Holistic Design: Facilitating the Exchange of Value — Part 1
The following is a holistic design philosophy according to yours truly, as it includes everything I’ve learned about design to this point. It’s been 13 years since I graduated college and entered the workforce as a graphic designer. In the last handful of years I’ve had more opportunities to mentor and teach new designers entering the field of UX design. As I’ve thought about how to present the overarching scope of design, the 10,000-foot view or “big picture”, if you will, it has forced me to reflect on my own experiences and organize the many lessons I’ve learned for myself. This two-part article is a culmination of those attempts. I revisit my design foundations, and explore the loftiest ambitions of designs, including the exciting new intersection of disciplines that could help us achieve our potential. Finally, I address some of the challenges we face on our journey in part 2.
Cover photo: New York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual
Swiss Design Principles
I studied graphic design at Utah State University (USU) between 2006–2008. The graphic design program was unique at that time in that it boasted the longest running, and arguably most successful, study abroad program in USU history. Every year for at least 13 consecutive years, a small group of students were selected to spend a semester in Switzerland studying design. The program was created by Bob Winward, professor of graphic design and Swiss design enthusiast.
I had the great fortune of being selected to the Swiss program for the final semester of my undergrad degree. I know I didn’t fully comprehend the magnitude of the opportunity at the time, but the impact of that trip has become more and more apparent to me over the years. Swiss design principles have certainly influenced my own tenets of design.
Objectivity and rationality are hallmarks of Swiss design. Meggs’ History of Graphic Design summarizes Swiss design, or the International Typographic Style, as it’s officially known:
Personal expression and eccentric solutions were rejected, while a more universal and scientific approach to design problem solving was embraced. In this paradigm, the designers define their roles not as artists but as objective conduits for spreading important information between components in society. (Meggs)
Massimo Vignelli, an Italian designer that helped bring Swiss philosophies to the U.S. during the 70’s said, “Good design is a matter of discipline. It starts by looking at the problem and collecting all the available information about it… It’s really more about logic than imagination.”
The mathematical grid is the manifestation of the logical Swiss designer and a dead giveaway of Swiss graphic design. In 2013, Mike Joyce released a collection of posters that combined his love of punk rock with Swiss design. Joyce’s posters were inspired by the work of important Swiss designers, help the viewer easily get a sense of the Swiss style. Layouts adhere to strict ratios of halves, thirds, etc.
The pragmatism of Swiss design scaled well and gained widespread recognition during the 60’s and 70’s. High profile projects like the design system developed for the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico, as well as Massimo’s work for the New York City Transit Authority in 1970 demonstrated the value of Swiss design for mass communication. It also became popular for corporate identities, particularly those with a global presence.
Perhaps the Swiss principle that impacted me most was the idea that “design is utilitarian and art is not.” (Vignelli) Design is useful, it serves a purpose. Wim Crouwel, a Dutch designer and advocate of the Swiss style, participated in a now famous public debate with Jan van Toorn in 1972 where he argued for a clear separation of design from art. This sentiment has been reiterated more recently by John Maeda author of The Laws of Simplicity and former President of the Rhode Island School of Design: “Artists make questions and designers make solutions.”
Objectivity and logic was the recipe for successful solutions in Swiss design. Designers viewed themselves as conduits to facilitate those solutions. The optimal solution was clear and devoid of personal expression, thereby allowing the message to be delivered to its fullest potential. These principles lend themselves well to modern customer-centric models and the UX industry that would come decades later.
The Spectrum of Design Complexity
Graphic Design
And so I began my career as a graphic designer with a semester of Swiss design freshly imprinted on my young design mind. The industry had fully embraced the computer by this time, but printed material was quickly losing ground to the web as the primary medium of graphic design. There was plenty of work within ad agencies and I was able to do my fair share of print before I moved to digital design almost exclusively.
However, I quickly became disillusioned with the work. I didn’t seem to be designing anything substantial. The nature of the work was ephemeral, campaigns were replaced quickly, and my designs didn’t really do anything. It became apparent that graphic design was limited to communication solutions. All too often that communication simply encouraged people to buy something. I discovered some of my graphic design heroes were well aware of these boundaries. Paul Rand, defined the graphic design discipline as the integration of form and function for effective communication. (Meggs, emphasis added) Even Massimo Vignelli viewed graphic design as a tool primarily for the “organization of information.”
Interaction Design
Whether you prefer the term UX, UI, or product designer, the origin to this branch of design began with the world wide web. The internet brought an interactive component to our communication solutions. Now customers could click and interact with the messaging. This new dimension brought a layer of sophistication as well as a bump in value to the consumers. Even the practical Swiss grid translated relatively well to the screen. But the additional interactivity required a greater understanding of the user and their expectations of these interactive components.
