Showing the Value of Design

Ian Paget: When I was preparing for this interview, I made sure to look at everything about you, your website, and so on. I understand that this is quite an interesting topic for you. I wanted to start off with this, and ask you your opinion. What value can designers bring when they have a seat at the table within a business?

Aarron Walter: Well, they can bring a lot. Designers have a lot of unique skills, in that we tend to be pretty good at turning abstract ideas and concepts into something concrete that others can see. When others can see that, they can start to ideate together, they can start to think about business models around that, and you can start to create something that helps everyone have a shared vision of this is where we’re headed together. I think that’s a very powerful thing that design can offer.

I do think that design, this proverbial seat at the table, that design, and basically what that means is, design is understood, it’s valued, it’s invested in, it is part of the broader activities in the company when we’re setting strategy and defining goals and so forth. For design to occupy that space effectively, we have to think a little less, navel-gazey of, what’s our own language about our craft and so forth. Those are all important things, but we have to start to think about what we’re making and how that influences the business.

How does your design help the business reach its goals? Then we need to talk to people about our work from that lens, to the extent that we can do that, we will be included in those deeper conversations. Oftentimes, designers feel like, “I wasn’t consulted. Why are we doing this? You brought me in at the end of the process to decorate or make it look pretty.” Chances are that’s probably because you are not communicating your work in a context of the business. That’s a really important skill that we as designers need to have.

Ian Paget: Okay. Leading on from that, obviously, as graphic designers, we need to be able to sell what we do and convince clients or people within an organisation of what we can bring. What’s your thoughts on convincing clients or business owners that we need to be bought in earlier in the process and not just at the end, just to make something look pretty?

Aaron Walter: Well, I think that the most effective way to do it is, instead of directly saying, “You should bring us at the beginning,” which may or may not work. In my experience, often, it’s not the most effective approach. Sort of saying to someone, “You should respect me more.” Okay. It’s hard to do. Respect is something that’s earned through action, and so if you want design to be included in strategic conversations, you need to first show that design can have strategic outcomes.

My team, at InVision, we end up studying a lot of teams and visiting them. We did a big study of 2,200 companies, agencies, product companies, across lots of different types of markets around the world. We see that the most successful pattern for getting people to understand and respect design and employ it effectively in an organisation, is by tackling a project that is not something that everyone’s paying attention to. It’s not the cash cow. You’re not trying to redesign the homepage necessarily, or recreate the … I don’t know, the payment gateway in your product.

You’re choosing something that maybe is a cost centre, cost the company money, or you’re losing money through that, or just nobody’s paying attention. You use design, and in a very time-boxed way to try to make that better. You snap a baseline before your project, and then you get the analytics afterwards to show here’s what life was like before and here’s what life was like after, and here’s the value we created for the company.

Casing point, Abigail Hart Gray, who used to be at LearnVest, which was a large financial institution. She came into their company, and she saw that … the main portal, there was a section of the portal where people went into the bank to look at their accounts, that people were getting paper copies of all their statements, and with some light design changes, they could just make people more aware and have them opt into electronic documentation. No one’s paying attention at that in the company, no one really cares. They know it’s just part of business. We’ve got to print these things and mail them to people.

But through design, they decreased the number of people that were getting printed copies dramatically, and they saved the company millions of dollars. I would argue, that also creates a better user experience, that do we really … I personally don’t want 15 envelopes in my mailbox that I have to go process and recycle. That’s an example of, instead of saying, “I need respect,” it’s showing this is the value that we can bring. That’s how you go from, no one gets design to being invited to important conversations.

Ian Paget: That’s a really great example. It’s quite simple, but it clearly made a big difference. I’m just thinking though, that particular example is something that you could suggest and implement if you work as part of the team in an organisation. But do you have a different answer for those who are listening who offer graphic design services to clients?

Aarron Walter: I think it’s not so dissimilar. I used to run my own services company, and it’s a similar approach, where whatever you’re doing for your clients capture the baseline of this is … get access to analytics, if you can, metrics to try to understand where the business is right now. Do that work and show how you move the needle afterwards. I think it’s very similar, and then when you’re engaging new clients, and they’re starting to say, “Oh, could you design this new site for me?”

