Store Design continues to be available. Tell literally everyone.
I was chatting with a client recently about how the new analytics software is bad, and how there seems to be no real alternative.
This is a different energy than what happened when the big experimentation framework went away. When that went away, it went away. It wasn’t replaced by anything. This is replaced by a simulation of something that approximates the old thing, but is not the old thing and does not function like the old thing.
The new thing is bad, in a profound objective sense, and further work on it is unlikely to redeem it. There is no page speed. There is no conversion rate until you turn it on, and even then there’s a massive discrepancy which probably has a neckbeard explanation that nobody will care about.
Some of my clients have frantically attempted to replace the bad software with something that provides real quantitative insight. The dashboard, in this case, is a security blanket for the left brained, something that provides comfort without the necessary responsibility of doing the real work. Numbers matter, yes, but only to a point, because they always hide a story. What matters more is how those numbers are read. What narrative lies underneath.
And so we have found ourselves reacting to the new very bad analytics software by doing what we do best, which is to recognize soft collapse when we see it and to disengage accordingly. We have found there to be no real alternative at present. What are you going to do, segment on your Shopify dashboard? Good luck getting back to the same place you were at before. Break international law by attempting to do black-hat stuff? Shopify is going to clamp down on that stuff so fast it will make your head spin.
Obviously, what takes the place will be qualitative, narrative, rooted in the lived experiences of real people. Qualitative research is a massive competitive differentiator at present, since it is comparatively easy to do and likely to yield deep revenue-generating insight. While the rest of you try to get the numbers to line up, the value-based designer takes note & acts accordingly.
We speak of the awkward-but-accurate bile-mouthful enshittification as design experiences deep winter and leveraged power exerts across tech. The low quality of experience is the result of capital making objectively incorrect decisions regarding design.
The answer is to make capital pay. Enshittification should have a direct economic consequence. Fight back wherever we can, by protesting against the degradation of experience and not using products that degrade accordingly.
This is not possible sometimes, and it is eminently possible at other times. One reclaims dignity by walking away. We learn through our witness.
If you possess enough disposable capital to support paid products that exist in right relationship to customer needs, now would be a great time to invest in a higher quality experience. If you’re feeling disillusioned by a product and you want to walk away, remember that you can. Life will go on. It might even be a little nicer.
This week, for paid members
- Our design of the week shows the tension that exists when soliciting a custom-made product.
- Our weekly paid lesson is about design debt for large-SKU stores. When do you redesign, and how?
- And our fortnightly teardown is for a very small store, The Observer Collection. Remember splash screens? They’re back! For… some reason.
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Links
- A unified theory.
- Herman Miller’s brand guidelines.
- From NN/g, how to notify.
- Notes on the structure of design. In order for design to survive, the whole industry must acquire a close perception of leveraged power. Where does the money come from? What power are we able to exert? How are we able to identify nourishing structure and conscious allyship?
- Onboarding for Letterboxd through a JTBD lens, although the slides are a bit awkward.
- The cost of personalization. I’m increasingly convinced that personalization is a low-impact strategy for most businesses.