What do you measure to make sure your user experience improvements move the needle for your product and go to market strategies? How do you invest in UX wisely? Audrey Crane from DesignMap presents the last of the four orders of design: Value, Vision, and Hiring.

1. April 26, 2017
What Business Leaders Should Know About Design

2. Model of Design

3. 1st Order:
Symbols
and Images
2nd Order:
Artefacts
(Products)
3rd Order:
Activities
and Processes
4th Order:
Environments
and Systems
Orders of Design

4. The Value of Design

6. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 15
• Design operates at scale across the enterprise.
• Design holds a prominent place on the company org chart, and
either sits on the leadership team or directly reports to a
leadership team member.
• Experienced executives manage the Design function.
• Design sees growing investment to support its growing influence.
• Design enjoys senior leadership support from the top of the org.
• The company has been publicly-traded on a U.S. exchange for the
last 10 years.
DMI Criteria

8. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design

13. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 22
Expect real data, like the reports shown here,
to support and drive the value of design for
your organization.
(Design for designs’ sake is usually counter-
productive, although value may take a while
to build or focus.)
Advice

14. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
23
Look for both tangible and non-tangible results
(e.g. NPS, brand equity = design equity?).
Focusing only on the hyper-tangible / strategic,
like conversation rates, may tend towards tweak-
focus and leave out opportunities to innovate.

15. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 24
If you struggle building alignment on the value of design,
start with a bounded problem and build momentum:
1. Start with frustrations caused by poor experience
2. Identify the costs
3. Find the person in charge of reducing them
4. Ask them to champion a new UX project
5. Rinse, repeat
A Recipe for Showing Value

16. Vision

17. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 26
What is your company going to do to make money,
from the perspective of the people consuming what your
company produces?
A Vision should be a human-centered statement that is
vivid and concrete to inspire and align your entire team.
(Not just the design team!)
Vision Statement

18. Human-
Centered
Vision
Elements of a Shared Vision
custom
er’s
fundam
ental
needs
gap
com
pany
appetite
capabilities
com
petitive
landscape
area
offocus
pragmatic
aspirational

19. “You press the button, we’ll do the rest.”
custom
er’s
fundam
ental
needs
gap
com
pany
appetite
capabilities
com
petitive
landscape
area
offocus
pragmatic
aspirational

20. “A UX that closes deals by itself.”
custom
er’s
fundam
ental
needs
gap
com
pany
appetite
capabilities
com
petitive
landscape
area
offocus
pragmatic
aspirational

21. “Your files everywhere.”
custom
er’s
fundam
ental
needs
gap
com
pany
appetite
capabilities
com
petitive
landscape
area
offocus
pragmatic
aspirational

22. “Simplify your life.”
custom
er’s
fundam
ental
needs
gap
com
pany
appetite
capabilities
com
petitive
landscape
area
offocus
pragmatic
aspirational

23. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
32
The (human-centered, business relevant)
vision is the most important thing you as a
leader can provide. If you don’t do anything
else, do this.
(N.B.: Complementary visions can exist for
both a company and a product.)

24. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
33
Remember that most designers don’t get
business training.
A vision and ongoing collaboration with you
that helps them connect the human goals
with the business goals is one of the best
things you can do for them.

25. Hiring

26. hiring
designers
is hard

27. internal
or
external?

28. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 37
Internal vs external is not an either/or, but based on your
current and future design needs… if immediate needs a
vendor can be the right tactic while hiring full-time
designers in parallel.
An external team doesn’t need to mean that you lose
design expertise when they leave. A key selection criteria
is how your company can learn, adopt best practices,
and extend the design long after the vendor goes.
Internal or External

29. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 38
Hiring design is hard, taking significant time and effort.
Finding a vendor that can address your specific needs is
an accelerated way to add design to your initiative or
company.
1. Perspective
2. Resource Flexibility
3. Design Management
Vendors: Benefits

30. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 39
Vendors come in a variety of shapes… common ones:
1. Boutique (a handful of staff)
2. Design Studio (20+)
3. Digital Agency (100+)
4. Consultancy (Hundreds)
Vendors: Types

31. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
40
• How and when do you incorporate research?
• Where will you leave off in the process? How will the work transition
when you leave?
• Can you show me KPIs from other successful projects? (How does
your work impact your clients’ businesses? Do you understand? Care?)
• Can you show me examples of work in progress?
• Has my project lead ever worked for an internal design team before?
• When have you had a less than great outcome? What did you do to
address this?
• What don’t you do?
: Vendor ?s

32. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
41
Be creative in considering how a vendor might
help you. They may integrate and level-up a
design resource you currently have on staff, help
the whole organization with process best
practices, or help establish a vision. Start with
your needs and find a good fit, versus choosing
from a fixed menu (which meets their needs).

33. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 42
1. Have a champion for design.
Internal Hires

34. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 43
1. Have a champion for design.
2. Know what you're looking for.
Internal Hires

35. “Seed-stage startup looking for rockstar junior
designer to sketch wireframes and design
beautiful mockups. You’ll be responsible for
crafting our logo and brand and writing UI
copy. Must know how to run usability studies,
prototype and write production-ready HTML
and CSS.”

36. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 45

37. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 46
User Experience (UX) Design
Job Titles
• Generalist
• User Experience (UX) Designer
• Product Designer
• Specialist
• User Researcher
• Information Architect
• Interaction Designer
• User Interface (UI) Designer
• Visual Designer
• Frontend Prototyper
• Mobile (iOS/Android) UX Designer
• Seniority
• Executive = 12+ Years
• VP = 10+ Years
• Director = 8+ Years
• Senior = 5+ Years
• Mid-level = 2+ Years
• Entry = 0+ Years
• Adjacent Titles
• Digital/Interactive Art Director
• Creative Director
• Interactive Designer

38. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
47
Ask candidates whose titles are “UX Designer”
where they feel they are the most capable and
where they want to grow. This will help match
better to your specific role requirements.

39. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 48
• General Graphic Design
• Adobe Illustrator Proficiency
• Adobe Photoshop Proficiency
• Sketch Proficiency
• Basic Typography: Character and Paragraph Styles
• Good Use of Color and Contrast
• Good Use of Scale and Whitespace
• Good Source File Organization: Layers, Clean Artwork,
Symbols, Guides, etc.
• Good use of Gestalt principles
• Drawing
• Create Clean, Complex Shapes
• Presentable Sketching
• Going Conceptually Wide and Broad
• Effective Note Taking
• Real-time Whiteboarding
• Good Use of Symbols and Icons
Hard Skills: Foundational
• Critique
• Give and Receive Constructive Feedback
• Show Your "Math"
• Be humble
• Craft a strong argument
• Listen
• Personal Productivity
• Accurate Timesheet
• Define, articulate, communicate, and focus yourself around
clear goals.
• Good Organization: Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

40. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
49
Find something to critique in their portfolio.
How well they take this input and line of
questioning will be an important indicator for
how they’ll be to work with later. Look for people
who are open, inquisitive, and non-defensive
(although explaining their rationale doesn’t
mean being defensive).

41. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 50
• Discovery
• Topic Ramp-up
• Research Strategy: Outcomes
• Published Article/Whitepaper/etc. Research
• Feed-forward Research
• Persona generation from data
• Behavioral Research
• Field Research
• User Research Techniques: Quant & Qual
• User Scenarios
• Live/Collaborative Sketching
• User Interview
• Persona Worksession
• Ad hoc persona
• Client interview (SMEs)
• Key takeaways and insights
Hard Skills: Research
• Feed-back (Generative) Research
• Recruiting and Screening
• Session Scheduling
• Usability Study Protocol
• Usability Study Facilitation
• Usability Study Detailed Notes
• Usability Study Software: Morae, etc.
• Usability Services: Usertesting.com, etc.
• Usability Techniques: Quantitative and Qualitative
• Data Analysis
• Executive Summary Report
• Detailed Findings Report

42. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 51
• Discovery
• Brainstorming Techniques
• Lead brainstorming session
• Concept Sketches
• Story mapping
• Component sketches
• Concept Wireframes
• Go Wide: Variations
• Requirement/Functional Analysis
• Storyboards
• Models
• Navigation / Information Architecture
• User Journey / Map
• Competitive Analysis
• Landscape Analysis
• Heuristic Review
Hard Skills: Interaction Design (UX)
• Design
• User & Task Flows
• Annotated wireframes
• Feature design
• Screen-by-screen flow
• ComponentsSystem
• Interaction States
• First Principles (AskTog)

43. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
52
Ask to see the “sausage making”: the rough
work leading up to the final product. Make sure
the interviewee can be clear and specific about
how and why they got there.

44. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
53
Ask how they worked with the developer to
brainstorm ideas and functionality, how they
established technical feasibility, and how they
worked with the engineer through release of
the product.

45. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 54
• Discovery
• Image Research: Pinterest, Dribble, etc.
• Mood boards
• Competitive Analysis
• Landscape Analysis
• Understanding existing branding and styles
• Stakeholder Interview/conversation to understand
the clients needs and desire (visual focused)
Hard Skills: Visual Design (UI)
• Design
• Concept Sketching
• Style Tiles
• Color scheme/palette
• Visual Directions
• Mockups
• Responsive Layouts
• UI Controls
• Components with states
• Low-res and High-res Artwork
• PNG Production
• Icon Design & Produtioin
• Style Guide
• Specs

46. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
55
Look for objective touchpoints in a Visual
Designer’s work. If they’re using words like
“clean” and “modern”, probe on what those
words mean and how they created alignment on
the team around that.

47. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
56
Ask specifics about what work they did and what
other team members did. (Often to show the
design for an entire product, they must show the
work of others.)

48. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 57
• Discovery
• Image Research: Pinterest, Dribble, etc.
• Mood boards
• Competitive Analysis
• Landscape Analysis
• Understanding existing branding and styles
• Stakeholder Interview/conversation to understand
the clients needs and desire (visual focused)
Hard Skills: Visual Design (UI)
• Design
• Concept Sketching
• Style Tiles
• Color scheme/palette
• Visual Directions
• Mockups
• Responsive Layouts
• UI Controls
• Components with states
• Low-res and High-res Artwork
• PNG Production
• Icon Design & Produtioin
• Style Guide
• Specs

49. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 58
• plain speaking / great communication
• high emotional IQ
• open to critique
• abductive, or design, thinking
• analytical thinking
• ability to synthesize information and identify salient points
• mediation and facilitation
• active listening
• interviewing and observation
• team-building
• collaboration
• empathy
• passion
• humor
• skepticism
• continuous learner
• highly organized
Soft Skills

50. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 59
1. Have a champion for design.
2. Know what you're looking for.
3. Use specialized recruiters.
Internal Hires

51. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 60
• The Creative Group
• VitaminT
• Creative Circle
• 24 Seven Talent
• Workbridge Associates and Jobspring Partners
• TalentAvenue
Recruiters

52. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
61
Invite the recruiter to your office to see the
space and meet the team. This will give them a
better personal understanding of who might be
a good fit.

53. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design 62
• General Assembly
• Tradecraft
Other Sources

54. What Business Leaders Should Know About Design
Advice
63
General Assembly and Tradecraft are probably
best suited for organizations that are prepared
to do some once-the-job design training.