You can say, “Well, we actually have this really compelling case study that shows that we can do more than that. We can help you solve some bigger problems that will really help your company improve, bottom line, whatever ROI metrics you want to speak to.” Create compelling case studies on your website that show how you move the needle for a company, not just, “Look at all these beautiful things that I made.” I mean, it’s to be expected if we’re only showing our work from an aesthetic perspective, not from a business impact perspective. It shouldn’t be so surprising that people think of our services in that respect, that we will just make it look good.

Ian Paget: Yeah, that’s very true. I do commonly see a lot of designers, especially those in the logo design space, showing only the logo on its own rather than showing the challenges faced, problems solved and the designs in context, so I 100% agree with the importance of case studies. Something I’ve been thinking, is that so far all the examples discussed have been UX focussed, which is something that can be easily measured and monitored, but what’s your thoughts when it comes to branding identity design, and logo design when it becomes a little more of a cosmetic change?

Aarron Walter: Yeah. Well, there are different ways you can study brand influence and brand recognition. I mean, you can use … and by the way, I don’t profess to be an expert on this.

Ian Paget: No, it’s fine. I’m interested in what you think.

Aarron Walter: You can use things like surveys to try to get a sense for … surveys before and after a project, especially if there’s a broader marketing campaign that’s part of it. It’s not just that you updated the brand, but what did you do to circulate that? You can speak directly to customers and run surveys to try to get a sense for their reaction, so more qualitative less quantitative, to understand how does this change your perceptions of the organisation?

Of course, you need to get those perceptions beforehand to … You need to show a delta of this is what it was before and here’s what we created afterwards. You can also look at, to the extent that it makes sense for your organisation or for the project you’re doing, social media influence could be another thing that might have an uptick or a change. There’s a really interesting case study that’s in my book, Designing for Emotion. Chapter seven is devoted to it.

A designer by the name of Matthew Smith, who lives in Greenville, South Carolina, did a big branding and website redesign for a company who writes resumes for people who are looking for jobs. With that redesign, they saw a huge uptick in their business, and he ended up being featured on Oprah, and it’s a pretty extreme example of how branding design changed outside perceptions, and that helped this business really grow in ways that it probably wouldn’t have.

Ian Paget: That’s a pretty big deal to get featured on Oprah. I’m keen to take a look at the before and after on that one, because it must’ve been really impressive work. I just want to jump back to something you mentioned earlier about a study you did on … what was it? 2,200 agencies? Was there any interesting outcomes from that that you wasn’t expecting?

Aaron Walter: Yeah. It wasn’t just agencies, it was lots of different design teams. 2,200 companies around the world. I think about 20% to 30% of them were agencies. There were some interesting outcomes from that. One thing that we hear a lot is, if you’re in a full time, larger company situation, people often think, “If we only had more head count or more designers on the team, we would create better work, and we can be more effective.”

The reality is that we see that that’s true to a certain extent, especially after around 40 or 50 people. It actually, the more people you add, the harder it is to do great work, and that is primarily because there’s a coordination tax, that when you’ve got a whole lot of people, you’ve got to operationalise and get them all to work together. That becomes pretty challenging.

Another thing is around ratios, that how many designers to engineers? There’s often this perception, and I have held this perception from a lot of qualitative research we’ve done through the Design Genome Project where we do these really in-depth studies of companies like Netflix and Intuit and Capital One and Pinterest.

The qualitative research suggested that if you had a better ratio of designers to engineers, let’s say like one designer to four engineers, you’re more likely to produce great work. But from our study of 2,200 companies, it turns out that ratios are not a significant factor in improving the work of design. That was fascinating to see. I didn’t really expect that.

Ian Paget: That’s really interesting, not what you’d expect at all. In terms of larger teams being harder to coordinate I’m not at all surprised to hear that, as I know the most successful design companies I’ve had contact with are fairly small, and I’d imagine they keep them small for that reason.

Now, I understand you have a lot of experience from your time at MailChimp and also InVision, and even though the podcast is primarily around logo design, it would be a shame, and a missed opportunity if we wasn’t to spend some time learning from your UX experience, so would you be willing to share with us some of the process that you typically follow when you work on a UX project?

