On Goals and Using Them Well
As a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed designer attending design school, I suspected mentors were onto something when they'd repeatedly bring up goals. In different words, they all seemed to say the same thing: use goals and use them well.
I did. And as I gained a little proficiency with the craft by my third or fourth project, goal setting started to click in my brain.
Take a pre-launch audit of an ecommerce website. The audit revealed many deviations from the primary goal of visual and aesthetic consistency. This was a very time sensitive project, and the developers had done phenomenal work in the time they were given. So the idea of pointing out every single problem with the output filled me with dread. Plus, auditing every tiny issue on every page was drudgery (I didn't know about randomisation). Even so, knowing the project goals like the back of my hand made things more manageable by helping me prioritise design inconsistencies.
But something small made the greatest impact: presenting the audit report to product through the lens of goals conveyed clarity amid chaos. Product ended up agreeing with most of the recommendations, I’m sure, because of goals. I didn't mention the word 'goals' once, yet the presence of goals loomed large in the audit review.
Take another design project with a different client: before kick off, the design manager and I had considered a workshop with the client. I thought the workshop would be a good opportunity to get everyone’s view on the first draft of the goals I had surmised from user research by a colleague. The rough plan I hoped to execute, but couldn't since the client was very busy, was to get folks from the client team to weigh and rank the goals and let the result guide the project.
But something unexpected happened. When, without my asking, the client handed me the goals on a silver platter, I had a revelation: if we can’t get stakeholders to sit down and rank goals with us, it doesn’t mean we can’t learn how they would prioritise goals for a project. In the first few design reviews, the client kept hinting, in a way that was hard not to notice, that avoiding unnecessary steps was a priority to them, based on their unique market niche. I made a note of this and a few other priorities (read: goals) and revised the goals for the project.
With newfound certitude, I prepared for future reviews, making sure the revised goals were incorporated into design flows. In the login flow, for example, on entering password, the customer would be redirected to the homepage with a toast containing a log in CTA. This would help avoid unnecessary steps and the customer would be able to continue shopping if they wanted to. When I presented this to the client, they definitively confirmed that avoiding unnecessary steps was important.
Clearly, goals made life easier. Still, I fretted about stakeholders not officially agreeing with project goals, or even taking a look at them. Goal setting wasn't meant to be a solo endeavour, I believed; solo goal setting for real world projects flew in the face of everything I had learned about goals in school. In my mind’s eye, I saw the professor and my mentors with their trailblazing journal articles glare at me with disapproval.
This changed when I read The Shape of Design, a book I highly recommend for all designers, but especially those who, having lost touch with their why, are navigating the long winding road of burnout. It is the only ‘design book’ to make me tear up; reading it is like speaking via telepathy to someone who is a cross between poet, philosopher, mystic and mentor. The author, Frank Chimera, attempting to give shape to design, compares the designer with an artist working on a painting.
The creative process, in essence, is an individual in dialogue with themselves and the work. The painter, when at a distance from the easel, can assess and analyze the whole of the work from this vantage. He scrutinizes and listens, chooses the next stroke to make, then approaches the canvas to do it. Then, he steps back again to see what he’s done in relation to the whole. It is a dance of switching contexts, a pitter-patter pacing across the studio floor that produces a tight feedback loop between mark-making and mark-assessing. The artist, when near, is concerned with production; when far, he enters a mode of criticism where he judges the degree of benefit (or detriment) the previous choice has had on the full arrangement.
Goals are akin to the artist stepping back from the easel every now and then to examine the painting.
Above all, the book helped me see that goal setting, when done solo, may be desirable. Educating stakeholders about goals in a workshop, then concretising the goals by collectively ranking and weighing them and expecting everyone to keep track of them would not only be unrealistic, especially in a resource constrained, lower design maturity context, but also very limiting. Frank Chimera writes that goals, once defined, are meant to stay in a drawer, and not interfere in the creative process.
(Note that he uses the word 'objectives'. While 'objectives' and 'goals' aren't the same, I suppose in the context of this book it is safe to replace 'objectives' with 'goals'.)
The first step of any process should be to define the objectives of the work with Why-based questions. The second step, however, should be to put those objectives in a drawer. Objectives guide the process toward an effective end, but they don’t do much to help one get going. In fact, the weight of the objectives can crush the seeds of thought necessary to begin down an adventurous path.
