Hygiene or differentiator
Find out which business you're in before you argue about the value of design.
The thing about designers is that they work as if design decides the sale. The problem is that most of them work in places it doesn’t.
75% of properly was about how much of properly an owner will pay for. This one is about something more fundamental: whether design can matter at all. In a business, I think this is something that’s decided by its market, which is settled long before design even sees the problem.
There are three questions which I’ve found useful to ask about a business that help me understand which kind of business I’m in:
- Is the product bought or sold? Bought means the customer goes looking, compares and picks. Sold means someone persuades them, and the persuading carries the sale.
- Does the customer choose on experience, or on price, rate, availability and what the regulator allows?
- What does it cost them to leave? If leaving’s cheap and the choice is made on price, I’ve come to believe the product has to be good enough not to lose them, and not much more.
If the answers come back as bought, price and cheap to leave, you’re in a hygiene business. If they come back as sold, experience and expensive to leave, design may decide the sale.
I cut my teeth as a designer in lending, and one of the things it taught me is that nobody picked a loan because of how well crafted the form is. They picked it for the rate, speed and the likelihood of approval. The form had one job, which was not to lose them in the application.
When designers get these questions wrong, I’ve noticed it’s nearly always in the same direction. A designer friend once sent me a screenshot of a budget airline’s checkout. It was bad enough to be worth sending and snarking about. Then he went ahead and bought the ticket. I don’t think that makes him a hypocrite; I think it’s what most of us do. We judge differently, because we’re trained to notice and paid to judge, but when it comes to buying we seem to be as susceptible as anyone else to the price, the route and the time. The trouble starts at work, where we bring the judging with us but forget how we buy. It’s all too easy to lose sight of what the business is actually paid for; I know I have.
If the kind of business you’re in is telling you design is hygiene, the work doesn’t stop, it changes shape. Kano called it must-be quality: the things a customer won’t thank you for and will leave you over. There’s a floor for this and if you fall below it you lose the sale. Above it, more quality buys very little the customer chooses on.
The work, as I see it, is knowing roughly where that floor is, which you’ll mostly learn by missing it. Spend past it and colleagues will see the cost as delays or navel-gazing, and start muttering about ‘the return on design’. You might hope that it’s understood as care, but it rarely is. They read it as not knowing which business you’re in, or as pulling in a different direction from everyone else, a judgement about commercial sense rather than craft. Craft is an inside-design judgement, so the accusation of lack of commercial sense sticks for longer and travels further than lack of craft. Ironically, this costs the most when design is right about the market. I’ve watched designers who tended to argue for everything get ignored when they argued for the floor, which was the one time the business would have lost the sale.
The other thing to know is that the floor moves if you believe Kano: customers come to expect what used to please them and competitors too will raise it. Regulators also raise it: the FCA’s Consumer Duty made customer understanding an outcome lenders have to show they deliver. I can’t think of a time I’ve seen it moved by designers arguing for it. So design within the floor as it moves, and if you’re good you’ll notice when it does and make use of it. If organisations change their minds about design, the cause tends to be from outside, and the designer who gains is the one who still has the standing to be asked for their input.
On the other side, if the business you’re in needs design as a differentiator, I think everything in Nothing to show applies. You’ll need someone inside the organisation willing and able to do things like carry the cost of a year with nothing to show.
One final observation: the answer about hygiene or differentiator is a characteristic of the business, or of the product in its market. I don’t think it can belong to the department; design doesn’t get to declare itself a differentiator1I’ve been hired into more than one business to help fix what that stance left behind. It’s rarely the brief, but it’s usually the job. no matter how hard it wishes. In the rare case where a business sits on the line, the best case I know for crossing it is that a brand is the sum of decisions each too small to justify on its own. I strongly believe in that case, but it’s also a bet over years, and a bet to be placed by whoever carries the cost, not one the design team can make a ticket at a time.
So run the three questions on your own business before the next argument about design. If the answer is hygiene, your job is to see if you can find roughly where the floor sits and work from there.
I’ve been hired into more than one business to help fix what that stance left behind. It’s rarely the brief, but it’s usually the job. ↩︎