How to convince stakeholders to green-light your design ideas
Quantifying delight to those who just “don’t get design”
Why is it that even with the demonstrated success of design-led companies like Apple, designers still can’t convince business stakeholders to greenlight projects?
I’ve heard many reasons — the predominant one simply being that we can’t convince the powers that be because there’s no way to “quantify delight”.
Bullshit.
The problem isn’t that there’s no way to do it, the problem is that designers focus all their efforts of empathizing with users, while neglecting the equally important task of empathizing with internal stakeholders. Aka — designers need to learn the catch the fish with the worm, even when it comes to internal company processes.
If a product manager asks “where’s the Return on Investment in adding UI animations?” don’t roll your eyes and tell all your design-minded friends that these business guys just “don’t get it.”
Get up, order a nice overpriced latte from the Starbucks down the street, and think of a way to show the Return on Investment in UI animations!
Catching the fish with the worm
We need to appeal to what matters to stakeholders. PMs, CEOs, etc. who understandably find emotional experience metrics nebulous and vague. They want numbers. You can’t really blame them either — qualitative feedback has historically been bad at providing an accurate measure of impact (because of biases like vocal minority, etc.)
So where do we start? Let’s look at business analytics tools — a $66bn market. There are now so many ways for businesses to understand their users that it’s getting kind of creepy.
Good thing one of Google’s mottos is “Don’t be evil.”
It’s clear that businesses want to understand their users. So how can we as designers leverage what businesses want to accomplish what we want — the production allocation to craft amazing experiences?
There are heaps on heaps of tools that measure what people are doing, down to what they’re clicking on. We also know what attributes people have through social media profiles, surveys, and the like. What matters most to designers however is measuring what people are thinking, feeling, and the motivations that cause them to behave in certain ways.
And don’t get me wrong — we shouldn’t only be concerned about what designers want either. There’s real business impact here. We’ve moved to a world where functional interfaces and experiences are par for the course. Thanks in large part to Apple, we know now the power of delight, of designing around emotion. And in my opinion this is going to become a central theme in the next few decades of software.
But if it’s important, why aren’t there a lot of tools to explain the thoughts & feelings of users behind the actions?
Emotional value in its nascency
At the outset of the two largest technological revolutions of the last century (industrial & internet), came the unprecedented ability to deliver incredible amounts of functional value. Cars could move ten times faster than horses, and this functional value spawned one of the largest industries on the planet.
After awhile though, because it was lucrative, a lot of people decided to start making cars. How then did car companies differentiate themselves if they could all move pretty fast? After all, there were speed limits capping how fast you could go anyway.
The answer is delight. Emotion. Charm. Whatever you want to call it, it’s undeniable that once the left-brain was satisfied, the right brain was looking for its share of value too. And it got its fill in sexy car ads, luxurious interiors, and very strange looking three-wheeled cars (everyone wants to be unique right?)
The same is now happening with the internet. The lion’s share of value created in the last few decades was around what the internet allowed people to do. Now, I believe we’re starting to see that companies that win care more and more about how the internet can make you feel.
Tools for quantifying delight
That explains why so far most internet tracking tools have focused on what people are doing, not how they’re feeling.
That’s changing, albeit slowly.
In the meantime, there are tools like Usertesting, Uservoice, etc. that can help us chisel away at unearthing what effects our products are having on people’s attitudes quantitatively.
If your team isn’t up for paying for one of those, as a designer an easy win is also just to pull up your sleeves and categorize support tickets. Tag your Intercom conversations. Chart all of your tweets and label them positive or negative so you have a number. There’s a lot you can do just yourself, you just need to think of creative ways to do it.
As design departments grow in influence, we need to find more ways and tools to justify what we do to the stakeholders involved. I’d like to imagine a world where designers can sit in an executive meeting and say “this quarter the design team increased user happiness by 6%, which led to a 3% increase in month over month retention.”
It sounds crazy, I know. But then again, where’s the fun in dreaming small?
Let’s talk about feelings
I’d like to see a new generation of products help people feel more capable, more confident, less apathetic and more. Sometimes those things can be even more powerful than simply allowing people to do it.
But in order to do that, designers will need the right tools & techniques to justify their seat at the table — the best way to catch a fish is with a worm, not a strawberry shortcake, as delicious as they are.
There are some tools that are already starting to do this. Usertesting sites where you get to chat with the users are great, aggregators of qualitative feedback from your social media are a start as well.
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If you enjoyed this post, please share it! I’m trying to share more of the incredible things I’m learning every day, but it’s hard to justify the time spent unless more people see value in it.