And, at first glance, often this appears to be the case.

It’s been my experience that the main reason most designs go unsolved is not the lack of talented designers or their interest in solving the problem. Instead, the problem is with the organisation themselves  - their inability to allow themselves to implement the right design, or even any good design.

Many times I’ve suggested a design approach only for the in house designer on the team to literally pull the design from their desk drawer or computer and to tell me how they tried to get the organisation to go this way two, three, maybe four or five years ago. They tried and tried, had no success, and filed the design away so they can get on with the work the organisation deemed acceptable or appropriate. It’s kind of depressing, and almost embarrassing when my main role is to advocate for work that was actually done years before I appeared. And sometimes it works.

Politics and egos are the main reasons that great design goes awry – either it is never presented (because presenting it is a risk to those egos and would be not wise politically), or it is presented and dismissed, or it is presented and then changed such that egos are not wounded and the politics are in tact, the design integrity is hardly a passing consideration.

Organisation processes and complexity are another common killer. As more and more, the digital products replace the previous products and functions of the organisation, this requires a transition in how things should be done that most organisations are unprepared for an unwilling to support. They’d rather keep doing things the way they always have, and craft a design that doesn’t trouble their processes or require additional resources. You know you’re designing for an organisation on the way out the back door when you come across this – disrupt yourselves or be disrupted, Peter Drucker, amongst others, has been telling us this for half a century (or more). Still, it can be surprisingly hard to do. We don’t like change and the changes required often threaten the existing egos and power structures. See above.

At first glance, the solution is strategy. Get more designers higher up the food chain and involved in the creation of strategies that would guide an organisation to make better decisions. Sounds right, but the reality is different. Most places I encounter these problems have all kinds of strategies talking about how important design and the end user is to them. They all handwave the right way, but the execution doesn’t match the strategy. This is the reality we live in – almost every organisation you come across is loudly proclaiming their interest in the customer experience and surveying you within an inch of your life to prove it. They’re talking about the importance of design and hiring expensive designers (who are then nobbled by the organisation). None of this matters if the execution, the tactics, don’t fit the strategy. And most often, it doesn’t.

I’ve tried approaching this two ways – firstly playing the politics and trying to get involved higher up, spending lots of time in meetings, or secondly: just executing – making things that actually live out the strategy that mostly lives on posters and induction manuals and giving the higher ups a better choice to make, giving them a good choice to make not expecting them to get there on their own and then brief the design team. These days I don’t get too much feedback throughout the design process (forget wireframes) – make it and then iterate. It’s been the second approach that has worked better.

‘Show, don’t tell’ is a design principle that seems to work well in design practice as well.

It saddens me how many great design solutions are hidden away in filing cabinets. It’s not enough to know the right answers, the real design challenge is in getting the organisation to adopt and implement and maintain (a whole other challenge) good design. It feels to me like we  need to focus on this more.

Although I’m no expert on public sector projects or the history of the UK Government’s web presence (I’ve done bits and pieces as I suspect many of the UX Community in UK have done), I want to take a moment to commemorate the impact of this achievement for anyone who is trying to encourage large organisations to embrace better digital work practices.

This is a big deal.

It’s important because Gov.UK arguably brings a new high standard of design, content and overall user centricity to public sector digital projects. It’s true that the UK Government has engaged its share of designers and user experience (or, probably more accurately, usability) people over the years, until now it has felt as though they were constrained to making things less bad, rather than aspiring to really create experiences that citizens wanted to engage with.

That’s because this is not really a design case study – it’s not about the government finally finding a decent designer to pretty up the interface or a usability person to write the perfect report telling them what to do. It’s about actually creating an environment where, having hired those people, they are able to do what they are good at and to actually get their work, relatively unscathed, through the complex web of stakeholder engagement and approval processes, and into ours – the citizen’s (or in my case, resident) hands.

What the Government Digital Service have given us is a brilliant case study in overhauling the way things were done before and changing them around so that they can support the creation of better user experiences online.

I thank the @GDSTeam for giving me the case study I need to present to large complex organisations who are trying to revolutionise their  user experience without changing the way that their organisations work. Now I can say,  ’Well, if the UK Government can do it, I’m sure we can’. In my experience, it’s quite  compelling.

