UX data – Superavi

Escape routes from dead end Design careers

Posted on July 17, 2018July 17, 2018

Entering the design profession is sometimes like love at first sight, but it can also be something you simply want to do and learn to respect. Design is one of the most popular fields for people to move into from other professions.

Design has been called many things in the past, but even as a definition it’s referring to a multitude of activities across times. Within the design profession there are people who are more creative and some that are more scientific in their approach. Some people can draw, other can write, and some can think, but designers have to study all of these and continually try to be better at them all. At this given point of time the most popular design roles are UX, UI, and Graphic Designer and I’m focused on these when I refer to ‘design’.

In this article I will explore the reasons for transitioning in and out of design, the have baked approaches that companies have developed towards sustaining designers on a career path, and the developing skill set of the designer who aspires to be an executive.

Transitioning

In my article Are you boxed in? Getting to beyond professional roles and job titles

I talked about the main drivers behind people who want to go through the process of changing career.

Within a person’s work life the two main key problems are interest and progression. Interest is hard to maintain now that we work for 55 years on average. It’s impossible to be interested in the same field for that long. Progression is another stumbling block because within those 55 years the thing that keeps the best people alive is constant change and challenge.

You would think that the design profession supports multi-disciplinary people, but it doesn’t.

Transition from another discipline to Design

Many software developers, economists, and lawyers have transitioned into the design profession. Changing career usually leads to a temporary step down in salary and status. I’m not sure about the statistics but I’ve personally met more people who have downgraded their salary to ‘design level’ than people who’ve upgraded. The main reasons I’ve heard are all linked to the fact that design is essentially social. People transition into design because they want to do something they love (and it can be cool at times).

I have found it quite hard for a developer to excite a CEO, or even friends at dinner, with the things they do. A developer expects to get a project done fast, but built properly and, of course, to come up with meaningful ideas to solve problems. The difference between the designer and the developer is that the developer is usually solving problems that are quite complex, have a lot of interdependent issues to deal with and must understand a lot of abstract, technical stuff. Whereas the designer is usually solving problems that people can see, and they solve them by talking to people and testing it with people. This is something that people find easier to talk about over dinner, something that everyone can have an opinion on. That’s why design problem solving can be more exciting for the CEO, a marketing executive, and people in general.

For many people being a designer is a dream: very few try to learn more about how to live that dream and even fewer succeed at living it. I have learnt that when something looks easy, it probably means I know nothing about it. The design profession suffers from appearing easier than it is, but once people dive into design, its complexity unfolds. Design is a social role. Designers talk to people, do ethnographic research, user testing, build stuff fast, launch, fail and learn. It’s a diverse field and that means it should be open to people from diverse backgrounds.

Transitioning from Design to another discipline

People in design usually love it, so if they are ‘leaving’ the field it happens because of three reasons:

They don’t like the fluff, and they prefer to answer to a clearer set of instructions. I call it the “either it works or it doesn’t” attitude.

2. Designers sometimes discover that they are really good at their craft, or art, and want to be their own masters.

3. They have power and economic aspirations, but in their organisation being a designer means they continually need to fight their corner and educate others about the value of design.

* By mentioning changing career away from design I’m only referring to designers who were professionally doing design. Looking back at my BA, and even my MA, the average percentage of people who learnt design alongside me and actually are working as designers is 50%

Let’s look at the design profession roles over the past few years…

The ever-changing professional design environment is where the problem for the cross-disciplinary person starts.

Here are some of the jobs that come within the design category:

Graphic designer, Human-computer interaction, Interaction designer, Designer researcher, Motion designer, UI designer, UX designer, Product designer, Design manager, Principal designer, Design Ops, Head of design, Creative Director, Director of Design — and that’s without adding Intern, Junior, Mid-weight, Senior, Executive and Global to each level. Two-thirds of this list are roles that were invented in the past 10 years. As you know, ‘Design’ is quite a new discipline, and as I grow older, I see more and more job titles that were created to sustain the 45-year-old designer, most of which never existed before.

