Clunky, inefficient and unintuitive, design was typically an afterthought for enterprise software companies. Enterprise software was notoriously known to be unchanged since the 1990s, long before the term user-friendly was coined. Until now.

John Maeda, Design Partner at KPCB, acknowledges that we are experiencing a new era of design in his #DesignInTech report, where design is no longer an afterthought. Instead, enterprise software companies are now seeing design as an investment instead of a cost.

“If we’re selling 1 million dollar software; it should look and feel like a million bucks.” — Deny Khoung, Founder at Whitespace

But the question is, how do you move from old ways of design thinking to make 1 million dollar software look and feel like 1 million dollar software in this new era of design?

As a product designer for BetterWorks, an enterprise software company, I was curious about how today’s design leaders thought about what it takes to deliver and measure good design. So I interviewed ten phenomenal design leaders from companies in Silicon Valley to see how they run their teams and produce quality work.

It turns out that to achieve good design you need to set great goals. Here is a goal-setting framework influenced by ten conversations with design leaders.

1. Getting everyone aligned

As ironic as it sounds, design shouldn’t start with executing design, nor should it end with shipping design. People might be familiar with the chart below on common product feature development process, in which design begins after requirements are defined and stops when development starts.

Instead, design should continue endlessly from the moment a feature is proposed, as seen in the chart below.

This is why it’s important to be transparent and involve stakeholders from the very beginning of the design process in order to built trust — with your stakeholders and as a design team. Getting everyone aligned around the same problems is crucial, because now you’re designing something that everyone believes in, and not just something that your designers believe in.

“The more trust you build, the more happy they are with the delivery, because they know you took their early input and delivered tactile results.” — Beril Maples, Head of UX at Rodan + Fields

2. Validate identified problems by conducting user research.

Empathizing and understanding the behaviors of your users plays a huge influence in design. Getting your users to think like designers can actually help them solve their own problems.

“Design is not just about being an expert in your own process — it’s about conveying that process to the rest of your team to get them more involved and thinking like a designer.” — Heather Phillips, Designer in Residence at Designer Fund, Formerly of RelateIQ

At RelateIQ, designers worked alongside their co-workers, whose roles most resembled that of their users, to create an experience map of the entire sales process. This not only taught non-designers about the design process, but their final output — a complete sales experience map — helped the broader team identify opportunities for new features and integrations.

3. Design and seek daily internal feedback

How do you measure design before it’s been shipped? It takes a conscious designer and a manufactured environment.

Designers should seek regular feedback, not just with end-users, but with the most engaged users of a product — employees. Everyone has a reaction towards design — it’s tactile, has personality, and it enables others to accomplish things. It’s the one thing that employees can play with that communicates a company’s vision. Being transparent with anyone and everyone will reveal trends on whether or not a design is efficient to use and communicates effectively.

Early efficiency = Less design debt later on.

Bob Baxley, Head of Product Design at Pinterest, created a design culture where reviews are cross-functional and happen weekly. These reviews involve designers, PMs, and engineers. They also have weekly 90 minute design only meetings, weekly reviews with their Chief Creative Officer, and product review meetings with the executive level. Baxley’s culture encourages his team to think about opportunities to share their work, rather than having to present in mandatory critiques or securing executive approvals.

“Good design cannot happen in a bubble, it has to happen out in the open. This approach aids in taking the preciousness out of people’s work, and helps to get feedback and great results faster.” — Daniel Walsh, UX Design manager at Google

Creative forums for early critique and discussion not only gives a design early feedback to collect and synthesize, but also enables and empowers their peers to think like designers. The earlier an employee is brought into the design process, the more invested they become.

4. Observe and validate how design is performing

Once you’ve shipped your design, it’s important to continue to observe how your design makes your customers feel. But how do we measure this? Ease of use and user delight are great indicators.

At BetterWorks, we decided to redesign one of our core features after users expressed frustration in customer onboarding sessions and support tickets that the feature was not easy to use. A month after the redesign, the usage of our core actions skyrocketed, as seen in the graph below.

In addition to ease of use, design also performs well after investing in user delight. Design has the potential to build so much trust with users that they forget they are even interacting with an app. So, how do you know your design is delightful?

“Delight factor is measurable by good UX implementation” — Matt Stein, Director of Product Design & UX at Metromile

Good UX implementation combines ease of use, cohesive look and feel, and consistent voice and tone. The result is a positive emotional reaction from your users, such as the one below.

Great qualitative result will come from investing in UX implementation and striving for user delight. If you’re not receiving it, you’re not investing enough in it.

5. Tying it all together

Of course, the most important thing is to stay transparent through the entire progress and track your progress. At BetterWorks, we use this framework to drive our design process and we track progress using our product. We’ll align our design goals to our company’s initiatives, which gives everyone a clear window to how design is moving the company forward in a very quantified manner.

In Summary

Good design is a result of getting early alignment, user validation, daily internal feedback, and observation. All of which are key milestones to staying transparent and keeping everyone involved. It’s the designers role to become a catalyst.

Design isn’t an afterthought — it’s time to set your goals now.