A page like this doesn’t come into existence because one designer had a good idea. This is no vanity redesign project, these designs and this content has gone through the complex series of stakeholders and approval processes to get from ‘good idea’ to ‘actually live’.

Being able to sell something as radically different, to give stakeholders the confidence to go with something like this -that is a tremendous achievement.

Remember – this is the typical approach to public sector content:

This is not a story about interface design (although kudos to the designers who have worked so long and hard on this project). It’s a story about organisational design. The changes that the GDS Team made to how digital design is done in government is what enabled design like this to emerge.

Changes like:

• moving to a centralised, multidisciplinary team who work in close proximity and are able to focus on solving particular problems, not get hauled around from project to project to project with no time to focus.
• housing this team in a space that facilitates close teamwork between the members of these small, agile teams (including, from what I’ve seen, plenty of wall space. It matters!)
• using an iterative but agile project methodology that involves regular testing information gathering allowing the team to make decisions driven by data rather than opinions
• working openly, sharing what they are doing (including the code) and why they are doing, inviting others to participate in the process and inviting feedback often.
• having clear and inspiring leadership who continue to evangelise for the team higher up in the organisation and be the battering rams driving change throughout the organisation.
• having vocal and consistent support from the highest parts of the organisation
• spending time on creating artefacts that allow the team, as it grows, to maintain a clear shared vision about the way they are approaching challenges and defining solutions.

and many more I’m sure.

More than anything I’m thankful for the final point – the openness and the time spent creating and sharing artefacts.

From the very beginning, the team have been sharing their methodology and rationale, their project documentation and even their code. They have been helping to enable the rest of the world – not just governments – to improve their practice and make better digital products.

Some of the treasures that they’ve provided us with include:

• Design Principles
• Content Principles
• Performance Framework (measuring effectiveness)
• and lots of discussion around user research and design decisions made on their blog.

There is plenty to criticise, there always is. Nothing is perfect, and even less so in large and complex projects like this. And yes, the real challenges are ahead – can this scale and can it be maintained for the years to come now that the ‘launch’ has passed.

Most of all though, here is an amazing opportunity for all of us – public sector or otherwise, UK and around the world, to take advantage of the awesome work the team has done and the resources they’ve provided us with and to use them ourselves to no longer accept ‘the way things are done around here’ but to require and facilitate transformation.

The space you work in, the size of your team, the access to and interest from upper management, your project methodology – all of these things and many more will directly impact your ability to do good work, to deliver good experience. If you want to fix the experience, it’s critical to look at the environment that is impacting the ability of your team to deliver.

People often talk about Apple’s design process, but I think equally important is the way that Steve Jobs took the focus off the Profit &Loss statement- making that the responsibility of just one person and, apparently, running just one P&L for the world’s most valuable company. (Most companies run multiple P&Ls between departments (functional or product), and crazy decision making and politicking ensues).

Only through transforming the way your team, your organisation works will you really be able to transform the experiences that the organisation is creating for its audience. It’s not a UI problem, it’s an organisational design problem. Those things do matter.

So, get stuck into addressing the environment as well as the experience design and when you’re feeling challenged, remind yourself and your colleagues, ‘well, if the UK Government can do it… ‘

Most of us with any agency experience would have no doubt been nodding in agreement to read:

Big digital agencies especially, will kick off a project with a “discovery phase” (which may or may not actually discover anything), and quickly jump into a waterfall-style design process of UX sketching, wireframing, and client meetings/approvals. Then after many (many) rounds of visual design… and only then… will agencies start to move into the development and tech stage. Only after every pixel has been pushed and use-case documented, will something be made that is working and actually functional.

Developers and tech leaders intuitively get the problem with this. Websites (or anything digital) are not buildings, made the stand the test of time without change — they are meant to be tested and iterated, and improved continuously. But in my experience, it has never made anything of real value to a client.

Ross goes on to advocate that agencies take up the Lean Startup methodology widely in use amongst start ups and some of the more forward thinking and/or buzzword aware larger companies. I concur. This is indeed a fine and very user focussed way to approach a project.

