Creating an Objective Visual Strategy
Ugh, clients. Every designer has their horror stories about opinionated bosses that just don’t get it. Sometimes, no matter how good your design is, they want to go in a different direction. They just really want to stick the beans up their nose.
The degree to which you struggle with this may depend on what kind of designer you are, or at least what aspect of the design we are referring to. There are some aspects of design that are pretty easy to validate or invalidate with research, testing, and data. If the button doesn’t work, we can tell in analytics. If the user doesn’t understand what a nav item means, we catch it in usability testing.
Interactive design methods are well-established and good designers can typically settle differences of opinion with data. But when it comes to visual and graphic design, we seem to instantly enter the land of emotion and subjectivity.
I can hear the recent design grads gearing up. “We have color theory, visual hierarchy, Gestalt psychology! I’m a trained professional! Why won’t you trust me to do my job!?” Unfortunately, design theory has never helped me win an argument with a client who simply thought a design didn’t feel right to them. And we all know what happens when we get into subjective areas with the client or boss:
That’s right. The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion always wins. So how do we move away from this effect and towards a more objective approach to visual design?
Understanding Emotional Value
Good designs need to do two things: provide value to users and meet business goals. Great designs go beyond this to establish an emotional connection. Now it sounds like we’re in the realm of art and subjectivity, but I don’t believe it needs to be. I think that we can go about designing emotional value in the same way we design functional value.
In his book The Lean Brand, Jeremiah Gardner distinguishes the functional value that a brand provides to a customer (often in the form of a product or service) and the emotional value, which has to do with what the customer gets out of having a relationship with a brand. If you are skeptical that this is a real thing, consider the difference between generic pain medication and something like Advil or Tylenol. Think about the difference between a bag from Coach and a bag from Chanel. In both instances, both products offer the same utility or functional value, but different emotional values to the consumer.
I like to think about this in terms of what happens “below the surface” of a design. I’ve always been inspired by JJG’s “planes” model, which demonstrates the design process from a functional (on the left) and informational (on the right) perspective. For the sake of our discussion, I created a similar model that represents goals, strategy, user value, and surface as planes and “functional” and “emotional” value as two perspectives on each plane:
On the left, business goals lead to product strategy which require us to understand and provide value to users (I like the Jobs to be Done framework for this), ultimately giving rise to the specific features and affordances of a design. On the right, the business’s vision for the relationship it has with its customers informs a visual strategy created to produce emotional value for users. The visible manifest of this strategy: the visual component of the design.
Visual Design Strategy
So WTF is “visual strategy?” Simple: its the link between the emotional effect we want to evoke for our audience and the specific tactics we use to accomplish this. First, here’s a basic model for strategy:
In the case of designing an emotional connection, you can interpret this as follows:
- Future: what kind of relationship do we want to have with our audience? How will they think of us?
- Now: how does our audience perceive us now?
- The Plan: what do we think we can do to bridge the gap?
When we put visual design into this strategic framework, it becomes more clear what we have to do. First, we have to know what kind of feeling we want our audience to have when interacting with our design. This is where branding and visioning workshops can work great. Next, we need to figure out some method of gauging how our audience feels about us now. Fortunately, the same user research methods that we’re already applying to functional value can be leveraged: user interviewing, surveys, and feedback from customer service or online reviews.
The last step is “The Plan.” When it comes to affecting emotion, visual design (along with motion, sound, and other sensory design) is one of our most powerful tools. After all, this is what brand designers everywhere have been trading on for decades. But for those of us who aren’t actually Paul Rand, how do we go about applying it objectively?
Prove your design has the desired effect
Once you are on the same page with the client regarding who the audience is and what we want them to feel, you can take a scientific approach to measure the impact of a design change and iterate from there.
Anything you may test starts with the fundamental belief that it is possible to affect emotion with things like type, form, and color. There is some interesting research to support this idea. Here’s an example:
Which of the above shapes is called “Kiki” and which is called “Bouba”? If you called the one on the left “Kiki,” then you are in the company of 95% of people.
Another example comes from a neuroscientist that I met many years ago. He shared that his research was about measuring the relationship between musical intervals and changes in neurochemistry, which he could map to certain emotions. He also claimed that it was possible to create musical algorithms to produce specific emotions. Whoa.
Good designers have instincts about the synesthetic relationships between design elements and the user’s psychology. Try these:
For each category, you probably first have a clear idea about which makes you happier. If you’re skilled in empathy, you probably also have an instinct about which of the two will make a given persona happier.
Knowing these concepts may be effective in helping us sell a design to a client or stakeholder. But we can take this a step further; I believe we can create the tools to empirically prove that a design is effective at eliciting a specific emotion or feeling for a specific audience. Conceptually, this is as simple as comparing a baseline measurement (the “now” part of the strategy) to a new measurement taken after the design change. Of course, the devil is in the details. We may have to look to affective science and gestalt psychology for methods to do this accurately. Perhaps a bigger barrier will be designers themselves — I think many of us will struggle with the idea of subjecting our designs to this sort of testing.
Let’s try this!
Many aspects of design are becoming more data-driven, but for some reason, the aesthetic component still feels like voodoo. I think that this can create unnecessary frustration during the design process, and ultimately hurts designers and business stakeholders alike.
I hope that the ideas in this post will encourage everyone to think more strategically about all aspects of a design, and follow through with testing and iteration to ensure that the design performs well on both the functional and emotional dimensions.
We test these ideas as much as we can in our design practice at Philosophie, but I think we are really just beginning to scratch the surface. If anyone else is applying data-driven design concepts to visual design, or is interested in trying some of these ideas on their own product or brand, please reach out. I’d be eager to share ideas!