I was recently exposed to this Progression.fyi by Jonny Burch which aggregates career ladders and measurements for designers inside enterprise companies. Looking at many of these companies’ ‘ladders’ it is obvious that this is still a work in progress and that a lot of that progress is being made by designers who need to invent their own career path while at the same time trying to get more leadership roles.

You can argue that design is not that new. It exists in commercial art, architecture and interior decoration, and the marketing and branding agencies established it as a profession many years ago. As the years pass many big tech firms started forming their own internal design agencies, as design departments which therefore adopted the hierarchy. But, I would argue that working for an agency with a fast-paced project versus working on a setting within the security settings submenu for a whole year are two extremely different experiences.

The leading Silicon Valley companies have a different take on this phenomenon. Companies like Google et al solve the issue of a traditional hierarchy within a sector by stripping away fancy titles and just call employees, “Designer’. ‘Manager’ or ‘VP of something’. You can see examples of this in many people’s LinkedIn profiles where they have gone from Senior Creative Global Director to UX designer.

The differences in ‘roles’ are often dependent on who the designer defines as their client. Is the client a Head of Design who has the mandate to enforce good design work, or a person from the marketing department looking for an inspirational piece of design? The brief, the client, the environment, the time frame and focus are the things that completely change the depth to which a designer can dive.

But design is everything: it is vision, research and ways of shifting the organisation — right?

Even though the designers are doing a great job of selling themselves within organisations today, their future is still moot. The plethora of jobs that were created in the past 10 years shackles designers to a slow career progression. Companies don’t have any new roles to give to these people: they can’t promote them to management, but they want to retain them, so they invent a new role. Yet the role of the adult designer might result in bathos. Maybe in 20 years, there will be a CDO (Chief Design Officer) role in big companies, but as long as there is no such role I foresee designers struggling and feeling unchallenged, especially when they are aware of their real potential.

How many are there? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_design_officer

What prevents designers from taking leadership roles?

There are areas and roles outside of design that unfortunately only great designers consider. For example, many designers see ‘Business’ as a Pandora’s Box that they are afraid to open. Development (coding) is another area that many designers ignore. Personally I’m extremely interested in how things are being built because it affects what I can and cannot do as a designer at a later stage, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Many designers choose to focus on the vision and design things without any constraints, such as use case or budget. In leadership it can never be just about the ‘vision’; it’s about the business and measuring your results. It’s about setting up goals and achieving them while taking responsibility for specific outcomes. Especially in leadership the role of the design educator never ends. Very much like a CMO it needs to be reinforced with proofs, that’s a different story.

To be an executive you need to be a leader and a part of that role requires widening your knowledge about all areas of the business. Ideally at any point of a designer’s growth path they need to interlink with other departments but it amplifies the further up you climb up the ladder. At that point the discussion should include passion and sense, deep understanding of the user, but also of the the technological stack, the organization’s DNA and the business goals. The best people to do that kind of job are people who have a richly varied experience: multidisciplinary people who sometimes have a background scattered around different professions, but can weave a sense and a story into their decisions and career progression.

Design doesn’t have an expiration date and I truly believe in design leadership. I think that every company should have an equivalent to Chief Design Officer in management. However I think that in many companies talented designers will have to go through product or marketing roles in order to uplift design and change the management’s perspective on what design is and how closely it should be aligned with business, product and development.

To the future CDOs 🥂

The slipperiness of UX data

Posted on August 27, 2017May 21, 2018

In my article proving design, I talked about how hard it is to have proofs for making the right product or product decisions. Some projects are so expensive that it takes a lot of convincing to get a budget for them. It’s a natural trade-off. It doesn’t get easier after you’ve done parts of the project, or even after you’ve done the project and are now interested in moving forward with a second stage of development.

Many UX professionals talk about the importance of data but let’s be honest, in the cycle of design and decision making there are countless things that cannot be measured.

What can be measured?

Do people need your product?
The product itself and how people use it.
Ideas, and iterations — Using user research.

Basically everything you can do with your team. It adds up to around 20% of the creation process.

What do you create? What informs your ideas? Are you influenced by other designs you can’t measure? Hell yeah!

What cannot be measured?