However, Ross glosses over the reason agencies work this way (‘comfort, dogma, and the ease of billing clients’ he suggests). I think a lot of agencies want to work in a more Lean or Agile way (and some attempt to do so), but the nature of the agency/client engagement will have to change substantially in order for this way of working to become widely adopted.

A few things happen when you hire an agency.

Firstly, the client effectively outsources the work. They create a separation between themselves and the people who are doing the work.

Even the agencies who work most closely with their clients (and by this I mean properly in each others faces physically or virtually ALL the time). This creates a different dynamic than what you get in an inhouse team. There is an “us” and a “them” and they have very different realms of expertise and knowledge and often not a great way of combining these two sets of knowledge to make a great product.

The lack of integration between the company who needs the project done and the company who is doing the project creates a very different shape to a typical (effective) Agile or Lean team, and it makes it difficult to work effectively.

It also introduces another ‘customer’ to the mix – one that is not the end user customer, but one who will sign off the project and pay the bills – so, probably, a more important customer to the agency than the *real* customer that the project is being created to serve.

Complicated huh. Makes it hard to focus on what’s really important when there are actually TWO things, often in conflict, that are important. Agencies will always preference making their customer happy over making the customer’s customer happy. That’s understandably, but it doesn’t lead to good project outcomes.

Secondly, when the client outsources the work, they feel as though they’re outsourcing the risk.

They effectively pay a premium for an agency who knows what they’re doing to do that thing well. It tends not to play well for an agency to then spend the duration of the contract being actively uncertain, making hypotheses and validating them, using the client’s money to ‘learn’.

This, traditionally, is not what we pay a top class agency to do. We pay them to know stuff and to get stuff right, and to be the people we blame if it doesn’t work out well. Until clients get comfortable with this (will they ever?) it will be difficult, nigh impossible, for an agency to be properly Lean or even agile.

Thirdly, when you’re paying an agency a lot of money (and you usually do), you want to feel confident about what you’re going to get when then money is spent.

This is why clients are so desirous of spec work in the pitch process – it makes them feel more confident about what they’re going to get for their money. Getting them to let go to spec work in the pitch is hard enough, how much luck do you think the Biz Dev guys are going to have selling Lean, where all we have is a Build, Measure, Learn process that admits we don’t really know anything for sure, and the possibility of pivots along the way. (Not to mention that most biz dev guys probably don’t have the first idea what Lean is and have the wrong idea about Agile).

No one ever got fired hiring a big name agency to do waterfall, complete with functional specs and three different visual design variants for the marketing team to choose from. They probably didn’t get a good product at the end of the process either, but they got a thing that looks as though it probably took as much time as the agency said it was going to take, and looked kind of pretty, and so they don’t feel ripped off and angry. And they won’t get fired.

It takes a special kind of client to take the risk and develop the level of trust and integration required to work the way that Mr Popoff-Walker and many, many other inhabitants of agency world would like to work.

The agency model is certainly pretty broken, but both agencies and – I’d say more importantly – clients need to take responsibility for that, and take both action and a little risk to help mend it.

This is far from a comprehensive list, but is a good place to get started.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on the Harvard Business Review and Forrestor’s CX Blog.

If you’ve got any other recommendations you think people should know about, feel free to share below.

Happy reading.

How many weeks in the past year did you feel as though you were doing the right kind of work, on the right kind of project. How often do you feel as though you’re really being properly utilised, that you’re using your skills and experience in a way that is really helping companies make a difference?

Based on my own experience, my hypothesis was that the answer would be pretty depressing. And, with a few exceptions, it has been.

At a time where companies are crying out for User Experience people to come help them solve problems – and there are so many problems to solve – the people who are at the coal face generally feel as though they’re either not able to work effectively, or they are doing great work but tackling the wrong problems.

What a tragic waste of talent, of time, of money, of life.

The last few months I’ve seen a lot of movement in the UX field – people moving in house out of agencies, starting their own companies, leaving freelancing – it feels like we’re generally a little restless at the moment, and it’s a feeling I’m familiar with. I need to stop taking briefs and trying to reshape them, and instead to work with companies to give them the tools to make better decisions, to give better briefs, to allow teams to work together more productively. We need to get out of the design or UX department to solve these problems.

