Value-Based Design Workshop

Undervalued. Overlooked. Dispensable. Discarded.

These are just a few words that describe the pain that many designers are feeling right now.

Tech is at an existential crossroads - is it threatening or empowering? – and widespread layoffs bring an added layer of uncertainty to the struggle against burnout.

It’s easy to feel helpless. But looking at the industry from this perspective isn’t productive for your job in the short term, and it isn’t healthy for your career in the long term.

Take a step back. Look at design from a different angle. There is a better way forward for our industry, and it starts with asking why people buy design in the first place.

Another World is Possible

Designers are good at researching why customers buy products, but the majority of us don’t perform the same research on our own jobs. Why do clients choose to work with us? Why do we get hired to practice design? What’s our own purpose?

This research is essential because it helps us understand the value that we bring to the table. It helps us understand how we can be essential to our clients and our companies.

Design isn’t bought because of trends like crypto, large language models, or even because our portfolios have a specific aesthetic.

People buy design because there’s an expensive problem that needs to be solved in a way that the designer’s specific expertise is uniquely suited to solve.

Businesses want to increase profit, lower their costs, or reduce risk. They will invest in anything that can affect one of those variables. When you come off as a person who can help them do that, you become valuable to the business.

Become Essential

When you’re viewed as essential, you’re more likely to survive a round of layoffs. You might get promoted into a role with more power. You might find a job that respects you. In short, you might finally pull up that ever-elusive seat at the table that we all keep hearing about.

So, how do you become essential? By rooting your design practice in the generation of value, which we call value-based design.

Value-Based Design

Value-based design incorporates elements of customer success, product, interaction design, and user research to create a holistic approach to design that is grounded in evidence.

When you become a practitioner of value-based design, you’ll:

• Use your design sense to reliably deliver work that has an impact.
• Understand how to ground design decisions in evidence
• Apply the soft skills you need to survive and thrive in any organization
• Accurately measure the impact of your decisions
• Advocate for design in a way that’s fundamentally impossible to ignore

In short, you’ll become essential.

We wrote the definitive book on value-based design, and we want to teach you everything we know, hands on, to help you level up your career. We invite you to begin your journey of proving your worth by attending the Value-Based Design Workshop from 9AM to 2PM Pacific Time on March 21st.

What You’ll Learn

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to go beyond the basic principles of design and learn how to get a seat at the table:

1. The high level design process.

• Research, synthesis, prioritization, experimentation. Define what each is and why each is important to the design process. Where design-qua-design fits into this.
• Soft skills. Current power dynamics in tech.
• How to get others involved in the organization. Issues to watch out for.
• Basic project management. Creating clear sources of truth for communication. Prioritization comes later!

2. How to suggest one-off improvements to a store or marketing site to fit with current best practices.

• Heuristic evaluation: what it is, why it’s important, how to create a series of heuristics that work for you, example heuristic lists.
• What metrics are: how you measure the success of a design. How to create metrics that work for you.
• Common metrics to start with.
• How to adapt heuristics over time as the business evolves.

3. How to analyze of heat & scroll maps to make high-leverage design decisions.

• How to run one: existing tools, how to install tracking, etc.
• What to look for. How to read a heat map. How to read a scroll map. Typical issues on key pages.
• How to synthesize into design decisions.

4. How to run usability tests.

• How to plan one. What are the goals of usability testing? What is an ideal outcome?
• What frameworks to use. Subscription versus a la carte. Recruitment issues.
• How to frame questions in a test. General versus specific questioning. Common starter questions. How to not lead participants on. What makes for a good test.
• What to watch out for when synthesizing a usability test. How to turn usability test results into design decisions. How to investigate usability test findings in order to confirm before designing.

5. How to prioritize a series of design decisions such that they possess maximal strategic leverage for a business.

• Separating ideas between experiments & one-off fixes. When experiment versus roll out?
• Our framework at Draft: impact, feasibility, strategic alignment.
• How to prioritize one-off fixes: instead of strategic alignment, prioritize context fit.

6. How to run & analyze experiments.

• Experimentation frameworks. What they do. Picking a framework.
• Hypotheses. What a hypothesis contains (design decision, primary metric, intended lift). Turning a design decision into a hypothesis. Calculating minimum sample size.
• Development & implementation. Difference between WYSIWYG v. feature flag tests. When to get the rest of the team involved.
• Basic statistics: chi-squared testing, Bayesian/black box calculations, statistical significance.
• Final analysis. Knock-on effects & secondary metrics. Segmentation. Should we roll the decision out or not? Should we run new experiments based on what we’ve discovered?

These are the same processes I’ve used repeatedly to help stores generate more revenue without increased ad spend.

Who Am I?

I’m Nick Disabato, a designer & writer from the city of Chicago with 18 years of experience in the industry. I run Draft, a small consultancy for online stores that is known for a deep focus on revenue generation through qualitative, value-based research.

Our case studies represent a net annual increase of $41M in revenue, and we’ve just had our best year ever. In 2023. The dissonance is felt over here.

Draft’s third book Value-Based Design was released in 2019, and represents the definitive answer to the “seat at the table” debate. Our latest book, Store Design, reinforces these ideas for ecommerce.

Workshop Details

The workshop will be on March 21st from 9AM to 2PM Pacific Time (check your timezone here). It will be held over Zoom, and will be recorded and transcribed for later viewing.

There will be several high-value group exercises and discussion throughout the day, and you’re encouraged to ask questions.

Attendees will also receive one month of membership to Draft for free, a $30 value.