[VBD] The three pillars of value-based design

Design is in crisis.

Designers are being laid off en masse in a broader power grab amidst a major economic downturn. In fact, layoffs.fyi shows over 535,000 people laid off since the beginning of 2022 – which, granted, are not all designers, but.

Our field became commoditized as buyers misunderstood the process & impact of our work. Incompetent people in power think they can practice some form of unresearched “design,” and then they make machines do it for them. Fortunately, there is a better way, and that is to restore design to its original purpose – which fundamentally can’t be automated.

Since our publication of the evergreen Value-Based Design five years ago, the kind of design we practice has only become more urgent. Tech writ large has focused too much on power & vibes, and not enough on creating durable business. Communities exist that fight against all of this, but they’re few & far between. People are learning the true purpose of design, but slowly, gradually, in small places.

Fortunately, everybody has to start somewhere. You can, too. Value-based design has three key components: research, measurement, and experimentation.

Pillar 1: Research

Design represents the union of business goals with customer needs. Research is essential to any design process. As a result, value-based designers must research customer behavior and desires, in order to create something that works for everyone.

Put another way: you can have pretty without research. You can even have functional, or useful. But you cannot have design.

Research activities include:

• Interviewing customers on the phone or Skype.
• Running post-purchase surveys.
• Planning, executing, and analyzing deep-dive annual surveys of all customers.
• Running usability tests of example transactions, either in person or remotely.
• Performing card sorts of existing product offerings.
• Running and exploring heat & scroll maps.
• Segmenting and exploring analytical data.

This pillar is the most “design-y” of the three. It’s the one that, as of this writing, designers are practicing most frequently.

Yet it’s also the mandatory part of design that is incorrectly cut from budgets, devalued internally, and executed sloppily.

Fortunately, within a value-based design practice, researched ideas are more likely to translate into long-term economic wins for the business. This is because the other two pillars of value-based design serve research’s core function: to understand the motivations, desires, and needs of paying customers.

Pillar 2: Measurement

Value-based designers measure the economic impact of their design decisions – as well as the long-term economic impact of their work.

This means the value-based designer spends a lot of time in analytics tools, business intelligence dashboards, and click & scroll maps.

Measurement is holistic and all-encompassing; it doesn’t apply to one single decision, but to the overall portrait of the business’s health over time. Put another way, value-based designers not only measure the impact of specific decisions through analytics; they also assess overall changes in behavior, trying to understand what customers are doing and why.

Value-based designers also create new metrics that act as proxies for business success. For example, corporate messaging platform Slack discovered that teams which send 2,000 messages in aggregate are 93% likely to stick with the platform, grow, and ladder up to paid plans. It stands to reason, then, that Slack’s fundamental goal is to get people to send more messages – not necessarily to convert right away.

Finding the goal for your business is not easy, and it may shift over time. Yet doing so will result in a greater focus on what matters to the business – both experientially (for the customers) and economically (for the business’s continued growth and success).

Designers farm this work out to executives, sales, marketing, or “data people” at their peril. Measurement is the core way that most businesses make decisions. Designers who incorporate measurement into their skill sets are more likely to be given a proverbial seat at the table – without having their decisions overridden by the HiPPO.

Always remember that value-based design helps a designer get closer to the inner workings of a business’s operations. A designer can’t do that by ceding control of their business’s most important conversation.

Pillar 3: Experimentation

The third pillar of value-based design measures the economic impact of design decisions through experimentation. The reasons for this are twofold:

1. All design is speculative until it’s put in front of paying customers. Experimentation allows you to understand the specific impact that a design decision will have on the business.
2. Experimentation is a hedge on risk. Keep what works, throw away what doesn’t, and grow the business accordingly.

Experimentation is an extension of the scientific method to the design process. First, you state a hypothesis: that a specific change (the design decision) will improve a specific metric (e.g. conversions, ARPU, etc.) by a specific magnitude (5%, say).

Then, you send equal proportions of the control (the original design) and the variant (the new design) to your customers.

Finally, you measure which performs better, use your findings as research to inform your future design direction, and repeat with a new change.

Done right, experimentation allows the value-based designer to surrender their ego to the needs, desires, and motivations of the business’s customers – which ultimately puts the customers in control.

Formerly the sole purview of internal, home-rolled frameworks and cumbersome, hard-to-understand enterprise apps, experimentation has never been easier to execute.

With contemporary experimentation frameworks, the value-based designer can rapidly prototype new, research-based decisions, measure their economic impact on the business, roll them out to all customers, and measure their long-term influence on the business.

Another world is possible

I recently had a friend visit for the weekend who works in the industry, and she sighed that everybody is now focusing on revenue as a metric. Of course they are. They run businesses. That’s the whole point. I did what I could to hold space, but I was privately delighted, since our consultancy has focused exclusively on value generation since our founding.

Since launching our value-based design workshop a few months ago, we’ve watched people notch quite a few wins in their own work. Some learned how to research better. Others figured out how to run experiments to de-risk business operations. Still more are incorporating our process holistically into their roles. Even developers are taking notes from our playbook! We love to see how beautifully cross-disciplinary this work can be.

Over the next few days, we’ll talk more about what value-based design can be for you and your practice – and how you can take action to join our growing movement.