So I’m shifting my focus to Customer Journey Mapping.

In workshops and conference talks I’ve done recently I’ve waxed lyrical about the Customer Journey Map and how it has, without doubt, been the thing that has most transformed my practice as a User Experience practitioner over the past few years. In particular it does three things that immediately accelerate an organisation’s customer focus:

1. Makes the customer experience understandable and addressable – even for quite small companies, understanding what it is like to be your customer at all points of the customer lifecycle and across all channels can be difficult. Creating a customer journey map helps make the big picture of customer experience understandable so that even as we deep dive on specific projects, we’re maintaining a consistent and coherent experience at all times. By picking out the critical moments of truth and focusing on those touchpoints, we make significant improvements much more achievable and measurable.
2. Unites the silos, ignites customer focus – often organisations are filled with people who are passionate about customer experience but who are functionally separated from each other and have difficulty communicating effectively and aligning their efforts across the organisational silos. A customer journey map gives them a focal point and a shared language and way of communicating the insight they have and activity within their functional group, improving the organisation’s ability to maximise the efforts and expertise of its customer champions.
3. Visibly connects business value and customer value – Peter Drucker tells us that the purpose of the business is to create value for our customers and that profit is the feedback we get from doing it well, but the connection between customer and business value is often difficult to see in today’s organisations. A customer journey map provides a way to show how the critical moments of truth for customers – the touchpoints that should be most thoughtfully designed – almost always maps to places where money flows in or out of an organisation. Customer journey maps provide a way to measure CX metrics that directly impact the organisations bottom line.

I’m not giving up the usual research, design and strategic UX work I’ve done over the years, but I’d like to spend more of my time working on making Customer Journey Maps with clients and helping to focus their energies on the UX projects that will really make a difference for their organisation, and also to bring some more ‘design’ into the world of Customer Experience (CX) (yes, CX is different to UX, and yes, I totally understand how confusing that sounds).

So, if your organisation needs some customer experience mapping done, or you hear of someone who does, I’d love it if you’d send them my way. With a bit of luck and good management I can do my bit to help make sure more UXers are working on real and important UX projects in the coming years.

What is Experience Strategy?

Having done a review of some of the significant contributions to this topic from the UX community, I found myself dissatisfied… Steve Baty wrote a detailed essay on the topic for Johnny Holland some time ago. This essay does address a lot of significant issues around what businesses should be doing to create better experiences as differentiating opportunities… but at the end of it I can’t help asking myself – isn’t this just a part of a good value proposition? And where and how does/should a User Experience person get involved in these kind of activities that go way beyond the interface and into the mechanics of how the entire company functions?

Then I discovered Customer Experience (CX).

Turns out there is this whole other profession, born, it seems, mostly from the marketing discipline, who have an active interest in orchestrating company wide good experience for their customers. They are experienced in making strong, financially driven business cases to management at the highest level, getting decent budgets and then investing in infrastructure that enables an organisation to deliver good customer experience (such as ‘single view of the customer’  and ‘voice of the customer’ programs that enable an organisation to aggregate their understanding of a customer into one view (how rare is this for most established organisations, and how crippling is the typical fragmentation), and enables an organisation to hear and respond to what their customers are saying to and about them.

Reading some of their books (I particularly enjoyed this one) it strikes me that they have a much more mature and structured way to approaching company wide good experience than we User Experience people (generally) do. Given the choice of having a Chief Experience Officer (CXO from a UX background) or a Chief Customer Office (CCO from a marketing/CX background), I’d probably choose the latter – for the more comprehensive, well rounded view of the organisation and all its working parts than the interface obsessed UXer is likely to be.  And I’m more confused about where Service Design fits into all of this than ever.

I’m writing up a lot more about what people who do CX do, and what they think about in the book (and I’ll no doubt share some more of that here, now that I’m back writing again!) but I wanted to take a moment to flag how – from my own experience and a lot of the people i’ve been talking to – we don’t really know people who do Customer Experience, in fact, most of us probably don’t even know they exist and will be immediately skeptical upon discovering them.

