Thinking in Triplicate

To the extent that the business takes place in software, designing the software is designing the business.

Designers either need to participate in defining the business model or they will simply be its tool.

Thinking about design in terms of the exchange of value, is the path to thinking about the whole problem. Even if a designer is making choices about a small part, they should be thinking about the whole.

 Otherwise, they risk contributing to a beautiful experience that exploits people, or to a beautiful experience that fails.

• Professional conversations are dominated by low-level arguments about terminology and artifacts rather than outcomes
• There is pressure to turn every piece of information into a measurement and scale it
• Despite everything that is known about the principles of good design, organizations are hiring a lot of skilled designers and making crap
• Attention gravitates towards incremental refinements rather than solving real problems
• Great products and services attract loyal customers while on the venture runway and then go to hell once someone figures out they need to make (more) money.

Business culture and design culture are planets with different atmospheres. Business suffocates in the absence of positive numbers. Design subsists on subjective human experience.

Value to the user is qualitative. Value to the business is quantitative. In order to make holistic decisions, you have to create a representation that makes that translation. Talking about value in the abstract does this. A business gets value and meaning expressed in money (or fungible equivalent). A user gets value expressed in a mental state, in meaning.

The fundamental challenge we are up against is that doing the right thing well is generally more expensive and time-consuming than doing the least you can get away with and figuring out how to defend it.

For example, the Lean methodology and the Minimum Viable Product technique are supposed to help reduce waste and increase the timely flow of useful feedback. In practice, they are used as cover for rushing to a less thoughtful solution without considering the context or the long-term implications.

Because so much value inheres in a digital intermediary, the interface/interaction design is the business. Any designer only thinking of the customer or user experience is doing at most a third of the job.

 The interaction not only needs to provide value to the customer, it must return value back to the organization or it doesn’t matter how delightful it is. And it’s much easier to create a sustainable exchange of value if you consider it from the beginning.

People who work with complex information use a lot of diagrams and models in their work. Models go wrong when they have a surfeit of detail or stylistic embellishments, both impediments to understanding that arise from their creator’s anxiety about demonstrating expertise.

For the purpose of design decisions, if the model serves as a tool for quickly communicating the salient points to help people make the right decision, it’s good. If it draws attention to itself, it’s bad. The map should not be more confusing than the territory.