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?
Leverage points
There are a handful of places where one can get meaningful impact using value-based design. They each contain trade-offs. They include:
- Software pricing funnels. High CLTV, low conversion rate – and hence low signal to be working with in experimentation.
- Checkout pages. Increasingly locked down by platform vendors, but you can find a lot of custom Stripe builds out there - and all of them have some potential for improvement.
- Home pages. High impact, but also high political risk. You learn a lot about a business when you see their emotional response to load-bearing changes to their home page, especially their masthead.
- Navigation. Nobody gets it right – it is the pain with no name. Huge chance to fix it.
- Copy. Early businesses especially mess up their copy, retreating to safety at the expense of emotional resonance.
- Store PDPs, especially in low-SKU stores. Most stores punt to defaults when building product detail pages – or they rip off Amazon.
- Retention, which is an extremely on-trend, high-reward activity that requires deep understanding of many touchpoints, from the site itself to email marketing to customer experience.
These are just a few expensive problems, but you get the idea.
Other dimensions
Niching to specifically one of these is perhaps unwise positioning, since design is holistic and never happens in a vacuum. What are other axes of positioning that one can follow?
- Industry. “We do design for apparel brands,” say.
- Size. “We work for enterprise brands,” for instance.
- Conditions, such as growth state, inbound traffic, etc.
No wrong answers, but we have to pick something to pursue. Our positioning is currently not serving us as well as I think it could.
I am, as mentioned, mildly terrified
We exist at a tremendous opportunity to reconsider what the practice looks like right now, and what kind of impact we stand to get from it. What can design look like now? If you’d like to answer this alongside us, we invite you to reach out.
This week, for paid members
- This week’s paid lesson talks about how to differentiate between a flagship product and a secondary offering.
- We dunked on a thing for last week’s design of the week, so this week we found something nicer.
- Our fortnightly teardown is for a regular makeup store.
- And lastly, our monthly office hours are next week, Tuesday July 16 at 1p CDT. Look forward to seeing you!
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Links
- An all-timer from Baymard, showing how to pare back checkout forms to make them more usable & performant.
- Exceptional work on how to make data tables easier to read. (Soft paywall; archive link.)
- Design patterns for our current apocalypse. Useful!
- How to skill up.