Aaron Walter: Yeah. I mean, one of the key things that is often missing in a lot of projects is just research. Research is something that I really love, if you can’t tell already. I started the design team at MailChimp and grew that, and it’s since grown into a much bigger organisation doing really sophisticated stuff these days, but … Part of that is, I created a research team and all the work that we did, we spent time talking to customers and really understanding the problem as much as we could before designing.

The process that I like to follow is, if we’re confronting a particular problem, there is a certain amount of research that we would do. If it’s a small iteration on an existing feature or product, we might do some baseline usability testing to see how effective that workflow is. It’s, as I alluded to earlier, catching the baseline of here’s where we were and we’ll try to make that better. There’s that research, and then also just qualitatively doing a lot of interviews with people.

If you’re doing your thinking about the future of what’s the big change that we could make, as maybe many listeners of your podcast might be if you’re doing a big rebrand for a company, there are things like design sprints that can be used to think about customers, and do some research around that, build some prototypes, test that with real customers, and get feedback in a short period of time. It’s very time-boxed. I love that process. Design sprints don’t work for everything, but they do if you’re really trying to explore what I would call horizon two.

Ian Paget:  Can I just ask you? Could you explain what you mean by a design sprint, for people that aren’t aware of what that is?

Aaron Walter: Sure. Yeah. Design sprint is a process that was popularised by the Google Venture’s team. Sprints are usually five days, sometimes three days, and sometimes even one day. But major companies like the Home Depot, for example, or Google or … Name most any company, there’s probably a design team doing a design sprint. It starts out with … Each day has a specific goal.

Day one, you’re trying to understand the problem, and all the way through to day two, where you’re prototyping … I think it’s day three, actually. I might get my days wrong. But you’re prototyping something based on your hypotheses, and you work together in a small team to produce a whole collection of ideas, you prototype that in high fidelity so it feels real and you can suspend people’s disbelief, and then you put it in front of real people and they use your product, and you get the reactions. It’s a way where you can really decrease the risk of your work.

If you spent a ton of time developing some big design project and you haven’t put it in front of people and you just launch it and hope that it’s well received, that’s certainly a tactic that a lot of people have used for many years. But you can see that that’s dangerous because you go to market and you don’t really know if you’re hitting the mark or not. Design sprint is a way to de-risk some of that. If you’re interested in learning more about design sprints, if you visit designbetter.co, they’ve actually written a great book on it that has a facilitation guide that can show you how to do that.

Ian Paget:  Yeah, I’ll make sure to link to that in the show notes for anyone that wants to find that. Can I ask you then… You mentioned about having customers actually there so that you can see how they’re using it. How are you going about finding these people so that you are able to do things like MOM testing?

Aaron Walter: If you’re working for a client that’s already in business, pretty strong chance that they a customer database, and you can just get a sample of those people. I get some E-mails, send some E-mails and say, “Hey, we’d love to talk to you for 30 minutes.” Sometimes people offer an incentive, like an Amazon gift card or something for their time, but you’d be surprised, a lot of people would be happy to talk for 30 minutes.

You can do that on the phone, you don’t have to be in person. You can do it on the old school phone, or you can be on Zoom. It’s something that we use a lot to do research. Pretty much any company is going to have access to customers, and there’s no better way to learn. You can also use some things like usertesting.com, and they connect people who want to test something with users who will run it through the paces.

Ian Paget: That sounds really useful. Again, I’ll make sure to add a link to that in the show notes. Sorry, I interrupted while she was talking through the process that you would take for working on a UX project, and you’ve got to the point where you would do a lot of research. Could you continue through that?

Aaron Walter:  Sure. Generally speaking, the process that we used at MailChimp was, there’s research, there might be a design sprint to explore something that feels very unclear to us. We’re not sure which direction to go. We spent a lot of times sketching. It’s a really key thing because sketching, it’s fast, it’s low risk, and lots of people can do it together.

This is a process hack for you if you’re designing in a small team, sketching separately together. Instead of everyone working through an idea on a shared whiteboard, calling out ideas and so forth, each person can draw a series of solutions or ideas within a limited period of time. Let’s say that everyone come up with eight solutions in five minutes. If you went to design school, you probably did the 100 thumbnail sketch exercise, which is brutal.

