Can And Should We Measure The Impact Of Design?
One of the questions that pop up when you start diving into the business value of design is measuring impact. The rise of the use of the way of the designer to solve business problems is partly fuelled by the hard data about the impact of design on the bottom line of a company that is published by companies like McKinsey, InVision and people like John Maeda. Maybe the most famous is this graph that clearly shows that companies that have embraced design outperform those that haven’t when you look at the S&P index.
The difference is clear in this graph by the Design Management Institute. And the message is to: if you embrace design, your whole company will make more money. If this message comes from designers, this might sound suspicious. Everyone knows by now that you can make a graph like this for anything if you just adjust the criteria and parameters a little bit. Companies that are not from the design world also publish graphs like this. Look at this one from McKinsey:
Numbers are strange creatures
McKinsey is also suspect because they are buying up design agencies and have a stake in making design look good. Numbers are strange creatures. Number make things look scientific and because we trust science, we trust numbers to be true. Anyone who has taken a statistics 101 class knows the relativity of numbers and graphs but business people are suckers for numbers. And one strategy to convince business people of the value of design is by giving them what they want: numbers.
20th-century thinking
This is all 20th-century thinking. The whole idea that you can measure comes from Cartesian thinking that you can isolate things and measure their individual performance. This whole idea quickly falls apart when you stop ignoring the complexity of modern-day business problems. In a complex system, all things are connected and it’s impossible to model the impact of one element onto another. And when you try to measure something that is a complex thing on itself (what is design, exactly?), things quickly so south when it comes to measuring efforts.
Holistic measurements
We live in a KPI-driven world in which things cannot be measured anymore. That’s a problem right there. The solution that the Design Management Institute and McKinsey use is to measure the system as a whole: the total amount of revenue or profit of a company and reduce design to one parameter: are you design driven or not. This is actually a good way to measure the impact of design. Because the main effect design has on systems like organizations are about ripple effects. Adding design into the corporate mix will lead to systemic changes that impact a lot of things like engagement, learning ability, joy, customer intimacy, innovation power etc. These things trickle through the entire organization if you play it right and makes the whole organization perform better.
Of course, reducing design to one binary variable like the Design Management Institute does: yes or no, is oversimplifying things. That is why InVision came up with its Design Maturity Model. In it, they define five levels of design maturity. And their research concluded that the higher the design maturity level, the more impact design has on the bottom line of a company. Which sounds logical.
Learn about design by measuring design
So I think you can measure the impact of design. It’s complex, but it can be done and the discussions around it might be more interesting than the actual numbers. How you measure might even be more important than the result. Because how you measure contains a vision, a view of design, of business. First, you have to determine the goal you try to achieve. On a high level, this is the performance of companies. One level under that, design is about lifting the complex problem-solving ability of people, increasing the synergy you get from co-creation, etc. These are things you can become aware of and figure out ways to measure. The measuring means breaking down, analyzing, formulating a vision. For design, I think the process of measuring is more important than the results. The awareness, the goal-orientedness, the breaking down, the diving into the language of business all benefits design and the ability of designers to express the value brings to a business. Let’s face it, the better we can explain the value of design, the higher the value of design can be.
Fear of measuring the impact of design (FOMTIOD)
Designers don’t like measuring. They don’t like the thought process of thinking in business terms, they are afraid that the results might prove their intuition wrong, they are afraid measuring will take all the creativity out of design. They are aware that measuring is flawed, that not everything can be put into numbers and even then, the numbers can be wrong. They will use this to resists measuring. They will fight it with everything they have. Which is understandable. Too much measuring can kill the human aspect of design and reduce design to a technocratic activity. There is this famous story of a designer quitting Google when they wanted to A/B test forty shades of blue to see which one would convert better. He was right. Measurement should not eliminate human powers and reduce it to an algorithm.
Measuring the impact of design increases the impact of design
But I think a little measuring would lift the business value of design and thus give designers the chance to have more impact, to deliver more value to the world. Measuring should not be thought of as science but as an art. You optimize what you measure. So measuring the impact of design will increase the impact of design. How can you use measuring to improve the impact of design?
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
— Peter Drucker
When you start measuring, a couple of things start to happen:
- You become more goal-oriented. If you want to measure the impact of an intervention, you must first be clear about the goal you are trying to achieve. Because design is a creative endeavor, design has a tendency to lose sight of the business goals. The danger of design is that if things look good and we fall in love with the surface, we lose track of whether this beautiful object will actually solve the problem we set out to solve.
- You start to see the system, the ripple effects that design has and how all things are connected. When you try to measure the impact of a design intervention, you will learn that results cannot be attributed to one single factor. You will find that other factors are in play. If you see this, you are starting to see the system and how things relate. Seeing the system and it’s leverage points will allow you to get more impact from your interventions.
- You learn the language of business. If you want to have an impact on business with design, you need to learn to speak business, understand how business people think. The better you speak the language of business, the deeper your understanding of business culture, the better you can help businesses with design.
The process of measuring is more important than the result
Measuring the impact of design will lead to different conversations around design. The process is more important than the result. Measuring the impact of design will have ripple effects that will increase the impact of design. Don’t see it as science, but as an art. Get creative. Figure out ways to measure the impact of your interventions, develop a strong vision and narrative around the impact of design. Get out of your building, talk to business people and users. The impact of design is systemic. If you learn that, it will help the impact of design on business. Not just for you but for all designers. It will also be a boost for morale if you can prove in some metric that your design intervention made an impact, made the world a little better. It will make design more inclusive, the designers more extrinsically motivated, outward looking. If designers want to use the seat they have at the strategic business table, they have to up their game. Designers have a lot of useful skills that greatly benefit human problem-solving capacity but sitting at the strategic business table is not the same as designing objects. It uses the same skills but it’s a different game. The new game requires a couple of new skills some of which can be developed by starting to measure.
The only metric designers like to use is the number of design awards they win with their designs. Those are not necessarily related to business impact. Something can look stunning but have no impact on the bottom line. Using the same logic of Peter Drucker that you improve what you measure, using design awards as a measure will improve your ability to win design awards. Choosing your measure is choosing your goal, your development path. So if your goal is business value of design, that is what you should start measuring. If you don’t, improving the business value of design is going to be a losing battle.
I wrote an earlier essay about how design can boost human problem-solving capacity as an attempt to break down the impact of design on business:
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