The value of good design

What's the value of good design?

For most folks, that's a lot harder to define than the value of other things, like specific functionality or workflows.

For example:

• If you suddenly found that your online forms for donations or event sign-ups were not working, you could probably pin a number on how much that's hurting your mission — in terms of funding, reputation, and other metrics you care about.

• But what if your website were suddenly ugly and hard to use — or the reverse: what if it were suddenly much more beautiful and easy to use? Could you put a number of any kind on that difference?

It's a tough question. I'm still working on the answers.

But Alan Faljic's How to estimate the ROI of design work? makes some good points about how even design professionals are challenged to define the value of their own work.

I expect you're not a designer, but this bit may sound familiar:

We try to explain design’s impact through qualitative thinking: empathy, aesthetics, and user experience, for example. While these are important factors, they’re not what business people understand, nor are they what drives business people towards action.

In other words, we usually think about design in qualitative, subjective terms.

Faljic's article explains a way to put numbers on that value, by tying it to quantitative, objective measurements that business leaders care about: increased income, and decreased expense.

In our world, we can also add: increased mission impact.

Here's the thing:

Good design isn't just about making things look pretty. Or the pride of showing off our fancy new design to our board members.

It's about making the journey smoother as we guide our people to the next step in their engagement with our mission.

That's got to be worth something.

And that's something surely is measurable.

All the best,
A.