Design literacy in product organizations

I’ve noticed an interesting trend in the tech startup world. As organizations become more comfortable with the product they’re selling and are building up their understanding of how to most effectively market it to their audience, their design literacy is scaling along with it. And the evolution of this design literacy over time as the company grows is quite fascinating.

At some point, a scrappy startup of five or six engineers is going to hire a designer. They’re going to do it because their app is a mess. Their icons were grabbed from random free resources online, their button styling is atrocious, and they desperately need more “fun and delightful” illustrations in their app. They never had a chance to focus on the design because they were too busy making sure that the thing actually worked and did what it supposed to do first. But now they have to undergo a big UI overhaul. So they hire a designer to come and fix this mess they’ve created.

So the designer re-does the entire UI. He creates a styleguide, he creates a sensible hierarchy of text headings, he standardizes their color palette, he updates the button states, and basically does exactly what they needed him to do. But then he does more. He looks at the overall user flow and suggests improvements in areas where a tweaked flow makes more sense. He suggests moving the registration process from the beginning to the moment that the user actually needs it. He re-does the entire user flow for account recovery and starts creating more helpful error states for many of the app’s features.

As he’s doing all this, the engineers are starting to see the value of design. They start understanding that design is more than just making pretty icons and choosing the right fonts. They start seeing design as a problem-solving tool to ease friction in the entire user experience. They start consulting the designer more and more about core product decisions and start involving the designer more in the product planning process. At this point, the startup is considered design literate. They have a solid understanding and appreciation of the value design can bring to the table and try to take advantage of it wherever they can. Most startups of twenty to thirty employees that have a small design team (1-3 people) can be considered design literate.

But there’s more. As the startup scales, it’s inevitably going to hire even more people in sales, project management, data science, accounting, and HR. As the organization scales, it becomes harder and harder to infuse design into the process. All of a sudden, it’s not so simple to simply walk over to a designer and ask them to do something. The design team is already busy making marketing materials, web layout mockups, app icons, UI elements, assets, and print materials on top of trying to keep up with ensuring that core product features are designed right and perform well. The ratio of designers to engineers in the company matters a lot here, because the more engineers you have, the more work they’ll need to “keep busy” and the more stressed the small design team becomes.

At this point, there needs to be a big process change. Every feature needs to go through the phases of conceptual exploration and some preliminary user testing within the design team before it touches the engineering team. The design team then iterates on it for a couple of rounds until they feel comfortable with it themselves. Then finally, they start creating the final screens, transitions, and animations. They slice the assets and prep the UI elements to hand it off to the engineers. They then work with the engineers to ensure that it’s built according to spec, and inform the engineers to tweak it as necessary. They work with the data science team to add specific counters and metrics to things they want to measure, and ship it out.

This is no easy task. This requires buy in from everyone involved in the features being shipped out, from project management to engineering to design to data science to QA. If an organization has managed to get to this point successfully, they’ve achieved design fluency. They are able to not only understand and comprehend the value of design, but are able to implement a company-wide process change around ensuring that everything they ship has been vetted by the design team beforehand. Every feature that the engineers work on has been validated by real user testing and has been toyed around with enough within design that most of the bad ideas have already been killed early on in the process. Everything gets measured and updated as necessary. These are usually companies whose employee count ranges anywhere from forty to two hundred. Examples of organizations that have reached design fluency would be companies like Evernote, Dropbox, Slack, and most of the mobile games developers out there.

If you thought design fluency was enough, think again. It keeps going. Once the company grows large enough, it will eventually split into entire departments that barely communicate with each other. Sticking to a consistent way of doing things across an entire suite of products that the company makes is a grueling challenge. Simple things like conforming to user expectations on a keyboard shortcut or allowing users to easily share between accounts on two products that are under the same umbrella can feel like an obvious thing to solve for but turns out to be a lot more difficult than one might initially anticipate.

At this scale, these companies are serving an audience of 600,000+ or even millions. Different demographics generate very specific and targeted sources of revenue, and it’s very easy for product priorities to fall off the radar and even contradict each other when one product is supposed to accomplish what feels like every imaginable user need at once. Infusing design into the product process here is the ultimate challenge. These are hyper-focused products that live with each other in one massive walled ecosystem of shared technical foundations. They need to convey confidence, security, and trust to the user in a meaningful way.

The design process here is heavily dependent on the organization itself, but there are common themes. The entire design team frequently takes on major rebranding efforts for the entire suite of products. The design team is significantly more involved in the product ideation process than in design literate and design fluent organizations. The design team’s priorities and objectives directly drive top-line revenue in a very apparent and obvious manner. The design team has meticulously detailed process documents not just for shipping designs, but also for all of the company’s shared internal dashboards. The design team has specializations within it, where certain team members excel at rapid prototyping while others hone their illustration skills. Design leaders start rising to executive positions and enforce the importance of selling design, being data-driven, and emphasize soft skills.

You can tell where this is going. At this point, the company has achieved design mastery. They have polished their design process to the point where the entire organization’s design strength is perceived as a core component of their brand value. The leaders believe in design so much that they invest valuable time and energy into design sprints, large scale user testing efforts, design hackathons, and huge rebrand efforts. These companies very commonly have a design founder or a designer turned CEO (or they have multiple designers on their executive boards). The community holds these companies up to a very high quality bar for design and the features that they ship are often critiqued heavily in the tech world. Companies in this category can have anywhere between four hundred to forty thousand employees. The design team itself can be anywhere between forty to two hundred designers spread across the globe. Popular examples of companies who have achieved design mastery include Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify.

So, it seems like scale is the obvious turning point where companies are forced to transition from design literacy to design fluency and eventually to design mastery. But it won’t happen organically or naturally. Many, many companies never realize how to adapt or disrupt their existing process to accommodate their new level-up on the design literacy scale. You’ll frequently hear many founders say that they “believe” in design and see the value of it, but won’t budge when it comes to restructuring the organization around a new process that better incorporates design for fear of slowing down or not being able to immediately see the short-term impact of the work in measurable metrics on a dashboard.

I hope more tech startups begin to put their money where their mouth is and start changing for the better. I personally know many professional designer acquaintances of mine who are experiencing frustrations with this as well. Oh, and “hiring a designer” or “hiring more designers” is not going to fix the problem. The company actually needs to make an effort, from the top-down, to actually integrate the new design team into the company’s process. The design team can’t do it alone. It absolutely needs to be a two-way communication line.

I hope this helps shed some light into where the most common pitfalls are of design falling apart in organizations. Every time a company as a whole makes a jump on the design literacy scale from literate to fluent to mastery, they need to take a hard look and re-evaluate where their existing process needs to change in order to better accommodate design. Granted, it’s hard to properly pinpoint when that leap happens (it’s frequently only obvious in hindsight), but it’s easy for the design team to notice. Just work with them on it. Here’s to hoping that this catches on in more tech startups.