Want to have a strategic design voice at work? Talk about desirability
Desirability isn’t just about visual appeal: it’s one of the most important user factors
“The first way designers should get involved in metrics is validating the problem with desirability.” A Product Design Manager at a Fortune 500 company told me, and he wasn’t alone.
I’ve been interviewing several design leaders to understand how they achieve their metrics and business objectives, and one word keeps popping up: desirability.
Desirability is often an odd concept, as it’s not a metric. Moreover, it’s a ‘secondary concept’ that gets grouped when discussing UX.
However, many design leaders believe that designers shouldn’t just know about desirability: designers should be responsible for this metric.
Here’s why.
Are you really solving a user’s problem?
To give a basic definition, desirability is a strategic part of UX that revolves around a single user question:
Have you defined (and solved) the right problem for users?
There are some marked differences between desirability and UX. First, desirability plays a much larger and strategic role in the early stages of the process. Why?
Because your team prioritizes a roadmap, businesses must decide which of many potential features to build first to achieve their objectives.
For example, should we build a new “Create a product” wizard or re-do onboarding first?
One way to figure out which features to prioritize is through these three dimensions:
Feasibility: The degree to which the item can be built technically. Do we have the skillset and expertise to create a solution?
Desirability: How much users want the item. What unique value proposition does it provide? Is the solution fundamentally needed, or can users accomplish goals another way?
Viability: If the item is functionally attainable for the business. Does pursuing the item benefit the business? What are the costs to the business, and is the solution sustainable over time?
Feasibility is often the realm of Engineering, and Viability is a decision made by the Product/Business Owner.
However, Desirability falls mainly into the realm of UX, which we must capture for one key reason: we need to prioritize features that users need.
After all, you don’t want your company to waste millions of dollars building a feature users won’t use.
More importantly, this is the strategic value we can deliver to not just have a voice: it can help our team make the best decisions.
The problem is, how exactly do you measure Desirability? Here’s how to get started
Measuring desirability: It’s about priority, not visual appeal
Desirability often gets confusing because many think it’s only about visual appeal.
After all, some toolkits measure ‘visual and brand appeal,’ such as Microsoft’s Desirability Toolkit.
However, the purpose of measuring desirability isn’t to determine if “users liked how this looked.” It’s to have a voice in prioritizing certain features.
If your team wants to spend $1 million building a feature and you determine users don’t want it, desirability is how you change their minds.
The first part of desirability is, of course, to focus on visual appeal. You might include questions during user testing that focus on ideas and categories like:
“How did the user feel when they landed on the homepage?”
“How does the design make them feel, and is it appropriate for your brand?”
“How does it feel to interact with the product?”
However, there’s another part of this process, which can often be summed up in a single question:
“Why should I buy your product?”
This can be further divided into two concepts:
“What motivates me to purchase/use your product?”
“Why should I buy your product instead of a competitor’s?”
What motivates users to use your product?
The second part of desirability is about understanding user motivation.
For example, your website might look beautiful, but if users don’t see the value you offer, they won’t use it.
This is often tied to a single problem: is this a problem the user is searching to solve?
Jared Spool, founding principal of User Interface Engineering, has often said that “users don’t experience a sudden sharp pain, when they encounter a UX issue.”
As a result, most users will live with problems until something motivates them to actively seek a solution.
Your job is to understand if the current problem is something users are motivated to seek solutions to. This may include answering questions like:
“What is the website’s main function, and is it visible from the start?”
“What evidence do I have that this is a problem for users?”
“What is a day in the user like, and how would our product/feature improve their life?”
Understanding those sorts of questions allows you to determine whether the user is motivated enough to want to use your product.
After that comes one last question: differentiation.
Users have a limited amount of money/time
One of the reasons Netflix prioritized the metric “Number of Hours viewed” for so long wasn’t just about getting users to binge-watch shows. It was so that their target audience would spend less time on competing platforms.
After all, there are only 24 hours in the day, and if your target audience spends 6 hours on Netflix, they (likely) can’t spend 6 hours on a streaming competitor.
This leads to the last aspect of desirability: how do you stack up against competitors?
If you and several competitors have roughly the same value proposition (i.e., “Streaming”), what allows you to win over users?
This often involves interviewing business stakeholders and users. We might ask users questions like:
“Have you heard of our brand?”
“Which one of these designs would you prefer (showing your design and competitors)?”
“What would cause you to pay for this product?”
However, there are (often) more essential questions to ask of your stakeholders, like:
“Who are our competitors?”
“What is our Unique Selling Point/how do we differentiate between them?”
“How do we want our users to perceive our product/brand?”
It’s through these aspects that we can begin to validate desirability.
Desirability is the gateway to having a strategic impact as a designer
Despite sounding only about visual appeal, desirability is one of the most important ways to make a difference in your product roadmap.
While your business might know the ‘features they need to build’, they’re likely constantly trying to determine what features you should prioritize.
Some of this will come down to technical feasibility (or viability), but the critical viewpoint they lack is desirability.
Being able to speak about the user beyond terms like “users like this” is critical in showcasing the user viewpoint to businesses, and it’s what successful design teams do to have a seat at the table.
So, if you’re designing a product in the early stages, one critical question you should ask is: Is this product/feature desirable to our users?
That is how you can make a real difference and have a voice as a designer.
Kai Wong is a Senior Product Designer and Data and Design newsletter writer. He teaches a course, The Strategic Designer: How to Use Data to Drive Strategic Decisions, that helps designers communicate their value and get buy-in for ideas.
Very good piece Kai. Interestingly, I was having a similar conversation with a friend/business partner lately about the dual roles of desirability and usefulness in validating a product idea as well as setting up a product for success.
I’ll be sharing a piece on this soon.
Thank you for sharing this post.