Competitors

You can’t know why your competitors behaved the way they did. You don’t have their data and you can’t know their decision-making process.

Pre-product behavior

There are many marketing products that are trying to solve this. However, in this part of the user journey, the designers have zero control. The user journey is driven by the facilitators whether it’s the OS or the platform. Each platform will supply you with some data and measurements but it’s not exactly monitoring UX, it’s more generic and marketing led. In big organizations, it’ll also be a challenge to get these data points. In addition, every piece of data should be verified. With platforms, it’s almost impossible to verify.

Analytics

In your service, you’ll need to check and correlate through different tools (MixPanel, GTM, Data studio, etc.). Understanding analytics tools have become essential for UX and Product roles. This is how companies make crucial decisions and that’s why it is checked and cross matched, usually with three to four systems, to compare and see if the data is reliable.

OS design patterns

The fact that Google decided something should look the way it does doesn’t mean it’s the best way. It means that they probably measured it and it works. It also means that with their level of influence, many apps will adopt it and it’ll become familiar. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better. Some of these decisions are made to differentiate from other platforms like iOS or Windows. Other decisions are a compromised solution to a great design because the design might be patented. That’s precisely why Google and Microsoft bought Motorola and Nokia, stripped them of their patents, and then sold them on to someone else. So if you’ve seen a design, even if it’s famous, it doesn’t mean it’s the best practice.

Just because it works it doesn’t mean it’s a nice experience. Many companies don’t see a reason to change. It’s very common when a company has a monopoly.. For example buying stuff on eBay…does it work?, Yeah…Is it a nice experience? No. Everything is cumbersome: receiving messages, sending, going through versions of eBay from 2000 till today.

It works but it ain’t nice and at times very confusing

In comparison, Amazon are more ambitious and “very slowly” redesign their experiences to be functional and delightful.

You’ve got the Data! But, wait, it might be skewed.

Let’s have a look at how this can happen.

Wrong implementation

Just a simple line of code or a selection of a wrong event could cause every click to be counted as two. That’s why it’s important to check with multiple systems — which, as I mentioned earlier, could be problematic at the stage prior to the user journey beginning in earnest.

Intentions

Even if you have a lot of verified data, how can you believe the data that you see? Every person that collects data (arguably even scientists) is trying to show the data in a way that will flatter their agenda. Data can be collected and presented in a non-neutral way. It’s natural and happens with everyone from marketing companies to UX designers who just want their projects to be successful.

Presentation

The medium is the weapon and it’s important to understand why something was chosen, in a similar way to understanding graphic design decisions: What do they show me, and what don’t they show me.

A few current examples of skewed data and how it has been used:

Facebook admitted to having wrong measurements for the 10th time
Facebook is accused of being part of the Fake news problem…Google is too, but it’s used much less for leisure and content consumption.
Facebook is deleting tens of thousands of Fake users, which is why they keep tweaking the news feed, and Google is doing the same with search results.
Cambridge Analytica is suspected of and grilled about their methods for influencing users in the UK / US.

Key ways to deal with it

Critic

Be harsh and critical, try to look for the angle. Life sucks if you always think everyone has an interest but even though awareness drives sadness it’s smarter to look at things critically, especially in business. So when you see a new feature, after you finish getting excited or booing it, think about why they created it? Whose decision was it to make it and what’s their interest? Link its value to the business, marketing, user satisfaction, design etc. Guess which department came up with this concept. Think about where they could take it to next. What’s the future of it?

Influenced but aware

There is nothing public, what you have is a trail of user experience data. I got responses for a previous post I wrote about Facebook that said: “But where is the data?” The answer is: This data is internal and not available to anyone else. It’s too secretive to expose, it’s their secret sauce. Does that mean I’m not allowed to write about or analyze it? I don’t think so.

In Instagram, you’d know how many pictures are uploaded to Instagram because it’s a financial data that affects retention/time spent. But you wouldn’t know how many of these pictures are uploaded from a computer, user’s gallery or a professional camera. It’s just important to accept it when critiquing or being influenced by it and to know the limitations of the data you’re dealing with.