The first 20, not that bad, and then the next 80, it’s really hard. It’s a bit like running a marathon. You get through a couple of miles and it’s okay, and then you hit those last five. It’s just really hard. But the thing about sketching is that you can do it together, and if you’re doing it separately together, if you’ve got five people each producing eight solutions in five minutes, you’ve got 40 different ideas to choose from. The math is good if you sketch separately together.

Then from there of course, you follow the standard process, where you define which solution or small set of solutions seem strongest, then you start to build those out in higher fidelity in a computer. Then you can start to test those with real people.

Ian Paget: I really like that approach. I’m known online for doing my logo design work, but I’ve actually been working for a web design agency for the last 10 years. The way that we’ve needed to approach it is we do one version that is based on the template and the roll that out. But the solution that you’ve explained here sounds so much more effective, and it’s more focused on actually solving specific problems, and then actually understanding are they working or not.

I really like that approach, so thank you for sharing that with us. I think the a 100 sketching thing, I think that can work for things like logo design and branding and other areas of graphic design as well. It sounds like a really good idea.

Aaron Walter: Yeah. You do it enough and you start to get to perfection very quickly. I bet your listeners will know Paula Scher, and her work. I know Paula, she’s an amazing person and she famously designed the city logo in three minutes. Then they billed the city of a pretty high invoice for the work, and they said, “We watched you do that in like 30 seconds.” She said, “No, it took me 30 years to be able to do that in 30 seconds. You’re paying for 30 years of work.” I thought that was great.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I’ve always loved the example. I think it was something like $1.5 million. I am not sure how many others could pull that off, but it’s a great example of, regardless.

I want to ask you about your book, which you mentioned earlier, Designing for Emotion. Can you talk through what you mean by emotional design, and how we can use that to improve our design work?

Aaron Walter: Yeah. That book came from a series of experiments and some exploration at MailChimp, where we started to see a strong correlation between how design can influence the emotional state of a customer for the better, and create a great brand experience that’s memorable and effective. There are scientific correlations between, let’s say, longterm memory and emotional experiences. We remember things that are good for us, that felt good. You probably remember your first kiss.

Our limbic system, which is in our brainstem, is where a lot of emotion is processed. It’s also where longterm memory is, and the reason why we remember things that are good for us, and also we remember trauma, things that really were negative. It’s a survival thing, that if we remember things that are good for us, we can repeat those and we can thrive a species, or as a person.

If we don’t remember the things that harm us, we run the risk of not surviving. There’s a strong connection there. If we think about that, the way that the mind works, and we think about how design … I mean, we designers, I probably don’t have to convince anyone that’s listening that design can influence our emotional state. Many of us, we’re obsessed with things that are beautifully designed because they just make us feel good.

They make us feel comfortable, they inspire trust, they inspire creativity. There’s so many things about objects and the things that we can design as humans, that can influence a person. We can be strategic about using design in key moments to create emotional engagement. I’ll give you an example. With MailChimp, it’s an E-mail marketing platform and it takes a long time to design an E-mail and write it.

We tried to make it as fast as possible with the product, but just by nature of the medium, it just takes a long time to produce that. When you get to the end and you’re about to hit send, it feels a little scary because you can’t suck an E-mail back in. Once it’s out, it’s gone. It’s out in the world. There’s this moment of high stress, then you press send and it goes out, and then there’s this just elation, just feeling like I finally got it, and you feel super happy.

It’s like you deserve a beer after that because it was such a major triumph for you. We created a high five. There’s some language on there, just says high fives your E-mails heading into the queue. There’s a high five, like a Freddie, the chimp high fives, the screen there. To this day, if you go to Twitter and you search for MailChimp high five, you see lots of people tweeting about it, pictures of them high-fiving your screens, high-fiving your computers because they feel so connected to that moment.

That’s a peak experience in the customer journey. If we can identify those and then we can use design to connect in that moment, we create this emotionally engaging experience that imprints on longterm memory. That leads to a lot of word of mouth marketing, it leads to continuing to use a product, telling other people about it. That’s all really good for our business.

Thinking about the emotion and its connection to design is so key. So I wrote a book about this, it covers all of these things and more. I also recommend checking out Don Norman’s book. It’s just called Emotional Design. He’s the guy who wrote The Design of Everyday Things, and both of those books are a great read.

