Influencing business strategy through design
Luke Wroblewski is an interaction designer who has written books and presented workshops that lessen the great divide between the business side and the design side of organizations.
What started out as an internal training course for a group of Yahoo! designers has since touched hundreds of designers seeking to break free of design pigeonholes, striving to make a greater impact on business strategies within organizations and in agencies.
Wroblewski, head of a team of interaction designers, visual designers and engineers who collaborate on new products and make experiences consistent across Yahoo! properties, believes designers have valuable—but largely untapped—abilities that can be put to good use in the boardroom as well as in the studio. He believes that designers just need to learn how to apply their unique problem-solving and visual communication skills to better participate at a strategic level.
In this interview with UXMag, Luke talks about how designers can leverage their unique talents to influence product strategies, how they can use data to communicate abstract concepts, and why they should take a more proactive stance to help organizations and clients reach strategic goals. Luke also shares a case in point about how an eBay design team initiative made a huge organizational impact.
UXMag: For the past several years, you've been passionate in teaching and writing about the influence design can have on business strategy. Can you tell us what your latest thinking is about that topic?
Wroblewski: When my partner Tom Chi, the senior director of search at Yahoo!, and I started teaching about this topic, a lot of other training focused on helping designers learn the language of business to essentially "sell" what they do. We took a different approach.
Rather than try to teach designers the explicit language of business, we give them a core level overview of what happens on the business side so they can understand the context people are coming from. We then focus on organizational dynamics and talk about how designers can play an important role in affecting where a company is heading.
The problem-solving approach that designers use can be a very valuable addition to strategic discussions. Those skill sets are often absent from the boardroom. Instead of trying to compete at a business level, we know that designers bring a different perspective to the table. They have the ability to extend and complement conversations, and communicate visually in ways that business stakeholders often cannot.
We talk about access to data and how designers can really do data-driven design. They can visually represent metrics, illuminate relationships, considerations, decisions and implications at a strategic level—and tell stories at a glance at an executive level. Telling the right story means using the tenets of design and the conciseness we strive for, and the clarity we seek in interfaces—to wrapping data into presentations about where products should go, why and how products are interrelated, and what the situation is in the business.
UXMag: That makes great sense from a design perspective, but what can we say to the business side of the table? How can non-designers be shown the ROI for leveraging good design?
Wroblewski: That conversation is a losing battle from my perspective. I've seen many design teams pull together a road show and run out to champion design. Hey, aren't we great? Look! We make wireframes and we do process diagrams. Include us because our deliverables are important!
As Tom likes to say, it's the equivalent of the finance department spouting about how they do balance sheets and depreciation worksheets. Therefore, they should be included in strategic conversations.
First, people aren't really interested in what we do; they're interested in the results that we deliver. Second, running around and selling things is not as effective as actually applying your design skills to problems that matter. In many ways, business people look at things and size up the problems. They may avoid complex variables—the who, what, where—simply because they are complicated factors.
UXMag: Is there an organization line that designers shouldn't cross? Could there be a case where unsolicited input to business strategies might not be well received?
Wroblewski: There are always issues. But I have a unique perspective on this. I view my role as very much a champion of the customer and their user experience. So if I see something that I think is damaging, or wrong, or a lost opportunity, I'll speak up. I've been part of many of those types of discussions over the years when it's actually been a positive thing. I have a lot fewer examples of negative outcomes.
- Here's a simple example that illustrates my point. Back in 2004, the eBay design team was looking at a lot of data about the eBay registration flow and how it discouraged new customers. The team had visibility data, they had analytics—the things that showed how people actually made it through registration. They also had a best-practices audit, all this information about what was going wrong with registration.
- But they couldn't, in isolation, convince anybody to do anything about it. Instead, they applied their design skills to the data and made a big visualization showing the poor registration flow, highlighted all the issues and contacts, and began talking to different people about it using well-designed visual communication deliverables. They put their unique language and skill sets to work on the business problem.
- They managed to push through a redesign of the registration process, despite lots of initial stakeholder objections. That quarter, eBay had to restate its earnings, I've heard, because the redesign made such a big financial impact on the business. Even though eBay was running a growth pattern at that time, the design team illuminated a different story and the outcome was tremendous.
That design team didn't ask for budget to build a new product. Rather, they impacted the business by actually finding an opportunity, visualizing the business impact of it and driving to make it happen. The results spoke loudly. The company then realized the value of design. That's the kind of approach that matters, and that works.
UXMag: Do you have any evidence of design influencing strategy at Yahoo!?
Wroblewski: There are a number of small- and large-scale initiatives that grew from the kind of principles we've been discussing. On a small scale, we have examples of designers laying out and making the case for product features or changes using business context and metrics. Several of these efforts were launched to our users and more are in the planning stages. On the large scale, we recently formed the Integrated Consumer Experiences group whose charter is to look at people's experiences across all our products. That's a new priority and it was fostered by early work Tom Chi and I did together. In fact, that process—which spanned almost two years—gave us a lot of insight into how we could influence strategy using design. We used many of the experiences we had to help develop our design strategy training classes.
UXMag: You've talked mostly about designers working internally. How can your ideas drive sales and help grow business in an agency setting?
Wroblewski: It depends on the relationships the agency has with their clients, of course. If relationships are short term in-and-out, you don't really have a chance to get immersed in context. That is challenging. If deeper relationships exist, it's a lot easier to start applying these ideas.
- Personally, I feel that there's potential for a new model where agencies really begin to become recognized for bringing clarity to problems, as well as create solutions to problems. Often, it's not that people need an answer, it's that they need to understand the problem better.
In our digital age, where we're awash with data, and we're awash with opportunity, and we're awash with products and things. Getting clarity into situations and into the problems that organizations face is sometimes more valuable than coming up with solutions. There are many more designers trying to provide solutions than there are trying to clarify problems. So that's the opportunity for designers working internally or externally.
This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see http://uxmag.com/uirc