Building Business Acumen (Book Chapter)
This post is a chapter from my book The User Experience Consultant: 10 Reasons Why UX Designers Should Consider a Career in Consulting
Chapter 5: Business
A UX practitioner is in the business of design and the design of business. At the forefront, a UX consultant needs to build a solution mindset. If you’re not inclined to finding solutions, you’re creating another problem for your client and your consulting firm. Clients hire consultants with a single point agenda — Solutions. We must understand that Solutions are not variants or mere options. Most beginners make the mistake of providing variants over solutions.
The outcome of any problem solving exercise should ideally be a set of potential design solution paths. However, it’s a common practice for UX designers to just change layouts, colours, fonts, and content to create some so-called variants or options and call them different solutions to a given problem. This is not a sensible and professional approach by any means. These options are just variants of a solution family, lacking any individual merit. As UX practitioners, we should present a range of solutions and not just variants to clients or users. For example, user testing is really not just about collecting data or feedback on those different button colours or copy. This would obviously lead the participant to share a different response. What you’re testing here is the preference for an option and not the solution per se.
Here is my hypothesis. If you present four options to a testing participant, obviously there is a propensity to pick one, considering they don’t have a choice to decline in this scenario. Choosing one makes the other options insignificant and makes the mostly picked one, a popular pattern, however it does not mean it’s the correct one. The reason being, they were presented options of a solution family and not distinctively different solutions.
The same logic applies when you present multiple solutions. However, its not that easy for participants to pick one based on personal taste and the evaluation process needs deeper thinking. We move from petty comparison to deeper evaluation in this context. As UX designers, exploring diverse possibilities gives us the opportunity to draw insights from popular and diverse patterns. Once we identify a potential route, we can expand further and test variants of the same. Think solutions!
UX Designers need to build business acumen. I think, we talk too much about working in the interest of the users. If you ask me, it’s always the business first. I’m an ardent advocate of user-centred design, however, we design for the user needs only to feed the business needs and revenue model. Pose this question to any product manager, business leader or an entrepreneur. The product experience has to translate into some form of direct or indirect business. A design leader should talk business; a business leader should talk design. This makes one good and sensible dialogue. Not the other way around; that anyone can do. UX consultants should ask business questions, not design questions. You should talk business using design language.
Here’s an example. Google’s trillion dollar business is kind of built against basic usability, in the interest of business. If you observe, the search-results page is purportedly designed with lower usability and high interaction cost for end users, in the interest of business and advertiser user groups. Google search is built on the PageRank model. Search results are organized as pages in some specific order. There are better interaction patterns when it comes to designing the search-results page, like the infinite scroll or a lazy load and other trends in pagination usability. The point is Google can build the most user friendly interface you can ever imagine, however they haven’t. It’s obvious. Any other design, goes against the business model and revenue is affected as clients optimize and pay for the page, and everyone wants to be on page one.
Here’s another example on selective usability. Did you know that Airbnb’s, desktop version does not have a sort-by-price feature. Isn’t this the most basic sorting feature that users expect? If you visit the website, you’ll notice that you can only select the price range to filter and find properties. At times, high usability can go against the business needs and other related user groups. This is not really a dark pattern, however a questionable design practice. This is a perfect example of choosing not to do something, by design. In this context, implementing best practices in usability and adding a sort-by-price can impact the entire business model of the company.
Is this good design? As designers, we need to ask pressing questions and address the needs of various user groups and find a fine balance, by design. Design shows the outside world, how a company intends to do business. We always have a choice. This is what I call, product design morality. Every product has one. As UX practitioners, we’re contributing to that morality every single day, with every single decision we take in our design endeavours. These two examples depict how the usability quotient can be a clear choice by companies, as business needs drives the user experience. The takeaway here is to think business and learn to balance the needs of a business, brand and users. However, always advocate good design practices and strive to find a good balance.
Innovation stems from questioning the status quo. If we can design a product, we can as well design a process that the designs a product. As you gain experience, you should aspire to build your own frameworks or thinking models and not just follow conventional thinking. Improving your design methods improves the consulting outcomes. Do this to build influence at work. Never indulge in frivolous talk of design tools, fleeting trends and obvious processes more than necessary. To command attention and authority at your workplace and clients, talk design only in terms of business - return on capital, conversions, product growth, brand value and UX metrics.