Similarly, in reading what they write about, it is disturbing how little reference Customer Experience people make to User Experience people. I’ve come across several references to human factors and usability, but you’ll almost never find Customer Experience and User Experience in the same book/article/room.

This worries me.

It worries me because I think that actually, this is possibly one of the best, strongest alliances that could exist in companies. It worries me because so much of what CX people do is what we need done so that the experiences we’re designing have a real chance of being good. And it worries be because I think we as UXers could really benefit from understanding, in greater detail,  a lot of the structure and discipline and business focus that CXers bring to our combined cause.

We’ve done a lot of hand waving about Good Experience and Experience Strategy over the past few years, but we’ve done very little to explain HOW to make this happen. Getting to know our Customer Experience colleagues, getting more of them in our organisations and  making them aware of our existence could really help move this forward.

don’t look at the website though, it’s terrible.

We’re currently operating with this tacit agreement that you can do great design ‘in theory’ but that it’s not our fault if that design never makes it to market. Or if it gets totally transformed so that it’s unrecognisable by the time it goes live.

Can we really go on like this? Doesn’t it make you question your own existence?

Sure, there are a LOT of things that come into play between the time you present your awesome design and when the code hits the live server, but it seems to me that, as UXers and designers, we’re largely stepping away from the plate to wash our hands clean of responsibility for what happens. (How’d you like that mixed metaphor?)

I think we might be letting ourselves off a little too lightly and, for myself, I’m going to take starting a lot more personal responsibility for whether and how much of my design sees the light of day by thinking more about:

• the nature of my engagement with clients and the shape of my projects - as a freelancer, the way that I engage with clients can vary a lot from client to client. I’m going to think more about how I can design engagements that maximise the chances of good design going live (this is part of the reason I recently kicked off UX Tuesdays)
• communicating design and user experience strategy – are you spending enough time on communicating your design to the project stakeholders? Are you giving them tools that they can use to help make good decisions as they move through the implementation process (where, let’s face it, some of the most important design decisions are made in the absence of a designer). Do your clients/managers understand the implications of the decisions they’re making on the integrity of the user experience? Quick tip: a functional spec does not tick this box.
• staying in the debate – are you still around when your design is being taken apart? are you engaging in a discussion to help save your design work? It’s easy to swan off like a princess mumbling under your breath about people who don’t appreciate good design work when they see it. Are you helping them (sometimes with a little force) to learn to appreciate it?
• making sure you’re designing things that can be implemented – it’s all well and good to design a thing of beauty but does the team have the resources to bring it to life? Have you made something that’s beyond their current capability? If so, then, how good is your design really?

From this point forward I’m taking personal responsibility for the design that goes live, no matter how far it is from the documents I might show you from my portfolio.

In the Drupal community they say ‘talk is silver, code is gold‘.

Let’s make a new UX motto: ‘portfolios are silver, live design is gold‘.

Let’s own the work that goes live, understand and explain why it is as it is, and work on the skills we need to make sure more good design actually makes it over the line. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Are you in?

I happened across this twitter exchange this morning. This is a not surprising response to personas, I’ve shared this response at times and have empathy for both points of view.

Here’s the thing… You don’t really want to use personas, do you? They are really a pretty cumbersome way of maintaining your customer’s active presence in the design & product management process.

What you really want is a small, tight team who get who your users are, what they value about your product/service and what is behaviourally significant about them. And you want regular access to them (if you or your boss are representative of your target audience this helps enormously).

Enter reality – the majority of us are not working in this kind of environment. We are working for large organisations who are focussing more on themselves than their users, with people who may not have seen or heard from a customer for years (if ever), whose attention is constantly being focussed on internal KPIs focussed on quantity not quality. Who resist making and decisions in preference to making a sub- optimal decision that can be traced back to them.

Sure, the likelihood of incredible design flourishing in this environment is significantly reduced, but what do we do? Give up?

We can’t all do that, can we? And neither we should.

Many of us have experienced that moment when a team transforms – when they realise what it is like to be their customer and how easy it would be to make that experience better. This most often happens during usability testing. (around the 3rd or 4th participant when the team acknowledges that perhaps we haven’t recruited a bunch of stupid users and maybe we do need to change the design a little).