Don't get me wrong — getting clients to sit down and agree on goals may be apt in some contexts. What I've come to realise is that the 'how' of goal setting doesn't matter as much as the 'what'. How goals are set and tracked varies with the designer’s unique preferences predicated on experience, the context (is it a startup or MAANG?) and the unique needs of a project. The act of setting and tracking goals, however, is a constant.
Designers, that said, after keeping the goals in a drawer, let's not not forget them. After all, as artists, we must step back from the easel to examine our art from time to time. Tracking and reassessing goals is as important as setting them, and in my experience, it helps to regularly revisit the spreadsheet where I keep track of goals even if I don't alter them.
Although there are many benefits to goal-directed design, I suppose the chief reason for my advocacy is that it prevents unhealthy conflict. Let’s say, in a meeting, the product manager insists the product filters should be placed on the left but the engineering lead wants them on the top, and both are unwilling to budge. The designer, as a facilitator equipped with goals, has leverage to break such deadlocks when they happen. When the designer votes for the choice that best aligns with project goals, the PM and the EL don't argue. They are relieved, whether they admit or not.
And this is the (often) unstated yet imperative task of a designer — she foresees where the project is heading. More importantly, she presages when it starts to go off track, then steers it in the right direction. I find this is true even in lower UX maturity environments (let’s say, UX reports to engineering and/or product) where UX designers have limited bargaining power.
Take an analogy I like to borrow from the professor whom I credit for sparking my curiosity about goals. Among the cast of characters in the movie Titanic, the goal-directed designer is not Jack, Rose, the snobbish fiancé, the plaintive violinist or the smug builder but the captain himself.
Goals keep meetings focused and stop meetings from going awry, thus saving time and cost. And a desirable side-effect of saving time and cost, I’ve long suspected, is fewer iterations. Focused design reviews mean more concentrated design feedback which leads to fewer unreasonable design revisions.
You may be wondering: why am I belaboring the importance of preventing unhealthy conflict? This, to me, is the biggest revelation of goal setting: less ‘fighting’ (as a PM once put it, in jest) and more focused discussion is criminally underrated. To be clear, I advocate for goal setting for conflict prevention, not conflict avoidance. While some conflict is unavoidable and even healthy, other types of conflict — in other words, bad friction — can be discouraging for morale and culture.
I remember often, an expression, by the above-mentioned professor: designing with goals is like playing darts. The implication is that we can’t throw darts without aiming at a target. (Well, we could throw darts without aim, but let's assume we're competing to win.)
Let's take the expression further: designing with goals is like playing darts with lights on. And a macabre way to put it: designing without goals is like playing darts in the dark. Meetings going awry because of insufficient direction can be like playing darts in the dark. By having the good sense to flip the light switch on, we can avoid much damage.
Designers, by embracing facilitation with tact and creativity and leveraging goals as a core facilitation tool, we can help prevent unhealthy conflict, thus save team morale.
More about playing darts in the dark. Earlier, I hinted the design mentors who’d bring up goals constantly were onto something. I suppose I’ve come close to figuring it out: they were preparing us to be advocates, knowing how dire the state of goal-directed design can be in the wild.
Throwing darts in the dark / designing without goals, especially in ‘UI/UX’ contexts, manifests as a bias for solutionising at the expense of problem definition. Because we’re conditioned to look at problems with a predominantly colonial and hegemonic gaze and assume that is the whole picture, we default to catering to low-hanging fruit (what we can see), when insight would tell us that real problems stay hidden in plain sight (what we cannot see and thus tend to other). In some design cultures, this conditioning is unquestioned.
You may be wondering if a bias for solutionising can be pinned down to deficits in skill. But more often than we may realise, the line between craft and culture is blurry. In fact, skill/craft deficits (neglect of goals) exacerbate culture problems (more ‘fighting’), which in turn exacerbate skill/craft deficits. It’s a vicious circle.
Antithetical to solutionising and throwing darts in the dark is design’s special ability to connect but not anchor, and to be in the middle position, as Frank Chimera writes. And I love especially how indispensable facilitation is to making this connection possible.
The qualities of design consistently change, because there is a wide variety of characteristics in what design connects. It means that design lives in the borderlands – it connects, but it does not anchor. The work must provide a path without having a specific way of its own. The design is always the middle position, but rather than acting as an obstruction, it should be the mortar that holds the arrangement together.
A word I use often to describe design is fluidity. Goals, as a core facilitation tool, help us work in tandem with, not against, design’s fluidity. Goals amplify design’s ability to connect but not anchor.
