One of the most interesting things about my job has been the tension between evidence & agenda. Does anyone speak of this? It feels like maybe no. We are now here, in this place.
When one comes to the table with an agenda, they must as a rule either fundamentally ignore evidence, or misread it with intent to execute on their agenda. This is obvious, a structure of incorrectly overleveraged power, and it must be named if design is ever to reclaim its authority.
When listening to evidence, one lets go of their agenda and puts the power in the hands of the customer, where it belongs. One must come to the evidence with a clear head, with no expectations, preparing to be surprised & challenged.
Customers are supposed to challenge us. They are supposed to push our business forward. There is always a path outside of the one we think we know.
This week, for paid members
- Our design of the week is hilarious. Probably an app, maybe executed okay, gets a couple big things wrong, nothing unfixable. Bravo, maybe?
- Our monthly paid lesson covers shared research dynamics. How do you collaborate with others on synthesis?
- We answered some questions about PDP descriptions and upsell flows for members. Remember that paid members can always ping me about anything facing their businesses, and I’ll be happy to answer as best I can.
- And we held our monthly office hours, where we talked about all things value-based design. Join us to hang out next time!
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Links
- Learning design.
- Enforcing hard breakpoints is considered harmful. Why? Because no two viewports are alike, functionally speaking.
- A tremendous deep-dive into interview execution from Stéphanie Walter. Absolute goldmine of insight. Bookmarking this for the future.
- Today in Betteridge’s Law. This article could have been one word long.
- Build filters instead of advanced search We’re currently on a major refactoring project with an active client, and one of the things we see coming through on usability tests is the need to have better filters, instead of subcategories. Filters are hard to get right across the board, especially if you have a lot of SKUs. They are a project. They are designed.
- Baymard’s latest is all about what summary text you should provide on individual items on collection pages. Most people don’t even provide summary text at all.
- Example recruitment emails for customer interviews. I loved this. I wish more people showed their processes around interviewing, especially on the essential topic of recruitment. These are well-written and worth exploring. Kudos to the author for compiling them.
- Oh, you say designers should learn business? There’s a book for that.