Here is an example where you have data, but can only see part of the picturee: “Apple’s revenue from repair is bundled in with its “services” revenue, alongside digital content sales, AppleCare, and Apple Pay revenue. While there is no good way to figure out how much revenue comes from repair, Apple’s services revenue pulled down $7.04 billion in net sales, out of $52.90 billion total.”

Hack

Be aware of your level of control, but see if you can take it further. The difference between owning an OS and participating in one is huge. When I was working for Samsung we were designing the core of Tizen OS for TV. We had control over everything without limitations. We could track everything we wanted to if we built it. But when you are a part of an ecosystem you need to play by the rules and get whatever you can throughout the process. That’s why designing for a native OS is such fun, especially if others are building and increasing your knowledge.

Data is important, but I would argue that decision making can only be done based on it to a certain degree. In my opinion, around 70% of what constructs the decision is experience, aspirations, and alignment with the other sides of the business. A good designer or product guy should influence and convince but it’s not all up to data. Data is just another tool in the arsenal and it’s good for specific use.

Voice assistance and privacy

Posted on August 27, 2017May 21, 2018

Voice assistants technologies are hyped nowadays. However one of the main voiced concerns is about privacy. The main concern about privacy is that devices listen to us all the time and document everything. For example, Google keeps every voice search users do. They use it to improve its voice recognition and to provide better results. Google also provides the option to delete it from your account.

A few questions that come to mind are: how many times do companies go over your voice messages? How often do they compare it with other samples? How often does it improve thanks to it? I will try to assume answers to these questions and suggest solutions.

A good example for a privacy considered approach is Snapchat. Messages in Snapchat are controlled by the user, and they also disappear from the company’s servers. Considering the age target they aimed for, it was a brilliant decision since teenagers don’t want their parents to know what they do, and generally, they want to “erase their sins”. Having things erased is closer to a real conversation than a chat messenger.

Now imagine this privacy solution in a voice assistant context. Even though users aspire the AI to know them well, do they want it to know them better than they know themselves?

What do I mean by that? Some users wouldn’t want their technology to frown upon them and criticize them. Users also prefer data that doesn’t punish them for driving fast or being not healthy. This is a model that is now led by insurance companies.

Having spent a lot of time in South Korea I have experienced a lot of joy rides with taxi drivers. The way their car navigation works is quite grotesque. Imagine a 15-inch screen displaying a map goes blood red with obnoxious sound FX in case they pass the speed limit.

Instead, users might prefer a supportive system that can differentiate between public information that can be shared with the family to private information which might be more comfortable to be consumed alone. When driving a car, situations like this are quite common. Here is an example — A user drives a car and has a friend in the car. Someone calls and because answering will be on the car’s sound system the driver has to announce that someone else is with them. The announcement is made to define the context of the conversation thus to prevent content or behaviors that might be private.

The voice assistant will need to be provided with contextual information so it could figure out exactly what scenario the user is in, and how / when to address them. But we will probably need to let it know about our scenario in some way too. Your wife can hear that you are with someone in the car but can’t quite decipher who with. So she might ask “are you with the kids?”.

Voice = social

Talking is a social experience that most people don’t do when they are alone. Remember the initial release of the bluetooth headset? People in the streets thought that you are speaking to them but you actually were on the phone. Another example is the car talking system. Some people thought that the guy sitting in the car is crazy because he is talking to himself.

Because talking is a social experience we need to be wary of who we speak to and where; so does the voice assistant. I know a lot of parents that have embarrassing stories of their kids “blab” things they shouldn’t say next to a stranger. Many times it’s something that their parent said about a person or some social group. How would you educate your voice assistant? By creating a scenario where you actively choose what to share with it.

Companies might aspire to get the most data possible, but I doubt that they really know how to use it. In addition, it doesn’t correspond with the level of expectations that consumers expect. From the users perspective, they probably want their voice assistant to be more of a dog, than a human or a computer. People want a positive experience with a system that helps them remember what they don’t remember, and that forgets what they don’t want to remember. A system that remembers that you wanted to buy a ring for your wife but doesn’t say it out loud next to her, and reminds you in a more personal way. A system that remembers that your favorite show is back but doesn’t say it next to the kid because it’s not appropriate for their age.

