offer multiple payment methods, especially PayPal & Apple Pay.
• NN/g’s latest study guide is all about web user experience. Do we care about that here? Do we?