How Design Can Save the World

Over the last decade, the world has rediscovered its appreciation of aesthetics.  I’m not sure exactly which cultural or historical factors have played a role in this transformation, but I think the average person appreciates good design much more today than we did twenty or thirty years ago.  And for good reason: in a chaotic world, design is often the only thing that keeps us sane.

Design isn’t powerful because of the aesthetic experience it creates, though I would never discount the power of beauty.  An aesthetic experience is intrinsic; it can stir the soul just like good art. Design is powerful because it provides an extrinsic, emotional connection to otherwise unrelatable facts.

In its simplest form, design can turn data into information.  Consider a stacked line graph that charts the historical performance of two stocks.  By themselves, the individual data points don’t tell you much, but the act of graphing them gives the data points dimension that didn’t exist before (trends over time, points of comparison, etc.).

What makes business intelligence relevant to decision-makers?  The well-crafted dashboards and reports that display essential information in a compelling way.  What sells products on a supermarket shelf?  Packaging that inspires consumers by consistently evoking the right kinds of emotions.  It’s the art in data analysis and marketing that gives these disciplines their power.

Perhaps good design is a luxury that has just become more accessible, but I think the evolution is more complex than that.  Our minds have learned to live with facts and data, but we want something more.  We want to experience the world in new and interesting ways.  We want to feel connected to objects and experiences in a uniquely human way.  What art did for the Renaissance, design can do for the information age.

The Path of Least Resistance

Customers will drive us insane unless we understand their habits and design accordingly.

At Scavado, we make it painfully obvious to our customers that their subscriptions will automatically renew unless they cancel.  There are at least 3 different e-mails that mention this.  Our sign-up page indicates the term of the subscription before you place an order.  Our Terms of Service page (which, admittedly, few people read) lists the cancellation terms in pretty clear language.  But inevitably, a portion of our customers will always contact us, enraged, when they’re billed again.

I’ve begrudgingly come to appreciate accept that users will always choose the path of least resistance.  Whichever solution seems easiest or most logical at any given moment is exactly the solution they’ll choose.  This observation seems obvious, but addressing it is not.  Anyone who has ever used software knows that most products provide a fair amount of resistance.

It follows, then, that good product development means designing every path to match the path of least resistance for your users.

But this doesn’t just apply to products.  As we consider our sales funnel, marketing channels, and every internal process that drives our business, we must evaluate it through the lens of our customers.  How can we reduce friction in every interaction people have with our business?

At the very least, we must try to remember Robert J. Hanlon’s advice: ”Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The Delusion of Passion

Last year, I came across this great article by Daniel Pink, where he refutes the notion that finding your passion is the most important thing in life.  Pink writes:

Of course, passion isn’t bad. But business can be a bit like love. When people first fall in love, they experience that woozy and besotted feeling that verges on obsessiveness. That’s passion, and it’s great. But as couples bond more enduringly, that fiery intensity can give way to a calmer warmth. That’s true love – and that’s where the magic is.

That’s a brilliant metaphor for building a business.  Unfortunately, we spend a lot of time deluding ourselves with romantic notions that success can only come from the hot-headed, instinctual drive to do something we love.  As an entrepreneur (read: someone who’s irrationally addicted to doing things that are fucking hard), you’re bombarded by this message.  Everywhere you turn, there’s someone waiting to remind you to follow your passion — that you’re wasting your time if you’re not doing what you love.

And it’s so easy to believe them, because we want life to be simple.  Even entrepreneurs crave consistency and security, despite the things people often assume about our risk tolerance.  It’s easy to think that if we just do what we love, we’ll find success.  But nothing worth doing is ever that easy.

Ironically, passion implies a sort of blind drive that makes for terrible business decisions.  We need a certain level of emotional drive to get through the hardest times, like the early stages of running a startup, but the only way to navigate those times successfully is with a sober grasp on reality.  That’s why passion alone can’t lead to success.

I’ve been searching for my passion for years, and I think it’s a waste of time.  Searching for your passion is an excuse for deferring life, for deferring action.  Sometimes, it’s even a cop-out for failure.  It implies that what you’re doing now isn’t as important as what you could be doing, someday… maybe.  And I think it’s a recipe for unhappiness.

That doesn’t mean I don’t care about my work.  Arguably, being an entrepreneur means I care too much.  But I do it because it allows me to create value out of nothing.  I struggle and fail and try again for one reason: the challenge of doing something that matters, and doing it better each time.

The Art of Taking Advice

Advice is a tricky thing.  I’ve read countless books, articles, and blog posts that seem to offer magic solutions to every business problem you could imagine.  But does the author of “How to Build a Billion-Dollar Company in 3 Easy Steps” know your market?  Your business?  Your strengths and weaknesses?  Even if she’s built a billion-dollar company, there are countless other factors that play into success and failure, including a fair amount of timing and luck that none of us can control.

The same is true for your advisors: the only value they can provide is a new perspective. Perspective is important, but it’s not intrinsically helpful or correct, and it can’t execute a solution. We should always seek to gain as much perspective as we can, but it’s important to keep it in context.  Use new perspectives as data points to draw your own conclusions.

Advice will never solve your problems, because the best advice in the world is useless if you don’t follow it.  Ironically, knowing when to take advice is just as tricky as the problem you’re trying to solve.  And let’s be honest: the majority of business books and startup blogs present the same ideas regurgitated over and over again.  They may be valuable ideas — lessons worth learning — but at some point, you’re wasting your time reading one more Fast Company article about optimizing your social strategy.  That point is probably now.

Giving advice is easy; there are no consequences.  So take my advice: stop reading and start doing.

I recently decided that it was time for an info-diet.  When I read business articles or books now (a lot less frequently), I skim them pretty quickly.  I’ve read enough of the same ideas over and over again that spotting new ones is pretty easy.  I’m also making an effort to read content that isn’t so business- or startup-centric.  Getting out of the software startup zone is incredibly important for me, because I’m constantly immersed in it.  Reading articles that have nothing to do with my industry (or even business itself) provides invaluable perspective and makes me think differently about the problems I stare down on a daily basis.

More importantly, those perspectives give my brain a break from digesting hundreds of daily messages about what I should be doing to be successful.  If there were a simple answer, success would be meaningless.  But it’s not.  Creating real value, making progress — whatever your metric may be — is hard, and there’s a good chance it will never happen for any of us.

We could all use a break from the startup gurus and genius VCs.  Leading a productive and meaningful life, I think, is about being reflective and making connections.  The best way to gain perspective is through experience.  But don’t take my word for it.

The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands
but in seeing with new eyes.

— Marcel Proust (via Tom Kelley, IDEO)

Tom Kelley on “Three Steps to Design Thinking”

Design West Michigan held an event tonight with Tom Kelley, General Manager of IDEO. Tom gave a great presentation called, Three Steps to Design Thinking. They were:

Start with Empathy. Solving problems by starting with the human element (what “design thinking” or “human-centered design” is all about) requires a fundamental understanding of the people affected.

Treat Life as an Experiment. That sums it up.

Leverage the Power of Storytelling. Another pretty basic lesson in business: stories are more compelling than facts, and they’re easier for an audience to remember.  Tom recommended Dan & Chip Heath’s Made to Stick, which is a great book.

Hearing presentations like this always reminds me that throughout human history, we keep relearning the same lessons over and over again. Those lessons are just applied in new ways, and we create new methodologies to apply them and help others learn them despite changing variables. Design thinking is fascinating because it’s such a simple concept but has been out of reach for most of us for thousands of years.  People may have come along who had a gift for thinking in this way, but firms like IDEO have started creating a science that produces replicable results.

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