Ian Paget: It sounds like a really fascinating book and a really interesting way of thinking about a project. I’m sure it’s covered in the book, but I’d be really interested to know from you, how do you go about actually identifying those moments within a process or within an organisation, where you can leverage understanding that? Because the concept of it sounds absolutely amazing, and if you can leverage that is absolutely fantastic.

With something like E-mail marketing, that minute when we’re now sending it, that fills relatively obvious that that would be a high stress moment for the user. But other companies, I don’t know where you might potentially put it. Do you have a method, or at all, some kind of approach for identifying those moments?

Aaron Walter: You can use something as straightforward as journey mapping. Journey mapping, if you go to Medium and you search for journey mapping, you’ll see lots of articles that will tell you how to do it. But in a nutshell, what you’re trying to do is identify the highs and lows of the customer experience, where in the process of signing up for a product, using a product, getting your bearings, doing mundane tasks and so forth, where are the peaks and where are the valleys? What we can do is we can identify the places that are the worst, where it’s so confusing and frustrating.

That’s where there’s a lot of negative emotion happening, and it’s not really a time to be cute. It’s a time to fill in that valley and make it just easier, just make it more intuitive and easier. Then where there are peaks, that’s where you can start to think about what’s your high five moments? If you’re, let’s say, a financial institution and you want to use emotional design, you might use it a little bit differently.

I know that Mint, if you’ve heard of mint.com, it’s a financial tool, their success hinged on the use of design and creating an emotionally engaging experience, because they ask their customers to input login information for all of their banks so they can aggregate all that data and show you meaningful stuff that helps you manage your money more effectively. With them, it’s less about creating a moment of joy or happiness or even a moment of humour. That would actually be dangerous for them. They to inspire trust.

They use design to make sure that the brand and just the experience felt really buttoned up and well considered, because if it looks great and feels great, that suggests that it’s probably a stable platform. It’s not unlike going into a job interview in person, and you don’t go in your pyjamas, you go in looking your best because you want people to trust you that you’re someone who has their stuff together and can be reliable and intelligent and have something to offer. Design, just on a general level … I’m sure all of your listeners are working hard to create really compelling, beautiful experiences. That in itself is creating an emotionally engaging experience.

Ian Paget: That’s really interesting. I’m keen to do some journey mapping on my next project, to see where things could be improved. Because, like I mentioned, I do a fair amount of UX work, so it’s a nice extra thing to think about to improve the experience further. I think I’m definitely going to have to check out your books. It sounds really interesting. Anyway, I know here today, you are VP of design education at InVision, which is a really impressive title. But what does that job entail? Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Aaron Walter: I lead a small team of folks with a background in the design space, and together we spend a great deal of time building relationships with design teams and trying to understand what helps them succeed and where they struggle. We try to capture the best practices, because we’re standing on the top of a mountain, being able to see across a lot of design teams, we can start to see some patterns. These are the things that are best practices, and we want to share those with as many design teams and designers as we can.

Because if we do that, we can advance the role of design in lots of different types of businesses. We sometimes do research, we write books, articles, we have a podcast, the Design Better Podcast, where we interview interesting people like David Kelley who co-founded IDEO, and created the Stanford d.school, Julie Zhou who’s the VP of product and design at Facebook, and lots of other really interesting folks. We try to give everyone access to the design wisdom of the world.

Ian Paget: That’s absolutely fascinating. I knew what you were saying earlier about your role when you was working at MailChimp, how you like to do all of the research, am I right in understanding that you are basically collating all of that information, understanding the target audience for InVision, and then effectively feeding that back into the product to improve the products and product offer?

Aaron Walter: Well, sort of. We do have a connection to the product, but our primary goal is to give the design best practices to the world. It’s a bit of a long play, if you think about this, that if we can help design as a discipline advance, we help create a space where the many design tools that we create and we offer to customers, that it’s more needed, it becomes really critical.

If businesses can start to understand design, then they can start to invest in it, and when they do, that’s ultimately going to be good for InVision. But our primary goal, as a team, is to serve the design community and help designers improve their practice.

Ian Paget: It sounds amazing. Just to clarify all of the information that you’re collating, is that all freely available to anyone that wants access to that? Or-

Aaron Walter: Absolutely.

Ian Paget: That’s amazing.