A voice assistant that has Tact.

Being a dog voice assistant is probably the maximum voice assistants can be nowadays. It will progress but in the meantime, users will settle on something cute like Jibo that has some charm to it in case it makes a mistake and that can at least learn not to repeat it twice. If a mistake happened and for example, it said something to someone else, users will expect a report about things that got told to other users in the house. The Voice assistant should have some responsibility.

Mistakes can happen in privacy, but then we need to know about it before it is too late.

Using Big Data

The big promise of big data is that it could globally heal the world using our behavior. There is a growing rate of systems that are built to cope with the abundance of information. Whether they cope or not is still a question. It seems like many of these companies are in the business of collecting for the sake of selling. They actually don’t really know what to do with the data, they just want to have it in case that someone else might know what to do with it. Therefore I am not convinced that the voice assistant needs all the information that is being collected.

What if it saved just one day of your data or a week, would that be contextual enough?

Last year I was fascinated by a device called Kapture. It records everything around you at any give moment. But if you noticed something important happen you can tap it and it will save the previous 2 minutes. Saving things retrospectively, capturing moments that are magical before you even realized they were so, that’s incredible. You effortlessly collect data and you curate it while all the rest is gone. Leaving voice messages to yourself, writing notes, sending them to others, having a summary of your notes, what you cared about, what interested you, when do you save most. All of these scenarios could be the future. The problem it solved for me was, how can I capture something that is already gone whilst keeping my privacy intact.

Social privacy

People are obsessed with looking at their information the same as they are obsessed with looking in the mirror. It’s addictive, especially when it comes as a positive experience.

In social context the rule of “the more you give the more you get” works, but it suffers in software. Maybe at some point in the future it will change but nowadays software just don’t have the variability and personalization that is required to actually make life better for people who are more “online”. Overall the experience is more or less the same if you have 10 friends in Facebook or 1000. To be honest it’s probably worst if you have 1000 friends. The same applies to Twitter or Instagram. Imagine how Selena Gomez’s Instagram looks like. Do you think that someone in Instagram thought of that scenario, or gave her more tools to deal with it? Nope. It seems like companies talk about it but rarely do about it and it definitely applies to voice data collections.

It seems clear, the ratio of reveal doesn’t justify or power the result users get. One of the worst user experiences that can happen is for example signing into an app with Facebook. The user is led to a screen that requests them to grant access to everything…and in return they are promised they could write down notes with their voice. Does it has anything to do with their address, or their online friends, no. Information is too cheap nowadays and users got used to just press “agree” without reading. I hope we could standardize value for return while breaking down information in a right way.

Why do we have to be listened to every day and be documented if we can’t use it? Permissions should be flexible and we should incorporate a way to make the voice assistant stop listening when we don’t want them to listen. Leaving a room makes sense when we don’t want another person to listen to us, but how will that look like in a scenario in which the voice assistant is always with us? Should we tell it “stop listening for five minutes”?

Artificial intelligence in its terminology is related to a brain but maybe we should consider its usage or creation to be more related to a heart. Artificial Emotional Intelligence (A.E.I) could help us think of the assistant differently.

Use or be used?

How does it improve in our lives and what is the price we need to pay for it? In “Things I would like to do with my Voice Assistant” I talked about how useful some capabilities would be in comparison to how much data will this action need to become a reality.

So how far is the voice assistant from reading emotions, having tact and syncing with everything? Can this thing happen with taking care of privacy issues in mind? Does your assistant snitch on you, or tell you when someone was sniffing and asking weird questions? It’s not enough to choose methods like differentiated privacy to protect users. Companies should really consider the value of loyalty and creating a stronger bond between the machine and the human rather than the machine and the company that created it.

Further more into the future we can get to these scenarios:

There could also be some sort of behavioral understanding mechanism that mimics a new person that just met you in a pub. If you behave in a specific way the person will probably know how to react to you in a supportive way even though they didn’t knew you before. In the same way a computer that knows these kind of behaviors can react to you. Even more assuming there are sensors that tells it what’s your physical status and recognize face pattern and tone of voice.