Well made and well used personas are less able to create this transformation (watching real users will always trump personas) but they can help maintain that transformation and act as a tool to evangelise a customer focus through out the organisation and to create a common language around our users and – possibly my favourite thing – to allow us to reduce usage of the term ‘user’ (so abstract, inhuman and elastic) and replace it with our personas names.

Yes, this does make you feel like a bit of a hippy. I agree. But it helps, a lot, to transform focus from internal processes and priorities to what people actually do, need, want.

You don’t *have* to use personas to do good design. If you make bad personas (made up not researched, focused on demographics not relevant behaviours and attitudes), and if you use then poorly (make them and forget about them, or keep them hidden within the UX team) then you might as well not use them.

But well made personas in day to day use through out the organisation are incredibly useful when you need to gain and maintain focus on the (potential) customer.

Here’s the test:

• do you have personas for your project/product?
• are they made of data from real (potential) customers?
• do they have real names not segment names?
• do you have fewer than five personas?
• can you remember all the names of your personas and describe them?
• do you use them to guide, evaluate and/or explain design decisions?
• can your boss name your personas?
• can the developers on your team name your personas?

If you’re not answering yes to the majority of these, there are probably good reasons why personas aren’t really working out for you.

Don’t fret if you didn’t do so well here – most people don’t (out of a room of dozens of UXers last night only one lonely hand remained in the air at the end of this line of questioning last night).

I reckon personas are the best known but most misunderstood and misused tool in the UX toolkit. Don’t throw your personas out necessarily but see how you can incrementally improve how they’re made and communicated.

And if your fortunate enough to work in a project team who doesn’t need personas, well, lucky you – just don’t be too successful or you may find yourself large enough that you’ll windup needing personas after all! ;)

(For help on making good personas, two excellent resources are Designing for the Digital Age or About Face 3)

Right now I’m looking for two things in particular:

• the dark side: examples of things that are commonly called ‘our strategy’ but are not really strategy at all.

  I think there are plenty of these out there. Some examples:

  1. I’m often shown things that are called ‘our strategy’ but are usually a list of tasks in groups, like, say  ’Our Social Media Strategy’ with a list of things we’re going to do (make a facebook app, make a twitter widget, etc.)

  2. Another one I often see is an incredibly vague product description something like, ‘we’re doing social mapping’ – again this is not a strategy.Do you have some other examples of things that are currently misconstrued as strategy?

• the bright side: good ways to keep strategy alive (known, understood, attended to) in an organisation – communicating strategy
  
  These examples, I fear, may be a little more scarce, but I’d love your help to try to uncover as many good examples as possible. What have you seen/made/used to help an organisation maintain it’s focus on it’s purpose/strategy/mission? (where that purpose/strategy/mission is a real one and not just a marketing soundbite).

  This could be some kind of physical thing, an activity, a tattoo (just kidding… I think) – whatever works to help make sure that people in the organisation know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, who they’re doing it for.

I’d really appreciate your help compiling two sets of examples and, of course I’ll happily share them back with you here (wherever/however possible, taking commercial sensitivity into account of course).

Add yours to the comments below or email me.

His book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices is going down as one of the best User Experience books I’ve read in a long time. He wrote it in 1974.

One of the issues that it is really clarifying for me is something I’ve had a gut feel about for a long time. The role of the commercially or business savvy designer.

What does it mean to be ‘business savvy’ when you’re a designer? For some, it means you have an MBA, you take pleasure in doing SWOT analysis, and you love to spend your afternoon doing some double entry book keeping. For most of us, I think it means that we’re willing to ask for or define and then design for measurable outcomes that the business cares about. Increases in sales, page impressions, things that accountants and managers care about.

While I’m all for helping my client/employer be profitable so that they can continue to pay me and so we can work on more and better projects together, the description above doesn’t really fit well with most of the other aspects of User Experience. All too often, we find ourselves making compromises, or doing things that don’t really make sense, because of these clearly defined business objectives or ‘commercial reality’.

Reading Drucker has helped me to better articulate why this feels so wrong. It’s because it is wrong.

Most of the business people we’re taking orders from are actually doing business wrong. And if anyone can help them, it’s a User Experience person who has a firm grip on how business should be.

Actually, if you read Drucker (and I’ll post you some snippets in a moment), I think you’ll be amazed at how – if business is done the way he advocates – business people and UX people are actually coming from precisely the same place. Working together, doing things the right way, we can actually be firm allies rather than – as is so often the case – being mildly suspicious of each others motives and usefulness to the organisation.

There is so much of the first part of my copy of Drucker’s book highlighted I can hardly choose which bit to share with you. Here are a few pieces I had to underline then make a big highlighter star in the margin about:

To know what a business is we have to start with its purpose. Its purpose must lie outside of the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society, since business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

It is the customer who determines what a business is. it is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. Whatever the business thinks it produces is not of first importance – especially not to the future of the business and to its success…

What the customer thinks he or she is buying, what he or she considers value is decisive – it determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper. And what the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always a utility – that is, what a product or service does for him or her. And what is value for the customer is anything but obvious. (pp 56-57)

We really need a value measurement. What economic value does innovation give the customer? The customer is the only judge; he or she alone knows the economic reality. (pp60)

Profit is not a cause but a result – the results of the performance of the business in marketing, innovation, productivity. It is a needed result, serving essential economic functions.Profit is, first, the test of performance – the only effective test… Indeed, profit is a beautiful example of what engineers mean when they talk of feedback, or the self-regulation of a process by it’s own results. (pp65)

With respect to the definition of business purpose and business mission, there is only one such focus, one starting point. It is the customer. The customer defines the business.

Management always, and understandably, considers its product or its service to be important. If it did not, it could not do a good job. Yet to the customer, no product or service, and certainly no company, is of much importance. The executives of a company always tend to believe that the customer spends hours discussing their products. But how many housewives, for instance, ever talk to each other about the whiteness of their laundry? If something is badly wrong with one brand of detergent, they switch to another. Customers only want to know what the product or service will do for them tomorrow. All they are interested in are their own values and wants. Any serious attempt to state ‘what our business is’ must start with these truths about the customers. (pp 72)

The customer never buys a product. By definition the customer buys the satisfaction of a want. The customer buys value. Yet, the manufacturer, by definition, cannot produce a value, but can only make and sell a product. What the manufacturer considers quality may, therefore, be irrelevant and nothing but a waste and useless expense. (p 76)

Maybe I’m unlucky but all too many projects that I come into contact with seem to start with the sales figures. They have noisy shareholders demanding dollar value results in the next three months. They focus on traffic, page impressions, ad revenue, numbers of customers. Yet ask them what the purpose of the business is, what the value to the customer is, and often the response you get is a sigh and a look that makes you feel like you’ve drifted off into touchy-feely-designerland.

Well, no more. Forget ‘design thinking’ and any new-fashioned mumbo-jumbo. And forget being an order taker for sales figures and page impressions. By not focusing properly on customer value, defining their business in relation to customer value, our business people are doing business wrong. Putting the cart before the horse, focusing on the feedback and not the system. And it’s not me that says it, it’s the guys who defined what management is.

(And, for the record, Drucker kept saying pretty much the same thing for the next 20yrs until he died, in 1995 – you reckon you’re frustrated, try being him. He ended up giving up on business and working with non-profits instead).

Yes, its going to be a tough job turning some businesses around. Yes, sometimes you’ll need to give up and go somewhere where people actually want to listen. Working out this customer thing is much harder than setting some sales figures and then pressuring everyone around you to try to meet them… somehow.

But that’s our job, right. The customer thing. Let’s stop feeling bad that we don’t understand all those complicated tables in Excel and how to read a profit and loss table. Let’s focus on what we know – gaining customer insight and designing products and services that deliver value to customers – because more than anything, that’s what business needs.

Do this confidently, and that’s the best way you can ever be a business savvy designer.

It’s a tough mission. Let’s do it together.

I’ve added this book as an idea for London UX Bookclub – vote it up if you’re local and you’d like to talk about this more.