Good Morning! ☀️
Today I’m lucky to be in sunny Los Angeles for the week. As usual, prepare for more poorly formed thoughts on design presented as best I can 🖊️
Let’s get into it 👨🏻💻
We can all agree digital experiences are ever-changing. Voice is rapidly being adopted, multi-screen experiences are ramping up, the meta-verse conversation is coming back, digital communities are growing globally, niche products are customised to individuals, and identity products are replacing “one size fits all” quicker.
Over the last two year this has accelerated quicker due to the COVID pandemic. We are spending more time in our homes, and in front of our screens, working remote, and companies are responding to provide better experiences to capture our attention and spending.
Everything is convenient, everything is customised, and everything is everywhere.
Recently I’ve been compiling a vision on how the discipline of design is evolving inside organisations to meet the changing needs of digital product design.
Today’s writing is a first step in sharing that, and I’ll share more in the coming months as I solidify it.
Over the last decade Design Thinking worked to bring the voice of the user into the organisation. It usually offered point solutions for exploring user needs over a complete cultural adjustment. Exercises like Design Sprints, Service Design diagrams, and qualitative research reports all helped provide visibility for design within organisations, but lacked a complete transformation towards building experience-first products.
In the growing world of complex product experiences we need a more strategic and cultural view on the creation of products, process, thinking, and teams that represent tangible business value through a user lens.
I’d like to look past Design Thinking to Strategic Design. That is, knowing how to deploy and activate Design as a strategic, cultural, and operational element inside of organisations will be critical in this new world.
As companies move from Sales or Engineering cultures to a Strategic Design culture, I see a shift in hiring and building teams towards what I’ll label as horizontal designers and vertical design skill sets.
Horizontal Designers will tackle more abstract problem solving skills for looking at problems. This will include analytical thinking, lateral thinking, creative problem solving, qualitative research, adaptive learning and more. Their output would be market opportunities, actionable user insights (from research) for product solutions, multi-product roadmaps, and strategic experience direction on a broad company level.
Vertical Designers, would be those individuals that carry through insights, direction, and strategic solutions to different surfaces that need distinct specialisations. These may include Voice, Touch, Screen based interactions, AR / XR and more. We can’t expect everyone who is labeled as “designer” to be experts in every surface, and therefore specialisation will continue to be important.
btw - Yes, I am looking for better names than Horizontal and Vertical, and welcome suggestions.
My colleague Sky and I have been working on this, and he broke it down in a slightly different way worth sharing - and with different names.
His view looked at expanding the role of Design Research or Service Designer into Input Designers, and those who work on different surfaces (screens, voice, etc) as Output Designers.
From Sky
I love the reassessment of design roles. Something about the term “visual design” never felt right to me, since interfaces and our interactions with them are all closely tied to visual experience of them. One other quick half-baked idea for a way to divide roles is input designers & output designers. Input designers would essentially be design researchers who focus on immersion and crafting artefacts that articulate opportunities, insights, personas, content mapping, data viz. etc. (almost creating a super high-fidelity brief) and output designers would be responsible for translating all of that input into beautifully informed, expressive and functional solutions.
While the terms may need adjustment, I feel confident in the concept abstraction. One set of designer who look at the high level abstract problems through research, lateral thinking, analytical thinking, adaptive learning. And another set who can take their output of insights and actionable direction, and produce beautiful, convenient, adaptive, and engaging experiences on individual surfaces and technologies.
In closing, just as we see software becoming customised per user (see: “internet of one” or Situated Software), companies won’t be able to rely on one size fits all types of design organisations. They will need to deploy and adjust these different types of designers through testing and watching product results.
Organisation design, is simply another design problem - and companies need to understand what is right for their product and their outcomes to produce the best results - everything is a balancing act ⚖️
Thank you for reading and exploring topics with me.
Until next time!