Design Ratio
The Golden Ratio is foundational for design. It is utilized in typography, page layout, icon and logo design, it guides us by revealing a potential path for our designs.
There’s another design ratio that we use to help guide design leaders, it's one that doesn't often get much focus and its application is something I've struggled with for much of my design career to get the balance right.
How many designers do we need on the team? What is the design ratio of designers, to researchers, to developers, to PM?
The topic of Design Ratio and team size came up recently when I was getting coffee with Michael Smuga . I’ve had the fortune to work with Michael for over a decade building and fostering design teams across a wide range of products. He is a passionate advocate for the design teams, going to the table to make sure we had the resources needed to deliver great work.
Michael developed a framework for Design Ratio that allowed us to scope, and plan our work in a rational way, allowing stakeholders to invest in our team.
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Top Down Bottoms Up
Design Ratio based on discipline is a Top Down approach to provide an approximation of team needs. If you had 10 developers on the team, would you need 3-4 designers to create the designs that will funnel into the workflow to build the product. It provides an aggregate view, the big picture. It gives a quick reference on our design investment and its simple to apply. It's also insufficient and can be misleading.
Design Ratio misses the work of a holistic design team, how we need to address customer journeys that cross product lines. Horizontal work like design systems, design agenda on inclusion and sustainability, to hybrid designers and ux engineers that prototypes and elevates our product experiences, to generative researchers that are formulating the insights and hypothesis for our design direction. The?expansive design work to explore and envision new growth opportunities in the next tech cycle gets lost in Design Ratio.
A Bottoms Up view is needed to show the investment to maximize the global impact. We created vertical product charter with clear Design Ratios by product areas, giving more granularity to the design investment. Then we showed the horizontal design work that lifts all the product areas, that maximizes our team's global impact.
This approach is not perfect and just as the Golden ratio is an ideal, in practice getting the balance right with Design Ratio and Top Down Bottoms Up requires iterations, getting feedback, monitoring performance and adjusting as team needs evolve.
As the next era of generative design emerges, new tools and practices will shift Design Ratios and getting the balance right will be even more critical for design and product teams.
Content Design, Customer Advocate
2 年Albert, I am curious whether you factor in content designers as part of UX staffing. I'm aware that some teams keep UX/UI writers as part of traditional documentation teams, and other organizations place content designers in UX Design. Is it a matter of the core disciplines needed to ship product? Honest question.
Global Head of Design for Philips
2 年Ah the complex politics of Design funding! AWS is close to 25:1 on average, at one time Azure was 23:1 (Philip varies but is close to this). MSFT office is likely closer to FB which is in many cases about 14-17:1, Companies like Pinterest likely closer to 8-10:1. Only start-ups seem to be in the "Golden Ratio" zone. If you have a lot of back end workload, AI science and API overhead, the engineering ratio SHOULD be much higher. In some companies (such as Amazon), bringing up the topic of ratio based funding is "third rail" triggering. I've found it best to speak more about being an "equal product stakeholder" and demonstrate value thru early prototypes and especially powerful writing for designers (an Amazon strength and one reason to work there for awhile). Thesis: Every case and every business is different based on what needs to be done. That said in most of my roles other than Nokia and Palm, Design has been about 25% too thin to deliver the best outcomes.
Founder at Lake & Pine Creative / Design Partner at New Normal (ex-Amazon, ex-Zune, ex-Napster)
2 年Love the topic. At AWS my design team was always gonna lose out on Dev/Design ratio when measured across the division at large. However, looking at projects and/or workstreams through a ratio lens was always helpful to the Product Managers. I structured the design team to play more of a zone defense, allocating design team to certain UX intensive sprints. Not ideal. And, when i needed to, i could always trot out the 70:1 (not kidding) as a reminder of the pressure and speed at which we were moving....for a little sympathy or an excuse for the bottleneck we were perceived as.
Product Design Leader | Experience Strategy + AI + Innovation | Ex: Microsoft, Samsung, Smartsheet, Frog Design, and startups
2 年Agree with this. Agree with you Albert Shum, Michael Smuga and Drew Bamford (hey, Drew! It’s been a minute). In my experience, ratios are a great conversation starter and sanity check. Fits in nicely with sprint planning. Can be a great way to spot check or triage team health. For planning, though, using ratios presumes you know what you’re doing and don’t need any generative design. If you don’t know what you’re building, then you need to have a different conversation about resources and process. Are we doing a Sprint 0? Dual-track? Bi-modal? Agile-fall? All valid ways of working that all require a different staffing approach. So ratios? Yeah, I like them. They often don’t solve anything other than to kick loose or unblock a bigger conversation. Which is a very good thing.
I design tools for technical people.
2 年My way of estimating this is count all developers, front end, back end, doesn't matter. Also count all designers, visual, UX, junior, senior, etc. Then I find that a ratio designer/developer 1/6 is comfortable, 1/8 starts to get stressful, 1/10+ puts design is on the critical path or requires design to decline to participate in some projects.