Interactive agencies seemed to spring up over night. Flash was a popular medium for interactivity at the time. The Interaction Design Association (IxDA) was incorporated in 2005 and I joined the Utah chapter around 2012. This eventually evolved to become the Product Hive in 2017 which now enjoys a large global community and yearly conference.
However, the nature of the design solutions hadn’t changed with the interactive agencies. I was basically building brochure sites with messaging to sell more products or services.
Functional Design
Eventually, I began working on more and more complicated online systems that I consider “tools.” This was much more satisfying for me, since I felt like I was building something with a function. A lot of the “tools” I created at this time were business-to-business (b2b) solutions. Our clients didn’t seem to be concerned with the appearance of the tools at all. They were even fairly tolerant of usability issues. The most important thing was that it functioned properly.
Toward the beginning of 2014, I was working at a design agency called modern8, and one of our clients provided services to the Health Care industry. They offered a variety of solutions to hospitals, including medical coding, billing, auditing and compliance software. At this time, they had somewhat hastily acquired a new software solution and found it difficult to use. They didn’t really know where to turn, but they had liked the brand design we did for them previously, so they asked us for help. It was a classic case study of simply improving the usability of their tool but I found it extremely satisfying. This tool dramatically impacted a medical coders ability to do their job faster and more efficiently.
My experiences to this point led me to view distinct levels of complexity in the solutions I was designing: communication, interaction, and functional. A functional solution is more valuable than a communication solution, however, it still requires clarity of information to be successful. Each level builds on the previous one.
Emotional + Social Design
As I began working on more consumer facing products, particularly those at Sling TV and Facebook, I saw a need to add another level of complexity. Customers of these products don’t necessarily need these tools but it did provide a social and/or emotional benefit. Once again, it was impossible to successfully satisfy someone’s emotional/social need without proper functionality, interactivity, and communication. This can be challenging since the general consumer can be fickle and it’s often difficult to quantify emotional/social needs. I suspect a company’s brand strategy may play a part at this level. Nevertheless, I have found that the general consumer is not impressed by a solution that simply works, not for long anyway. They want additional meaning with the products and services they choose to purchase.
Well-being and Behavioral Economics
At my current company, MX our mission is to empower the world to become financially strong. I have come to believe that this is among the most difficult design challenges I have ever faced. Solutions that are meant to impact a persons’ well-being, including health and wealth, face tremendous obstacles. People are irrational and don’t always make decisions that are in their best interest, so, you have to design solutions that make an impact on their well-being, and essentially, protect them from themselves.
MX has worked with the Common Cents Lab (CCL) and the Center for Advanced Hindsight (CAH) at Duke University over the past few years. The goal of CCL and CAH is to make people happier, healthier and wealthier with behavioral science, at home and abroad. This new tier of human behavior and the goals of wealth and health add a final dimension to my spectrum of design complexity. The stakes are highest when creating a product that impacts a persons’ well-being. It is the most difficult design challenge I have faced so far. On the flip side, it has the potential to be the most valuable.
“If your products are intended to change people’s behavior, then psychology is essential for your design toolkit. Even if they’re not, a strategic dash of science will still help you create better products.” Amy Bucher
Behavioral economics is a valuable tool for the designer working on difficult problems. There is a wealth of research and experiments that can inform our designs. These serve as springboards to get our products started quickly and on the right track.
Allison White, one of the behavioral researchers (and former designer) at CCL, consulted with us on a product called FinStrong and introduced me to a small community of behavioral designers advocating for greater unity between behavioral economics and the design disciplines.
Ruth Schmidt, associate professor at IIT Institute of Design is among those at the forefront of this community. Her paper, Strange Bedfellows: Design Research and Behavioral Design explains how the two disciplines can be combined for greater results. “Rather than applying known principles to known problems in search of ‘best fit’ solutions, a design lens allows us to use generalized criteria that can help shape heretofore unknown solutions.”
Allison published a practical guide that details how this can be applied using behavioral maps and service design.
Value Design
I came across a quote several years ago attributed to Robert Fabricant who said, “The medium of design is behavior.” I thought it was profound at the time. I certainly wanted my products to help people do things. In the earlier example of the web tool for medical coding, an increase of codes submitted per day means the tool has improved that persons’ ability to do their job. With FinStrong, an increase in savings deposits, either by frequency or amount, is a behavior that is improving their financial well-being.
