Designing for two worlds at once
How to integrate communication, reasoning, and empathy to solve business and user needs
Designers are responsible for pleasing various groups of people. The two most common are the users who interact with our designs for a product or service, and the other is the business stakeholders who represent and market the same products or services. Each group has a distinct set of values and desires that require special attention. Understanding these needs will help designers develop and mediate mutual design goals to deliver successful outcomes for both groups.
The following lists contain common user and business needs that designers typically must consider when creating compositions or solving design problems:
User Needs
- Intuitive, satisfying, trustworthy, accessible, and reliable
Business Needs
- Profitable, low overhead, deliverability, measurable, and scalable
Design Mediator
Sometimes, what is best for the business is not always best for the user, and vice versa. For example, displaying advertisements or restricting content and features is far from an ideal user experience. However, these friction points are sometimes necessary for businesses to produce revenue.
The best way to fulfill the goals of both the users and businesses is through strategic, rational, and empathetic thinking — and, most importantly, effective communication.
Designers must communicate a variety of proposed and objective needs for each group and determine their design impact on each other. We must then articulate assertively our specific design solutions that can solve these potential problems.
Anyone who has been designing for a while understands that good design is more than just aesthetics. Learning about communication techniques, coding, marketing, psychology, and even personality types can help deliver more effective designs instead of spending hours researching the perfect drop shadow.
Example: The popular subscription form request
Let us pretend that you currently provide design services for a company that publishes news to a website. To deliver the expected revenue and audience growth for the fourth quarter, its stakeholders have requested a subscription popup form to appear for non-subscribers visiting the site. Their suggestion is to display the popup 5 seconds after the user visits the website. And to make it stand out, they have asked for the headline text to be vibrant red and sparkling to get the reader’s attention, of course.
This hypothetical scenario will make most designers cringe, but it happens all the time. Unfortunately, many passive junior designers, including my younger self, have produced terrible designs from similar style requests because when our bosses, clients, and other experienced business professionals who get paid more than us ask us to do something, we do it without question.
However, an experienced designer who listens and communicates effectively can translate business jargon to ascertain the vital information. Which, in this case, is the need to obtain more subscribers to meet business objectives. This information will craft a better solution that provides new subscribers and a positive user experience while maintaining design integrity.
The first step is to communicate the user’s needs alongside the stakeholder goals. In this case, the combined goal is to provide value and a positive user experience while persuading non-subscribers to subscribe. This description is a sincere and succinct statement that most reasonable stakeholders would agree makes sense. It is essential to articulate a solution that delivers first with intent, then content.
A designer could suggest that instead of a disruptive popup with sparkling red text that appears five seconds after a user hits the site, maybe offering something of value, such as allowing a non-subscriber to visit two free article pages before the subscription popup appears may be a more effective solution—explaining that this method provides more value to the user in the long run. While this type of suggestion tends to fall into the heavier UX and marketing arenas, designers who understand the entire customer experience (CX) and how it impacts the overall design can tell the whole story more effectively, which helps to persuade design solutions from a holistic and strategic perspective.
Next, a designer may suggest implementing a softly animated popup that uses colors and fonts to reinforce the branding. And a semi-transparent dark or light layer behind the popup to create contrast allowing the user to focus on the subscription callout. This solution interprets the essence of the original stakeholder request and will deliver the same results with a better user experience.
These kinds of design suggestions highlight your understanding of the business and empathy for the user. However, it is worth mentioning that sometimes communication techniques such as this do not always work. Some clients and stakeholders can be stubborn and unwilling to trust their design experts.
The skills are within us
The ability to recognize the needs of the business and the user is a fundamental perspective that will allow any designer to grow and succeed in a professional setting. As designers, we get caught between two worlds with sometimes complex and contradictory objectives. Nonetheless, designers can deliver fantastic designs if we stick with our knowledge of design principles and communicate using a combination of business logic and user empathy.
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