Moving beyond the screen to the ecosystem will save Design
Last night in Glendale, after hearing Jared Spool give an extraordinary talk about the growth of a new domain for design from screens and applications to organizations and ecosystems, I spoke to several leaders in the local UX community whose design teams are either facing layoffs and reorgs or are being wildly misallocated in terms of abilities and impact. The crux of Jared’s message was clear: design is much broader than pixels and the tools of design can have much greater impact when allowed. Through the example of the erroneous Hawaii Missile Alert, he stated that “Design is the rendering of intent and governance is the owning of intent.” Design methods from a user perspective, can have far greater impact in an organization when applied to the entire ecosystem than to just the product design.
“Design is the rendering of intent and governance is the owning of intent.” — Jared Spool
In every company I have worked at, I have strived to bring my design skills to enhance areas beyond the product and demonstrate that design is more than just pixels and colors. I have always stated that anywhere that a brand and a user meet is design. But even that is thinking small.
After the talk, I spoke to UX Directors, Managers and leaders at many large scale, very successful companies who are in the midst of reorgs leaving the fate of their teams uncertain. One told me how the CFO was now leading product and is directing the design team as if he had read a couple articles online about how to build a product. In my recent job search, I am seeing a lot of Senior UI/UX roles with criminally undervalued salaries attached. As a result, no one is happy and the products are suffering.
It became clear that design teams continue to be stuck in Application and Screen design and are not growing beyond their potential because, as has always seemed to be the case, design is seen is window dressing.
In previous roles, I have worked hard to bring design methodologies to areas outside of the product, such as marketing or recruiting. Here’s an example: a successful, but ultimately boring enterprise software company is looking to hire the top engineers in the city but is relying on a recruiting staff ill-equipped to woo candidates in the same way that a sexy startup can, because they are entirely inclusive and don’t understand the service design needed for this caliber of candidate. To that end, ugly and unclear benefits info sheets are created by recruiters in Microsoft Word and in-person interviews don’t make candidates feel welcome or at home and already part of the team. Simple things, such as having the front desk recognize the candidate and address them by name and offering them a beverage (or swag) makes a difference. These are parts of a process that are designed.
I am currently working on the redesign of the voting system for LA County for the 2020 election. This is a project that goes well beyond the design of the new voting booth, the touchscreen interfaces for voters, the tactile controller for the blind or the diagnostic lights for the volunteer poll workers. When this project was initially kicked off, the goal was to redesign the voting machines only. What quickly became clear is that in order to effectively do this, the entire infrastructure would need to be upgraded. Last week, I visited the Election Operations Center to learn how the behind-the-scenes process of voting happens and let’s just say, it’s kind of a miracle that voting works as well as it does.
Two weeks ago, my team sat down to have a conversation on the topic of, “what is the overall impact strategy for our UX team.” By the end of that meeting, we rebranded ourselves the “Experience Team.” And the reason for that is exactly what Jared Spool discussed last night: we need to have greater impact on the ecosystem of voting. We need to understand how county officials work. We need to help them design a new warehouse to hold all the new voting machines. We need to support the county in getting the word out on an entirely new system and process (11 days, any voting center!) for the election. We need to understand how electronic registration and vote-by-mail will be impacted. We need to help design the web interfaces that will support the ability to pre-mark your ballot on your computer or phone. We need to help direct the training materials and videos for poll workers. The entire ecosystem needs to be designed holistically to avoid confusion, influence or disenfranchisement.
To have us only focus on the individual screens of a ballot marking device is not only thinking small, it is disingenuous to the nature of this historic project. It became instantly clear that we would now be an Experience Team. Will we instantly gain purview to all the parts of the process we feel we should to be effective? No. But this gives us the vision and the desire to be more impactful and to fight for what we feel is right and do the work to prove it so. It gives us a new angle to speak from when we lobby for more user testing in a constrained schedule. Most importantly, it gives me a reason to get up everyday, and travel across town by train to do something big and important and make a difference. I can push pixels at home. I can’t save democracy without having the necessary conversations to make it so.
So when I hear about reorgs and layoffs and design teams suffering by constraining requirements and nonsensical requests or I hear about design leaders lamenting that they aren’t impactful enough, I can see Jared’s point:
Different resolutions have different problems and demand different solutions.
We must strive to use our design skills beyond the pixel, and affect how business is done in the organization and the ecosystem. Otherwise, design is doomed to fail as designers get paid less and jobs decrease. If designers can change their resolution, they become more valuable to the company and have more ownership in the intent.