More recently, I came across an article by Jeff Gothelf, co-author of Lean UX, in which he said, “Meaningful changes in customer behaviour — i.e., outcomes — are the only way to know if we’ve delivered value.” When I read that it struck me that delivering value has always been the goal. Whether it has been a clearly articulated message or an app that helped you make financial decisions, the point is to make something valuable. The behavior is merely the outcome of value. I came to view my medium, not as print, or pixels, or even behavior, but of value.
The medium of design is value
One of the experiences that solidified this concept for me came while I was at Acima, a lease-to-own fin-tech. We couldn’t figure out how to speed up the leasing process. After several years of tweaking the process in typical startup fashion, we seemingly had no more room for improvement. Our lease times were stagnant but it simply wasn’t fast enough. One day, the product manager over the leasing product came to my desk and pulled up the lease form on my computer. “We need to trim this down so we can cut down these lease times.” As far as lease forms, it was already on the shorter side. We went through each field one by one and could only remove one question. The rest was essential for approving a lease. One less input wasn’t going to give us the change we were looking for. I stared at that form on my computer screen for a couple of hours. Then I spent a couple weeks with the processors in each department. I dove into the data and lease times. It took awhile but I was finally able to find a solution. In the fast-pace, startup environment, a legacy protocol had stuck around and was sending a few specific statuses to infinitely route through our system until they were eventually deleted manually. This kept our average lease completion time high. What’s more, I discovered that the department that handled this status, was no longer needed at all. Our proprietary algorithm for detecting risk had become accurate enough to stand on its own. The solution was to eliminate an entire processing department. I sent my supervisor an email and walked him through my findings. Over the course of six weeks, we terminated the department and we were able to reassign all the processors as well, so no one last their job. The outcomes? Lease times dropped and operational costs went down as well.
In this example we were able to increase the value to all parties. Customers got a lease decision quicker, and the business saved on operation costs. All this without “designing” a single pixel on a computer screen. This experience led me to believe that my job is to facilitate the exchange of value between a business and its customers, whether that involves a UI, or not.
Hierarchy of Value
If we re-examen the spectrum of design complexity, we can argue that it could also represent a hierarchy of value. A product or service that successfully improves your well-being is going to be substantially more valuable than a brochure, or communication piece.
Once you understand the level of value your team is trying to deliver, it can help you prioritize your design work. If an interactive challenge doesn’t ladder up to the overall product goal of improving your customer’s well-being, how important is it really?
Bain & Company published a study in HBR that identified 30 elements of consumer values broken into 4 category of needs. (2016)
Shifting my mindset to think about delivering value to the customer and the business, has helped me look for solutions beyond the screen. While discovering value, my focus is drawn outside the company, to the customer. And many times, changes within the company are required to deliver the newly discovered value.
In part 2, I will discuss how the facilitation of value is coupled with business models and the challenges of discovering and delivering value.
[NYCTA Graphics Standards Manual Compact Edition](https://standardsmanual.com/products/nyctacompactedition)
[Cheese, Chocolate, Great Art and Design Bring Summer Study for USU Students](https://www.usu.edu/today/story/cheese-chocolate-great-art-and-design-bring-summer-study-for-usu-students)
History of Graphic Design Fourth (4th) Edition- By Philip B. Meggs and Alston W. Purvis. Wiley
[Wim Crouwel, the Dutch graphic-design legend who championed clarity above all, has died] (https://qz.com/quartzy/1713605/wim-crouwel-the-dutch-graphic-design-legend-championed-clarity-above-all/)
[Design Is Not Art: Uncovering the Brilliant Logic Behind Massimo Vignelli’s Famous Designs] (https://mymodernmet.com/massimo-vignelli-design-is-not-art/)
[John Maeda on Twitter: “Design makes solutions. Art makes questions. (https://twitter.com/johnmaeda/status/599340687616778240?s=20)
[IxDA About & History](https://ixda.org/ixda-global/about-history/)
[Behavioral Mapping — Habit Weekly PRO](https://www.habitweekly.com/behavioral-mapping-pro)
[Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change | Rosenfeld Media](https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/engaged-designing-for-behavior-change/)
[Strange Bedfellows: Design Research and Behavioral Design — Behavior by design](https://ruthkschmidt.com/drs2020-strange-bedfellows)
[Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development | Jeff Gothelf](https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/defining-value-the-most-ambiguous-word-in-product-development/)
[The 30 Elements of Consumer Value: A Hierarchy](https://hbr.org/2016/09/the-elements-of-value)
[Elements of Value interactive graphic — Bain & Company Insights](https://media.bain.com/elements-of-value/)
