Your design has impact. But…

A number of recent events have helped shape our thinking about design impact because clients are now asking designers to define the impact their design will have.

The pressures on designers have never been greater. Clients still want you to sell products and services, raise awareness and communicate clearly. But increasingly they want more.

They want to engage hard-to-reach communities. Combat misinformation. Build trust. Change behaviour. And, increasingly, prove the design impact.

All with tighter budgets and shorter timelines

What’s changed is the expectation design will have measurable impact.

We’ve heard this recently when talking to design clients. They initially talked about raising public awareness of their organisation and its goals. Nothing particularly unusual about that.

But then came the important bit where they wanted to change behaviour, and that’s a very different brief.

It’s no longer enough for someone to see the communication, understand the message or remember the brand. The client wants to control what happens next.

That fits directly with the way we’ve been thinking about our Design Impact Framework.

Your design has impact. But is it the impact you want?

Every design project creates impact, whether the designer or client chooses to recognise it or not. The challenge is to set a framework for design impact and define what the impact will be before we start designing, and then measure what actually happened afterwards.

We look at that impact through three lenses.

Social impact. What changes for people? Their understanding, trust, behaviour, inclusion, wellbeing or ability to participate.

Environmental impact. What changes in the environment people experience? That could be the workplace, a service, a digital experience, a physical space or the broader ecological environment.

Economic impact. What changes for the organisation? Revenue, costs, productivity, efficiency, risk or growth.

Behaviour change sits across all three.

Think about a recycling program. Design might change what people understand, but the real test is whether they recycle differently. The behaviour change could have a social impact, change the physical environment and reduce costs.

From visual designer to behavioural designer

This changes the designer’s role; if the brief asks you to change behaviour, understanding visual communication isn’t enough.

You need to understand why people behave the way they do now.

What’s reinforcing the current behaviour?

What’s stopping them changing?

What would make the new behaviour easier?

And what evidence would tell us that something has actually changed?

That’s where research becomes much more important.

Talk to people. Observe what they actually do. Map the current behaviour. Identify the barriers. Establish a baseline before designing anything.

Then you start the design process with discovery followed by strategy and finally design and implementation.

It doesn’t finish there because you need to go back afterwards to ask:

Did awareness increase? Did attitudes change? Did people behave differently? What changed in their experience? And did that create a social, environmental or economic impact?

The takeaway

Catchy slogans and great-looking communications still have a role but they’re not the outcome. They’re the intervention. The outcome is shown in behaviour change.

As always, happy to discuss further, just email Greg

Greg Branson

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