ROI & faustian bargains in design

Erica Hall says:

The “ROI of UX” is a thought terminating cliché.

The working assumption that business interests and user interests are inherently aligned (they are often not) prevents designers from doing the work that would be more likely to bring those interests into alignment.

Amen. I think user experience designers do need to be smart about about the relationship between user needs and business interests, but simply accepting creation of that alignment as part of designers’ mandate is a dangerous idea.

I like to describe UX design as offering a kind of benign faustian bargain.

Hey, Corporate Organization, I will figure out some things which will serve users well. Surely you can find a way to make money from that.

Which is okay-ish to a first approximation. But. There are subtleties.

It is irresponsible and ineffective for UXDs to simply throw cool product & service ideas over the wall to The Corporation to figure out how to make them viable business ideas. UXDs have a distinct role of user advocacy, but that is not wholly separate from the business. Doing the work properly requires deep engagement in the business without simply becoming a servant of the business only. Hall underlines this distinction between informed engagement and simple-minded service in pointing to how creating profitable-but-bad user experiences is, unhappily, what many digital designers do with their day:

The historical ROI of being shitty to people is quite impressive.

If UX designers simply understand our role entirely as a way to Deliver Business Value, we become not user advocates but user manipulators. I reject the tech industry, public, and even many members of the profession seeing our work that way.

As various folks underlined in replies to Hall’s Twitter post, the question of “return-on-investment of design” is a pernicious instrument of people holding corporate power who resist design disrupting their comfort. We ask for many proofs of ROI in business but do not ask that the professions of management or executives or IT or countless other org roles justify their existence as professions this way. A Twitter thread by my old boss Alan Cooper raises this point …

Where is it written in stone that designers need to know business? Why don’t business people have to learn about design?

There are a lot of fine businesses out there, but there is a distinct shortage of well-designed products. I’m saying that the critical ingredient in successful products isn’t middle management but rather design.

And when I talk about good design, I’m not talking about white space and the color wheel, I’m talking about knowing what motivates the user and then giving it to them.

Isn’t that, in fact, what a good business does? They find their user community, figure out what they are trying to accomplish and why, and then give it to them. That’s design, not business.

Remember when Apple kicked out Jobs and hired all those great business people? That didn’t really work out for them. When Jobs finally came back, he made the user the most important thing, and they succeeded.

Look at a company like Nest. Running a thermostat company is not a great challenge. Designing a thermostat that changes the entire thermostat business is. The critical ingredient is user-centered design, not business.

All this talk about designers needing to know business is a lot of crap perpetuated by people who have learned that business is much easier than design is.

To paraphrase an old comic book, Design will get you through times of no business, better than business will get you through times of no design.

I too would ask why we hear so many demands that “designers have to understand the business" but few that "businesspeople have to understand design”.

… and I want to frame that a little differently. I too would ask why we hear so many demands that “designers have to understand the business” but few that “businesspeople have to understand design”. Everyone in a business organization needs to operate in a way that is generally aware of the concerns of the business, but it is striking that there are special calls for designers in particular to deeply understand the business.

Designers must admit that part of the issue is that there are some “designers” who do work which is almost willfully unconnected to the needs of the businesses they serve. They are a disgrace to the design profession and all too common, poisoning the water for all of us. When a client tells me that they are keen to get “actionable” design, often it means that they have experienced irresponsibly useless “design” work. (And of course now they are stingy with time and money, having sunk both into work they could not use.)

But that plea for “actionable” design which “understands the business” can also reflect narrow-mindedness: “I want a design which does not disrupt my business model, development process, or marketing. And make sure it is easy to implement.”

So ... don’t innovate. Great.

The most business-savvy design work I have ever done has not always gone over well. “Why are you talking about the business model?!?” Well, my user research showed you were planning to sell the wrong service; I designed the right thing, and the business model was part of it.

Considering how well I understand the business of my clients, and how poorly the business people I work with understand what I do, I share Cooper’s resentment driving him to say that the business really needs to work to better understand design more than vice versa.

“Design needs to understand business” reflects the absence of true product management, which is why I sometimes say that strengthening PM is one of the best things we can do for the profession of UXD and the UX of the systems we create. Yes, UX designers need to understand the business, technical, and marketing context of their work, but I disagree profoundly with the common contention that aligning UX design work with business objectives is UX designers’ responsibility. Creating that alignment is the function of product management. PM aligns all of the product team members with the biz goals (and each others’ efforts).

That gives UXDs at least the potential for a clean place to stand, acting as a full-throated advocate for users and people at large in the systems we work on. You may have heard of a company headquartered in Cupertino, California which tries to follow this model and even without always doing it well has won the biggest market capitalization of any corporation in the world.

But the ground is difficult. Hall reminds us:

Anyone who calls themself a designer, particularly a UX designer, has to confront the fact that what is good for business/investors and what is good for humans—even the rarefied tranche of the population that gets elevated consideration as "users"—is divergent and trending worse.

Mauricio Mejía asks:
Has it ever been convergent?

Answering this (to what extent do business interests/capitalism and human welfare ever converge) requires way more than a tweet. The fundamental premise of UX design is that the goals can converge.

Financialization in particular splits use value from exchange value.

Hall expands on the bind financialized market capitalism creates for ethical design:

A design education is incomplete unless it provides the tools to determine to what extent the needs, objectives, and incentives for an organization are in alignment with those of its audience, customers, users, partners, employees, etc. The entire field of UX needs to be rethought from the perspective that perceived/actual value to the user and perceived/actual value to the business are often very deeply at odds.

Power analysis is a critical part of this. Value to people with the most power in a system is not always financial, even if the system is nominally a business.

[Gestures around]

So, the idea that you can just make a case for user-centered design in terms of ROI is naïve.

If you’re in a public company, it’s about whatever makes the market happy—often the narrative more than the fundamentals (see: layoffs) at least in the short term.

If you’re in a private company, it depends on the goals of the owners.

Welcome to the worst case scenario.

I hope the UX design profession can find a way through.