The balance between tactics & spaceholding, experimentation reporting, “mixed methods”

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?

I feel that I’m fairly well-equipped to answer some of these questions, but doing so will also create a tension with the more rigorous side of the practice. I invite you feedback as to what the right middle path looks like in this moment.

This week, for paid members

• This week’s paid lesson covers experimentation reporting accuracy, from QA to A/A testing.
• Our design of the week shows the single worst nav decision we’ve ever seen in 12 years of work in this industry. Sometimes they’re good! Sometimes they’re this.
• And our fortnightly teardown is for New York art institution Printed Matter. How does their store manage to be such a close reflection of their in-person experience?

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Links

• Design is a form of leveraged power.
• Apparently we’re calling the Draft Method “mixed methods experimentation” now? Okay. Regardless, the aforelinked is a lovely post on how to blend quantitative & qualitative research insight to generate outsize profit. Worth a look to see how a bigger agency does it!
• Gosh, what if we actually tried to help each other? What would that look like?
• Classification of design systems. How complete is yours?