But when goals are mistaken for objectives, they are rendered less fluid. Goals, to those with a bias for objectivity, seem fraught with uncertainty. The broader and more subjective the goals, the more they give the impression we don’t know what we are doing, which is anathema in design cultures where grandiosity is currency. Objectives, on the other hand, proclaim we know what we’re doing, so take us seriously.
Plus, goals don't get the attention they deserve, especially in ‘UI/UX’ agency/startup contexts, because of a bias for output — ie. the finished product — over outcomes. Paradoxically, these contexts could benefit the most from goals (a more accessible term than 'strategy').
The allure of the veneer, as Frank Chimera articulates, is another way of describing this bias for output. Why takes lower precedence compared to how; a set process, and hard-boiled tools and frameworks are favoured under the guise of lean design.
The finished piece on its own, however, frequently acts as a seductive screen that distracts us from this higher level of investigation. The allure of the veneer hides many of the choices (good and bad) that were a part of the construction; the seams are sanded out and all the lines made smooth. We are tempted by the quality of the work to ask how to reproduce its beauty. And how can you blame us? Beauty is palpable, while intentions and objectives are largely invisible. This leads us to ask How more frequently, as if the tangibility of these characteristics were to somehow make them superior.
But let's face it: when we’re not in touch with our why, and constantly favour tactics over strategy, we're forced to overcompensate for the deficit in strategy. We turn to a whole gamut of defences (or coping strategies, some would argue) to deal with the product vs. UX divide, which seems wider than the Gulf of Kutch. Some of us complain about it, while others learn to grin and bear, taking it for granted as an integral part of the designer's day-to-day.
Or: we carry a chip on the shoulder, manifesting as a feral resilience, a compulsion to prove our value. This, we conflate with assertiveness. Juxtapose this illusory assertiveness with true skin in the game, a type of creative assertiveness, also called self-efficacy or competence. It is a dining on ashes kind of courage and humility in those unwavering few who dare to cultivate self-awareness. A self-awareness that stems from care and intentionality in life, and spills into the craft. It is the antithesis of grandiosity. Finessed over time and based on real design chops, this creative assertiveness is independent of whether stakeholders recognise and validate our value.
Or we cope through humour. Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy the occasional silly meme or joke about requirements (read: features) changing at the speed of light. God knows anyone who isn’t living under a rock today needs a respite. My favourite meme: I want it that way. (You’ll get it if you were born in the ‘90s.) Makes me giggle like a 12-year-old every time. But a part of me wonders if the memes and jokes buttress our sense of disempowerment, and if the line between joking and complacency is very fine.
Truthfully, I'm no less prone to the above defences. But I wonder if we would need them if we recognised that our non-negotiable value is in embracing the why, which lives in the middle space where design truly belongs. I wonder if embracing our why would free us to build design cultures that are empowered and autonomous. Goals belong to this middle space and thus blur and complicate lines, like the lines between product and UX, and culture and craft.
This blurring of lines is akin to losing the edges that give design a shape. It can be terrifying or freeing, depending on how we want to see it. Only by embracing and owning the blurry middle space, our why, and by taking goals seriously, can we have real skin in the game as designers. Owning our why can enable us to own, not prove, our autonomy and value.
We’ve looked at some of the benefits of goals - improved communication, saving time and costs and fewer iterations. But there is more. Goals, or a broad idea of goals, is integral to every phase of the design process. Take every lacklustre persona you've seen in the wild: even non-designers don't find it hard to spot these. While many factors contribute to half-baked personas, goals or their absence is often the prime culprit, and a reason why personas get a bad rap.
As a consequence of ignoring goals and personas, scenarios are trivialised, or at best, considered placeholders in the creative process, their full potential not realised. So it isn’t surprising that design visions don’t evolve or create impact. Plus, without an underlying holistic vision, agile work is rendered aimless and not very agile.
Goals are especially handy and essential for design evaluations. In my experience as a slightly more seasoned designer now, they make planning an evaluation less intimidating. Less like playing darts in the dark. If designing is like playing darts with the lights on, then evaluating with goals is like making sure we keep the lights on so we can see if we have hit or missed the mark.
I have a suspicion: despite all I've learned, applied, grasped and most of all, unlearned, I've barely scratched the surface. There's so much more to learn about what it means to be goal directed. And I look forward to this never boring and ever fascinating process of discovery.