What’s it like to succeed as a designer right now?
Undervalued. Overlooked. Dispensable. Discarded. These are just a few words that describe the pain that many designers are feeling right now.
Tech is at an existential crossroads. We’re contending with a massive wave of widespread layoffs. Regulation brings an uncertain future to many industries. People are uncertain whether to trust tech: is it threatening or empowering us?
It’s easy to feel helpless right now, regardless of your situation. Helplessness isn’t productive for your job in the short term, and it isn’t healthy for your career in the long term. You’re still the hero of your own story.
Take a step back. Look at design from a different angle. There is a better way forward for our industry, and it starts with asking why people buy design in the first place.
Another World is Possible
Designers are good at researching why customers buy products, but the majority of us don’t perform the same research on our own jobs. Why do clients choose to work with us? Why do we get hired to practice design? What’s our purpose here?
Answering these questions is essential because it helps us understand the value we bring to the table. We know we’re essential for those we serve, but it’s also on us to convey that more broadly.
People don’t buy design because of trends like crypto, large language models, or even because our portfolios have a specific aesthetic. People buy design because there’s an urgent, expensive problem that needs to be solved in a way that the designer’s specific expertise is uniquely suited to address.
Businesses want to increase profit, lower their costs, and reduce risk. Smart businesses invest in anything that is likely to affect one of those variables. When you can help them do that, you become valuable.
Become Essential
By connecting your design decisions to these business objectives, you make it easy for others to see the impact of your work. It’s harder to be overlooked or disempowered when your work has a load-bearing economic impact on the business. Over time, you come to be essential.
Essential people survive that next round of layoffs. They get promoted into roles with more power. They find jobs that garner respect. And they finally pull up that ever-elusive seat at the table that we all keep hearing about.
This could be you. By rooting your design practice in the generation of value, you’ll move business in the right direction and be recognized for your efforts.
Design for Value
Design runs much deeper than selecting the right typography, color, and composition of elements on a page. It speaks to the value that people get from the service your business offers. Your design practice should increase that value through an iterative, holistic approach.
We’ll level up your approach by providing you with a framework to research, measure, and experiment with solutions to the problems that your business has today.
In this self-paced workshop, you’ll learn everything you need to become a value-based designer:
- Understand how to ground design decisions in evidence.
- Accurately measure the impact of your decisions.
- Run experiments through one-off changes and A/B tests that show the precise effects of any change.
- Use your design sense to reliably deliver work that has an impact.
- Apply the soft skills you need to survive and thrive in any organization.
- Advocate for design in a way that’s fundamentally impossible to ignore.
If you have any questions as you go through the course, we’re always available to answer them, and we’ll do our best to make sure you understand all of the concepts of value-based design. We’re also hoping to improve this course over time, especially in response to your feedback, so you’ll get lifetime access to any updates that we make.
