The design process is broken
And here’s how we can fix it.
I hate to break the bad news, but something we dread about has happened. The process we use to design our products is broken.
I see two reasons for this. We are waging a conflicted battle between two priorities. The first is desire for growth. And the second is need to ensure user satisfaction.
On their own, both of them are important concerns and the struggle ensues when there is a conflict between the two.
In this article, I have explained how these two conflicting priorities result from two kinds of approaches to the design process. One that is driven by business needs and another that is driven by user needs. In order to balance the two, I propose a third kind of approach that focuses on core values. This will provide the design process with a beacon that will bring about the much needed balance.
Greed is good
“Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
Gordon Gekko in Wall Street
This is a maxim that capitalism runs on. We have seen this being played out daily. In the race to become the next unicorn, every startup makes decisions based on this maxim. And when you look at it, there is some truth to it. When the business needs drive design, we can have extensive KPIs in place and monitor conversion and revenue so closely that the entire design can be optimized to provide maximum value to the promoters, shareholders and maybe even the employees. This looks good.
But more often than not, we see that this greed comes before a fall. Today, Facebook, that was once the poster boy of the Silicon Valley is facing flack for prioritizing design decisions based on a greed of more user engagement and monetizing user privacy through surveillance capitalism.
That need not have been the case. Facebook started on with a stated value to “Connect the world”. However it did not stay true to the value.
Imagine if the Facebook mission had been something like this–
We wish to connect the world so that everybody finds meaning in life
The whole approach would have been different. If Facebook had stuck to the above value, it would not have been sidelined by unethical ways to suck contacts. Sticking to the core value would have stopped Facebook from ignoring privacy and sharing user behavior with suspect advertisers.
Ease of use is never bad
“I suspect the functionality and ease-of-use of these devices lead us to become lazy and to lose awareness of ourselves, others and our surroundings.”
Steve Levine
Now here is something that has been drilled into us at design school. However of late, people are beginning to question this thought.
Seven years after Facebook first introduced its friction-less experience, almost all of today’s social media platforms like Snapchat and Twitter, make it trivially easy to broadcast messages to huge audiences. This has been the source of innumerable problems, including foreign influence campaigns, viral misinformation and ethnic violence. YouTube’s most famous frictionless feature — the auto-playing function that starts another video as soon as the previous one has finished — has created a rabbit-hole effect that often leads viewers down a path to increasingly extreme content.
Today, in fact there are editorials that serious ask, Is Tech too easy to use?
Again if we revisit the revised value statement that we had framed for Facebook, as a designer, we would have questioned the benefit of features like this.
And not all of the examples of easy to use bad technology is found in social networking. The Netflix binge enabler, Amazon One Click Buy and even the Sub Prime Loans are examples where the business needs are made easy to use. But they may not align with the values. Hence in the long run these easy to use features will be detrimental.
Unfortunately, user centered design does not have metrics to measure these types of long term ill effects. It’s only that people like Tristan Harris who are bringing it up, but they too seem to concentrate on the ill effects of social media.
Using the values to guide the design
People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
Simon Sinek
The best way to guide your design is by defining your values and ensuring that you stick to them. This way your entire team and your customers and other stakeholders know WHY you are building your product. And by always keeping this core value, your product why, in sight — the designs you build will be more meaningful.
Your ideal design will be one where all three goals (business, user and value) are met. However this is not always possible. So this is a guide that you can use to prioritize your design decisions.
How to run a value centered design process.
Now that you know why you need a new design process, let me quickly tell you a bit more about the value centered design process.
There are four main stages to running a value centered design process:
- Value discovery
- Explore strategies
- Execute in iterations
- Solicit continuous appraisals
This is the Value Centered Design flow diagram that I have shared in my earlier articles.
Each design will start with the core value discovery process and run through a set of phases that most of us might seem familiar with. But there are some differences.
I will expand on this process in my next article which has just gone up here:
Originally published at www.navneetnair.com.