Another good example are Doctors that many times can diagnose patients’ disease without looking at their full health history. Of course it’s easier to look at everything, but they would usually do that in case they need to figure out something that is not just simple. When things are simple it should be faster and in the tech’s case more private.

Summary

There are many ways to make Voice assistants more private whilst helping people trust them. It seems like no company has adopted this strategy yet. It might necessitate that this company would not rely on a business model that is driven by advertising. A company that creates something that is being released to the wild, a machine that becomes a friend that has a double duty for the company and the user, but one that is at least truthful and open about what it shares.

The UX Poet

Posted on August 27, 2017May 21, 2018

Not too long ago I had an experience that made me look differently on the way I use words. We were holding a workshop with colleagues from Korea and USA. Everything we’ve planned went well and the responses were good. Then we took them for dinner and drinks. A number of beers later, the lead Ux designer of the American team disclosed to me that he thinks I’m using altitudinous words in my presentations. He mentioned that at times they were dazed by the vocabulary. The others agreed and said that they had to go to the dictionary to figure out the exact meaning of a word. We laughed about it. They said I do UX poetry.

It was a good time to start explaining to my colleagues: “I have a confession, in my past, I used to be a rapper”. Everyone’s like “wow”…to counter all of the trillion preconceptions that just bounced into their head I ask “do you know Aesop Rock?…no…how about Sage Francis, Buck 65…maybe Talib Kweli / Mos Def?” then usually I get one “yes”. That was the kind of hip hop I tried to do.

from the amazing project: poly-graph.co/vocabulary.html

The point is: I’m in love with language, structure, words, rhymes and their meanings. When I was a child I spent hours going through rhyme books, dictionaries, philosophers. I love reading Zizek and going through the same sentence 8 times and maybe get it, or listen to Ghostface Killah and work my way through the slang. I love reading poetry and I also love wowing people with pompous words.

These rappers are less popular. Who reads philosophy nowadays? What does it have to do with UX?

Defining things in UX is crucial. Since the UX discussion is focused on users’ emotions it is eminent to describe it to the best of our ability. Vocabulary shouldn’t be compromised in presentations. The meaning of better communication is to say exactly what you meant and then if needed support it with simpler words.

There must be a parity between an eloquent text and the speaker’s elocution.

Importance of words

It’s never simple to simplify and to find the essence of a “thing”. It’s harder to constrain an emotion into a sentence. When dealing with UX we analyze human behavior and try to use pre-made experiment assumptions and methods to observe and extract meaningful insights. Being able to analyze behaviors require patience and the ability to just facilitate and empathize. Documenting it entails removing preconceptions, ego, and judgmental obstructions. Analyzing it make assumptions rise again through natural comparisons of people for example.

Everything ends up in text or visual format

The process involves dozens of tasks with each of them ending in a written output. The way they will be written and presented will dictate how serious the output will be treated and how will it be absorbed by the rest of team. When it’s all done, written and shared, the creator has to live with it for a while, it’ll turn into a creation condition. These words become the mainstay in which the design ship will be built upon. The definition of the user and the problems will find themselves to the people who are less involved directly. It will be a seed that stays in their head and will grow the business unrestrainedly and unsupervised.

Users are not always right and therefore testing is just the beginning of the process. On top of that experience, a solution is being developed. Every report needs to end with “next steps”. Paragraphs that describe potential solutions should inspire using a vision, maintain simplicity and reveal the road to the target.

Controlling the means of expression means better control of the process.

When reading poetry people’s feelings diverge. I try to create a scenario where everyone has the luxury to think different but eventually it feels the same.

Importance of keywords

Behind every simplicity, there is hidden complexity and the same applies to keywords. Each of them is the key to a passage of information. Eventually, they all end up in the same space, interacting with each other and creating the experience.

Keywords are pillars for the memory of the listeners and if the storytelling and weaving process is done, strong connections can be formed around your designs. A design is not only making per say, it is also communicating. We communicate it to people we present to, people who will read it later, people who don’t have time and will just skim through the pages. When we communicate there are infinite cases to cater and think of.

