Creative identity mindset shift #2: Stop talking about "quality"
You can be a designer who understands, shapes, and aligns with the business without losing your creativity.?Embracing business is not loss; it’s amplifying. It’s helping us do more of what we love. Becoming business-minded creatives is critical to our success as a discipline.?
There are five actions you can take to make this mindset shift. This is?#1, authored by Design Dept. CEO and founder?Mia Blume.
One of the most common mistakes creative teams make is believing that if we argue for things like “quality,” we’ll convince our stakeholders that our work is important.?
But quality means everything and nothing. When I ask a group of 30 designers to define quality, I get at least 20 different answers. They’ll say quality is framing clear problems. Or it’s good ux. No, it’s consistency. Or maybe it’s visual polish.?
If we ourselves can’t define quality, why would we expect our partners to do any better?
Get specific: business specific
It’s time for designers to stop using vague language that doesn’t serve us.?
The truth is, “quality” – whatever it might mean to you – does not map directly to business outcomes. We have to help people make that connection.
At Design Dept., we teach folks to reframe any statement about quality as an investment.
The great thing about the word “investment” is that it’s a metaphor that our business partners get. We’ve stepped into their arena and we’re speaking their language.??
“Investment” also implies a few things to our business partners. They understand that:
Here’s the reality: As designers, we have limited resources and we’re constantly making tradeoffs. When we use the language of our business partners, we help them understand how to consider our ideas and the user’s needs through that business lens.
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Two key questions
No matter what, the business really only cares if we can answer two key questions: Why us? and Why now??
Why us? is all about business strategy. How are we going to win in the market and what it takes to get that win.
Why now? is about the time of investment as it relates to product and business maturity.
Many of you may work in or with companies who have been in growth stages over the last few years. Those companies are focused on proving future value by growing their customer base. They are concerned about things like:
For companies in this phase of growth, things like engagement, completeness, consistency – experience focus areas – don’t matter as much.?
Do the translation
Designers of all levels need to stop using language that resonates with the crafting and quality side, and use the language that clearly resonates with business needs: competing and investing.?
What does that translation of design to business sound like??
It means that instead of saying: “increase the quality of user onboarding,” we say: “clarify and test value proposition to drive conversion.”
Instead of saying: “make ad containers consistent with organic,” we say: “reduce ad container size to increase ad volume and revenue.”
Now more than ever, if we can’t connect our work to key metrics like revenue, our requests will get deprioritized for ideas (good or bad) that make the connection to the business.
Want to grow as a leader? Here are three ways Design Dept. can help: