Interactions - November/December 2017

For a designer guided by human-centered methods toward improving our finicky relationship with technology, what does it mean to have impact?

What are the primary means of enabling an impact with lasting value for your team or company, as well as your customers? These are definitely existential questions. Who I am and what value I provide as a human-centered designer are concepts shaped by the actions I take and their consequences. It matters to me as a professional, in terms of pride and integrity, and to my cross-functional colleagues to justify my service to them toward collective, shared goals.

And, of course, customers care too.

To earn a smile of satisfaction and a joyful realization of value demands a journey—one of making impact and identifying the right moments or places to wield such ability and authority.

How does that even happen?

Let’s start at the beginning. Like many of you, I learned methods of discovery and analysis grounded in HCI within a university context. The approaches by professors were based upon learning and applying tools and techniques to achieve thoughtful outcomes per an iterative, feedback-driven process, from problem framing to user validation. Of course, this all adjusts quite a bit upon entry into the world of practice, with tough decision making and the navigation of interdepartmental agendas. Ah, politics! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m reminded of a chat with a
senior design leader from the early
days of my career, just a few weeks
after graduation, proudly armed with
my master’s degree, diving into the
realm of enterprise software, rich
with complexity and ambiguity. Eager
and still quite green, I was deeply
challenged and nearly run over by
the problems in this intense context
of expectation and argument. At the
conclusion of a sobering one-on-one
with my mentor, he gently asked what
it was that I truly wanted as a designer.

Stunned by the profundity of this simple question, I stammered and sighed. I dunno, fame... money... power?

Maybe one day ship a really cool design that aces all the usability studies with flying colors? Nope, he patiently replied with a slightly furrowed brow. What you want is impact through influence.

And there it was. The I-word.

The notion of influence as a means of channeling a designer’s capability and value was suddenly revealed to me.

In this context, influence refers to the ability to serve as a change agent of sorts, with persuasive powers to shape meaningful outcomes guided by intent. In effect, it’s a kind of meta-level wrapper for making stuff happen— the doing that needs to be done to get things done. I mean, you can design the world’s most beautiful, functional, usable product, but if that person with the authority and power to bring it to market for customers doesn’t respect or understand what you’ve created—and thus blocks or cancels it—then what’s the point?

Actually, let me amend that a
bit—it’s about the person(s) with
the properly effectual role(s) per the
organizational power structure who
can connect your designs to their
agendas and incentives. And then they
are able to see what’s in it for them,
in a mutually collaborative way that
truly enables that so-called win-win
situation. Not easy, but a worthy
challenge, right? Indeed, we might
approach this issue of influencing as
a design problem! How can we truly
empathize with our non-design peers
and masterfully craft influential
moments that speak to their needs/
goals/hopes/fears so as to advance our
greater agenda of improving the human
condition through new technology?
So, the question for all of us, the
great common concern across all
human-centered disciplines, channels,
and domains, from enterprise to
consumer, from medical services to
industrial machines, is: How do we
effect positive constructive influence
upon our cross-functional peers?
This includes stakeholders across the
gamut, from engineering to business
to research to even human resources.
Yup, HR! Consider this: If you want
to get that hiring classification for a
UX designer coded into the system at
the right pay grade and career-path
level, then you have to influence HR
with your story of the value-add for
them, the team, the product, and the
customer. All this is necessarily subject
to the influencing abilities of those
shaping human-technology encounters.
But how can you effectively
influence in difficult workplace
situations? Over the past several years,
I’ve come to identify four key vectors
of influence that can shape a designer’s
ability to be a leader and a successful
change agent who enables customer
value in complex organizations. To be
clear, this is a broad term that includes
start-ups. It’s more about the people
Designing with
Vectors of Influence