This is a recorded presentation by Drew Bridewell (Next Level UX founder and head of design/product at Grote) introducing "design impact" as the eighth pillar of the Next Level UX framework. The talk defines design impact as striving to build positive outcomes and experiences across people, teams, and businesses, and frames three practical practices to get there: (1) benchmarks — establishing stakes-in-the-ground and measurable indicators (e.g., component usage, retention, revenue, product-specific KPIs); (2) continuous learning — integrating insights, social learning, skill development and practice across projects and careers; and (3) design & life awareness — observing, reflecting, and turning observations into strategy. The speaker uses career examples (LinkedIn, LinkedIn Learning, Envision, Grote) to show how success metrics differ by product and stage, and encourages designers to talk with PMs, data scientists and others to discover company benchmarks.
Chapters
Think about things that you're currently building and the type of product that you currently serve. Do you know what success looks like? And if you don't, how do we measure success as a designer? Welcome to today's session. We're going to be talking about design impact now. Now, Design impact is one of these really important parts. It's the eighth category or the eighth pillar for the next level UX framework. You know, we're gone through training map number one. We're on training map number two. This is the last part of the training map number two, right? We talked about design energy, we talked about design clarity, we talked about design productivity. And now, yes, ladies and gentlemen, we're talking about design impact. This is where we really amp it up. So let's just dive right in. So today's mission, today's purpose is to strive and build to positive outcomes and experiences. Design impact, yes. We want to increase revenue. We want to increase the amount of things that we can do and get done in our product experience. But you know what? We need to build positive outcomes and experiences for the people we care about, for the teams we care about, for the businesses and corporations that we care about, and overall, the people that we really want to get better. So here, let me actually unlock this so I can get my little member. My mouse is coming in. So here we go. Hey, welcome in, Lee. I'm just going to keep going, buddy. We're talking about design impact today. We're striving and building to positive outcomes and experiences. And I'm going to kind of go into detail. Welcome, welcome, welcome. All right, let's just get the show on the road. So three core ideas that I want to strive with you today is one, we're going to talk about benchmarks. The heck are benchmarks and why are they important? We're to talk about continuous learning, you know, piggybacking on what we've learned from the design energy that we have within our teams, the design clarity that we have within how we run and organize our work. Now we kind of build things and then how we actually are productive in our design operations and what we're doing. So we're taking all those things so that we can continuously learn. And then the last thing that we want to do is we want to really increase our design and life awareness. And I'm going to go into all these things throughout the talk today, but what I really want to leave you with today is thinking about design impact as not just, oh, I'm going to make this product beautiful and it's going to increase this revenue, this core okr, which is important. But what we're really trying to do is we're trying to strive and create an incredible amount of positive outcomes and experiences for anybody that we're engaging with, anybody that's working, because we're going to end up having this work on a continuous basis from year over year over year. And it's important to not burn bridges. It's important to build bridges and to build teams and to build networks. And I'm going to talk about that today, too. So what are benchmarks? Right, measuring your progress and advancement. So a benchmark is an essential, like a stake in the ground. That's saying, this is where we're at, this is an honest conversation, this is where we're currently at in a certain, you know, product experience or somewhere in, you know, it could be down to how many components do we have in our design system and are we using them? How, how many design systems are we using as a company and are they productive, are they helpful? You know, just literally basic things there. There's also the advancement, like, how are we processing feedback and getting things going, like, how are we doing with that? That could be a benchmark. It could be a lot of those things. So we're to dive deep into those today. Continuous learning aspect is thinking about, you know, how are we really, truly integrate insights, how do we social learn, how we learning about what's going on in our experience? And, you know, I'm talking experience across our entire career, entire projects, entire personal life. Like, how are we learning and then how are we skilling up as a team, as an individual and then how are we practicing these things? The last one is about design and life awareness. So, like, as you're listening, you're observing new things, you're reflecting, you're evaluating, how are you taking all those nuggets and creating a strategy and a plan from it? These are critical three little units for creating design impact. And I'm going to show you examples today. I'm going to show you other ways that you can look up. So. Hello, welcome. My name is Drew Bridewell. I'm founder of Next Level UX and head of design and product over at Grote. And if this is your first time visiting, welcome, welcome, welcome. And if you're watching this as a replay, then be sure to whip out your notes. And we're going to have some fun today, talking, learning and growing. I'm really excited because we have so many really fun things that we're working on. Over at next level ux and then also things that we're striving for building in the meta universe, which is super fun. We'll talk about that a little bit later. So a little bit of background and I'm going to bring in the design impact conversation into this. So the top row is like, you know, the knowledge and experience I've gained from these companies that I've been really fortunate to work on. And you know, I kind of go back for the topics that we've been thinking about and design impact. You know, I remember the very first time I started learning about design impact was thinking about like, how do we measure success as a designer? And earlier in my career it was like, well, it was, were you getting your work done? Were you getting it done on time? Was the designs that you were making, were they actually increasing the, you know, if it was a consumer product, was it increasing revenue for, you know, were you bringing in more members? Were you increasing engagement? Now at Linda, it was really all about like retention and engagement. So the more people we could get into the product, which is like top of funnel getting people in and then it was like keeping them there and then it was keeping them becoming like lifelong learners. And that was the whole thing that we were really trying to do there. You know, at LinkedIn, the LinkedIn's ecosystem so big kind of continued over with LinkedIn Learning, but you know, with job seeker, you know, they're trying to help people find jobs. With recruiter, you're trying to help recruiters. Another one of LinkedIn's tools, like really trying to help recruiters use their prop platform and tools so you get more jobs into the platform, More jobs in the platform, that's better. More people searching and interviewing and signing up for roles in sales side of the LinkedIn ecosystem. That was success. So a lot of different ways to look at success, you know, for envision, Design Impact was really about trying to help create design transformation across companies so they can make design thinking like a way of life and make design thinking like a more normalized thing. Inside of these organizations that have been around for hundreds of years, they just want to you to build features and they just want you to build the thing that is being asked by the customer, but not necessarily like solving the problems of customers. So, you know, you think about all these companies and different problems and solutions. Like now I'm at growth day and what we're trying to do is kind of going back into the retention, going back into the, you know, our annual reoccurring revenue you know, for a monthly subscriptions. But we're also trying to help really transform people's lives and help them have a better wellness environment and be more productive in their environment. So we are starting to see measurements of this because we have some benchmarks which I'll share with you a little bit later in the. But, you know, just getting the wheels turning here. Think about things that you're currently building and the type of product that you currently serve. What type of things are you currently benchmarking? Do you know what your company is essentially benchmarking? Do you know what success looks like? And if you don't, a couple really quick things that you could do is just talk to product managers, talk to your business analysts, talk to data science and really just ask questions about like, hey, how are we doing here? What's going on there? How did it go last month? I mean, there's just so many questions that you could ask. And, you know, I think earlier in my career I didn't even know, like, data scientists existed. So I didn't even know, like, oh, there's people crunching data and crunching numbers. I was always like, okay, I'm focused on the design execution and like, what's going down. I think that was my first job over at the Magellan Network and as an interaction designer. But you get the idea, like, start thinking about this right now and we're going to expand our knowledge on this throughout the talk.
