What is the present moment for value-based design?
What does the present moment look like for value-based design? There are numerous opportunities for profit generation. Points of leverage always exist for us.
On the more production-grade end, design is load-bearingly critical in down-funnel activities. After all, you can never have a too high-converting checkout form.
It’s also highly useful in the more performance-based aspects of tech work, especially now that we’ve all learned to code & measure our impact. A faster-loading pricing page is likely a better-converting one.
Speaking of pricing pages, design will niche to supporting individual activities. “Pricing designers”, “onboarding designers”, and “checkout designers” will come to exist. From specialization comes real expertise.
When it comes to profitable research, design remains useful for auditing & addressing objections, creating a confident voice & tone, and defining a competitive landscape. Obviously, research on its own has concluded; what people want now is the results of that research. Value-based designers will focus on the specific outcomes of research. We used to spend a lot of time on describing the process side of things, but truly who cares anymore? Think about what businesses are getting, instead.
Design has a future because the current era of platform collapse has no future. Rentier capitalism has no future. But tech does have a future, and that’s where we come in.
Knowing there remains strong economic leverage for classical design, the question, then, becomes that of impact. What would a confident voice be worth to a business? 10% more topline? 20%? We’ve seen those numbers conservatively in the past. Most businesses don’t understand design well enough to practice it a as a cultural value – which is why they hire us.
What about the opposite? What happens when ego-driven executives fire designers, then ram through low-quality updates before they’re ready? Here, designers act as insurance. Will anyone in their right mind economically support the aforelinked anti-design brand again? Of course not.
The lesson for you: when all else fails, value-based designers can always appear to the fear impulse. I personally hate doing this because I’m more of a conscious-envisioning-the-future sort of human, but it’s nice as a last resort, you do you, etc.
And so I’m tremendously excited for the upcoming year for design. Tech is in its find-out phase. So is design, really. One day, very soon, we’ll learn how to get along with one another again.