Aaron Walter: Yeah. If got to designbetter.com, you can download our entire library for free on design thinking, design sprints, animation, product design, lots of different things, design systems, design operations. Of course, our podcast, we have events that we do as well. Lots of reports. Yeah, it’s all free.

Ian Paget: Wow. That’s absolutely incredible. I wasn’t actually aware of that because I know that you got the podcast, but I wasn’t aware of all the other information, so I’m definitely going to check that out myself and I’ll make sure to link to all of that in the show notes as well, so that listeners can go and check that out, because it sounds and mentally valuable.

I want to ask you about your podcast, as well. I’ve listened to a couple now, and your guests are absolutely amazing. Anyone that listens to that, you’re really going to learn a lot from all of the guests that you’re getting. I want to ask you, what are some of the most important lessons that you’ve learned from some of the guests that you’ve had?

Aaron Walter: Yeah, that’s a good question there. Lots of interesting lessons. I think that there’s a common theme about thinking in terms of partnerships. I used to think, as a product designer and as a design team leader, about the work, just really focus on the work and making great work, and thinking about the customer too. That was all good and really positive. But one thing that I think I didn’t do as well as I could have, is focus on partnerships, that design is not really something that happens in a vacuum.

It’s not like you have total autonomy that you made it all yourself. There are some listeners who might do that, who might code and design and put it all together themselves, and that’s awesome. But chances are a lot of your listeners, probably, have to rely on others to build it, to market it, to sell it. There are lots of other people who are involved in the process. Thinking in terms of how do I build those partnerships, how do I think less about me and think more about we and how we collaborate, I think that’s a common theme.

Also here, people like Abigail Hart Gray who’s recently on our podcasts, and how she builds partnerships by making sure that her goals align to the goals of her engineering partners. She finds out what’s really important to them, and then she knows what’s important to her, and she finds a middle ground and she creates a specific KPI or a metric, a goal that can be shared, and that’s a good way to bring people together. Abigail’s at Google, she’s doing some really interesting stuff over there. But I think partnerships are a key theme.

Ian Paget: That’s really interesting. I need to make sure to listen to that. But I think you’re right. I know when you work with others you get more done and use the best skills of everyone that you collaborate with, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that that’s been a common theme for people that happen to be successful. Now I know we are near the end of the time we have available because you got a hard stop.

I’m going to ask you one last question. We spoke a lot about UX design, and there’s been a few books that you mentioned, but are there any particular books that you’ve not already mentioned? Books or resources that you would recommend graphic designers to go out and buy so that they can be better UX designers?

Aaron Walter: Absolutely. One of my all time favourite books and I’ve had it for probably a decade and I still reference it, is Universal Principles of Design. That’s a great one. It’s about concepts, techniques, methodologies. That’s a good reference point, and what I like about that is that it feels like it bridges some of the concepts of graphic design and experience design, service design, all in one place. It’s a fun read and it’s also just an easy reference.

If you’re trying to get your bearings just on some basics of UX design, you might want to check out my colleague Leah Buleys book, UX Team of One, which just assembles all of the basic principles of how to do UX in one place. That’s a great read.

If you’re getting your bearings with research, you’re curious about that and you want to find how do I pull this into the work that I do and the offerings that I give my clients, Erika Hall’s book, Just Enough Research, from A Book Apart, is a great one. Of course, all of the books from A Book Apart, I think they’re … Jason Santa Maria’s book on typology is great. There is Ethan Marcotte’s book on responsive design. There’s so many good ones in there.

Ian Paget: Yeah, I’d agree with those books. I’ve got a couple of them and they’re absolutely amazing. Now I’m keen to read the one that you wrote, now that you’ve explained the concept of using emotion within your work. That’s really interesting. I’ll be honest, when I read the title, I didn’t quite understand how that would work, but now you’ve explained it, I’m really keen to learn more about that. I appreciate you explaining that.

Aaron, I know that you need to make a move in the next 10 minutes, so I’m going to wrap up the interview, but I just want to say thank you so much for coming on and for sharing some of your wisdom, and I’ll make sure to link to everything that you mentioned in the show so that people can find and learn more about you. I just want to say, thank you so much for coming on and for sharing so much with us.

Aaron Walter: Yeah, thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

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