Chapter 5: Business
A UX practitioner is in the business of design and the design of business. At the forefront, a UX consultant needs to build a solution mindset. If you’re not inclined to finding solutions, you’re creating another problem for your client and your consulting firm. Clients hire consultants with a single point agenda — Solutions. We must understand that Solutions are not variants or mere options. Most beginners make the mistake of providing variants over solutions.
The outcome of any problem solving exercise should ideally be a set of potential design solution paths. However, it’s a common practice for UX designers to just change layouts, colours, fonts, and content to create some so-called variants or options and call them different solutions to a given problem. This is not a sensible and professional approach by any means. These options are just variants of a solution family, lacking any individual merit. As UX practitioners, we should present a range of solutions and not just variants to clients or users. For example, user testing is really not just about collecting data or feedback on those different button colours or copy. This would obviously lead the participant to share a different response. What you’re testing here is the preference for an option and not the solution per se.
Here is my hypothesis. If you present four options to a testing participant, obviously there is a propensity to pick one, considering they don’t have a choice to decline in this scenario. Choosing one makes the other options insignificant and makes the mostly picked one, a popular pattern, however it does not mean it’s the correct one. The reason being, they were presented options of a solution family and not distinctively different solutions.
The same logic applies when you present multiple solutions. However, its not that easy for participants to pick one based on personal taste and the evaluation process needs deeper thinking. We move from petty comparison to deeper evaluation in this context. As UX designers, exploring diverse possibilities gives us the opportunity to draw insights from popular and diverse patterns. Once we identify a potential route, we can expand further and test variants of the same. Think solutions!
UX Designers need to build business acumen. I think, we talk too much about working in the interest of the users. If you ask me, it’s always the business first. I’m an ardent advocate of user-centred design, however, we design for the user needs only to feed the business needs and revenue model. Pose this question to any product manager, business leader or an entrepreneur. The product experience has to translate into some form of direct or indirect business. A design leader should talk business; a business leader should talk design. This makes one good and sensible dialogue. Not the other way around; that anyone can do. UX consultants should ask business questions, not design questions. You should talk business using design language.
Here’s an example. Google’s trillion dollar business is kind of built against basic usability, in the interest of business. If you observe, the search-results page is purportedly designed with lower usability and high interaction cost for end users, in the interest of business and advertiser user groups. Google search is built on the PageRank model. Search results are organized as pages in some specific order. There are better interaction patterns when it comes to designing the search-results page, like the infinite scroll or a lazy load and other trends in pagination usability. The point is Google can build the most user friendly interface you can ever imagine, however they haven’t. It’s obvious. Any other design, goes against the business model and revenue is affected as clients optimize and pay for the page, and everyone wants to be on page one.
Here’s another example on selective usability. Did you know that Airbnb’s, desktop version does not have a sort-by-price feature. Isn’t this the most basic sorting feature that users expect? If you visit the website, you’ll notice that you can only select the price range to filter and find properties. At times, high usability can go against the business needs and other related user groups. This is not really a dark pattern, however a questionable design practice. This is a perfect example of choosing not to do something, by design. In this context, implementing best practices in usability and adding a sort-by-price can impact the entire business model of the company.
Is this good design? As designers, we need to ask pressing questions and address the needs of various user groups and find a fine balance, by design. Design shows the outside world, how a company intends to do business. We always have a choice. This is what I call, product design morality. Every product has one. As UX practitioners, we’re contributing to that morality every single day, with every single decision we take in our design endeavours. These two examples depict how the usability quotient can be a clear choice by companies, as business needs drives the user experience. The takeaway here is to think business and learn to balance the needs of a business, brand and users. However, always advocate good design practices and strive to find a good balance.
Innovation stems from questioning the status quo. If we can design a product, we can as well design a process that the designs a product. As you gain experience, you should aspire to build your own frameworks or thinking models and not just follow conventional thinking. Improving your design methods improves the consulting outcomes. Do this to build influence at work. Never indulge in frivolous talk of design tools, fleeting trends and obvious processes more than necessary. To command attention and authority at your workplace and clients, talk design only in terms of business - return on capital, conversions, product growth, brand value and UX metrics.