Be a diplomat when you co-work. Be a poet, strife and ferocious when reaching the conclusion.

UX poetry is your chance to make a difference in a more personal way. Don’t get things diffuse by misunderstandings; write and design the future by any mean of expression, and make it eloquent.

Proving your Design

Posted on May 21, 2017May 21, 2018

Over the years I have had more experience working with developers than with designers. However in the past two years I have been more involved with managing and creating design. One of the key goals I had was to structure the processes that would allow me to prove my designs.

Design is not an exact science, but it still has rules. That means that there is a way of creating designs, but no definitive way of knowing in advance whether they will be right for your purposes. I believe that there are tools and processes we can use to increase the probability of designs being fit for purpose and, just as importantly, of convincing others that your design is the right one.

Tools for proving design

Trends

Trends give an overarching view of where people, industry, designers and technology are heading. Trend research usually collates the past two years of an area. All trends start as a seed of inspiration. What you’re doing with your research is tracking the development of that seed to see if it grows into a trend. From the data you gather, you can create a trends report that groups the data in meaningful ways. As well as helping you see where your design fits in current trends, it can also be used to remind stakeholders of things they’ve seen, while reassuring them that you’re considering the wider market and not designing in a vacuum.

Measurements and evaluation

Being patient and focused are rare traits in designers. There is always this drive to change and inspire, to revolutionize to make something interesting again. However, it is extremely important to harness that creativity for critical and incremental development too. Reflecting on your design, testing and measuring it is essential for proving its value to others. To be able to prove a new concept you should measure the previous one, or if it’s completely new, measure it in comparison to other similar concepts.

You can measure design by conducting user testing, focus groups or even guerrilla testing internally. If the measurements to which you test are agreed and respected by the stakeholders it gives your design substantial support.

Experts

To gain credibility for your design you can’t just settle for internet-based research. For example judging a product review on an app has very limited information. Talking to well-known experts will allow you to learn from people who founded the industry and their name can lend credibility to your design, especially if your stakeholders have heard of them. Moreover these experts or advisors cycle through many companies and often have a good sense of what is happening overall. Experts shouldn’t be just design experts, they could be experts in technology, strategy, marketing, or any field relevant to your product.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is an activity we do naturally all the time. We always compare our product to others and sometimes the grass looks greener on the other side. From my experience it looks greener when we don’t thoroughly understand the strategy or refuse to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of our workplace.

Keep a catalog of things that interest you and try to cluster and compare to see improvements and direction. Be mindful of the limitations it imposes on your mind, not everything should be about catching up with competitors. The fact that the market hasn’t done something already doesn’t mean you’ve identified a golden opportunity, it just means that you ought to find the reason it’s not been done already and then see if it matches up with your company’s strategy.

Strategy

Whether you create or rely on strategy, it is always important to understand it and interpret it in a way that will show links between it and your design. Strategy usually relies on knowing the current situation, the goal and how to get there. The change log is very valuable for this purpose – track your competitors and try to understand their strategy and then use that to your advantage.

History/Company DNA

Looking at the history of your company is extremely important. Know the past to learn for the future. Somewhere there might be a database of useful information about success stories and failures. The faster you understand how the company gained its success, the more quickly you’ll understand if your direction is aligned with theirs. Be mindful of politics; you might present something that has already been tried and rejected by stakeholders.

Co-Design

Designing together helps gain support on the ground and puts the design suggestion under multiple lenses. It is also essential to help you learn more about the company. The more communication and the more knowledge that goes into a design, the better it will be.

Summary

Using these tools is not enough to convince stakeholders though, you’ve got to tell a story. Using these methods could be tricky. You might realize you’ve got the problem right but not the solution, or there might be contradictions between the results you get when testing. When weaved into a compelling story you allow your client to focus on the narrative.

A good designer breaks the product and its context to bits, make sense of them, looks at them through a different lens and then reconstructs the product to make it better.

Communicating that process to stakeholders is important when proving a design. It gives them the why behind the what and often that understanding is what you need to gain support.

Thank you for everyone that helped me and advised me about this post: Carlos Wydler, Oded Ben Yehuda.