This is a modified excerpt from Business Thinking for Designers, a book authored by SWD founder Ryan Rumsey. Download it for free here.
What is desirable?
This is one of the first questions I ask when I work with a company, consult with design teams, or mentor design leaders.
I have yet to ask this question and get the same answer twice. Within an organization, this lack of consistency puts designers and design teams into difficult situations. Business partners expect to get the same answer to this question from every designer in a company. Why? Because designers are ambassadors of desirability for their organization.
Time and time again, I see designers on the same team or in the same organization give different interpretations of what makes a product or service desirable. This confuses business partners and makes them believe desirability is subjective—and therefore unworthy of trust in decision-making.
How do we fix this situation? In my experience, the tools we use to conduct our analysis and develop insights are too complex to share with business partners. Plus, they don’t really remove the subjectiveness of desirability. Journey Maps and Service Blueprints are incredibly powerful and useful. But they don’t directly show how improving an experience leads to objectives and goals for adoption.
So we have a communication gap. Product teams, stakeholders, and executive leadership struggle to connect the dots between desirability and adoption. Strategy Maps are the bridge we need.
What are Strategy Maps?
Strategy Maps are one of my favorite business visualizations. Simple in structure, a Strategy Map shows the relationships between organizational objectives through underlying quality perspectives.
Strategy Maps were originally popularized in the 1990s as part of a strategic management framework called The Balanced Scorecard. Now they’re a popular tool for describing and visualizing business strategies at companies large and small.
While traditional Strategy Maps connect objectives between separate perspectives of company health, Desirability Strategy Maps connect creates a clear viewpoint on how separate perspectives of desirability influence product success.
Four categories of Desirability Health
In order to keep things simple for my business partners, I use only four perspectives. And I’ve been able to align most desirability objectives within them without any problem.
These perspectives, in order of importance are:
- Credibility: To drive adoption, what are the things that need to be credible for the user?
- Impact: To meet a credibility objective, what are the things that must create impact?
- Usability: To meet an impact objective, what are the things that must be usable?
- Detectability: To meet a usability objective, what are the things that must be detectable?
If you want your organization to prioritize factors like ethics or accessibility, you need to first emphasize these perspectives. I place credibility above all others because, ultimately, factors like trust, accuracy, and good intentions matter more than usability. If a customer doesn’t believe your product or service is credible, they’ll quickly take their business elsewhere.
This setup gives design teams an initial outlook on what desirability is: a detectable, usable, impactful, and credible customer experience.