If you’re new in the field of UX design, remember that the organisations you’ll work for are made up of a bunch of humans, and humans are only humans. Designing solutions to crazy problems is nothing compared to getting a group of humans to align.

What are visions

Visions and missions are terms common in religious contexts, but has in the past 60 years been more and more commonly used amongst leaders of our well known organisations, and there are reasons for that. A vision statement can facilitate decision-making, and by depicting the future, it serves to align people to work towards the same thing.

Studies have shown that companies with clearly communicated and shared vision perform better than ones without. That doesn’t mean that it’s the vision that determines your success as an organisation, but rather that organisations where everyone is aware of where they’re going, are more likely to get to where they want to go.

Jared Spool describes how visions usually created by senior leadership are easy to ignore, because they tend to be vague. The vision is there to sell not what the organisation is today, but what it could be tomorrow, and by design visions are kept vague to not promise anything that might not eventuate.

People crafting a vision together, picture from DALL-E 2

Visions that enable or inhibit

When company visions are used to align people, they have the potential of playing a huge role in achieving goals. A vision can make sure that different teams work towards solving the same problems for the same users, and create a coherent service or product.

However, company visions are sometimes used to paint a lovely picture of who or what the organisation would like to be seen as, but has no intention of actually being. This is when visions can get in the way of collaboration between designers and the rest of the organisation.

The balance between high aspirations and reality

Maybe you’ve been there, you’ve been introduced to an organisation, applied for a job and had that first euphoric time of love, excitement and butterflies. You’ve made new friends, discovered new tools and learned something. Then you start looking at your work. You look at your OKR:s and the business. Maybe there’s a presentation by management that makes you wonder.

The grand vision to help all the users, solve a huge problem, change the industry and create a sustainable altruistic new world view isn’t really what seems to be on everyone’s mind. Instead, there’s talk about ROI, investors, profit and a whole bunch of stuff that makes sure you get paid, but isn’t necessarily what will get your organisation to achieve that grand vision.

This is of course a common reality, more or less exaggerated. Companies run as companies need to be financially stable (or receive a huge investment) to be able to continue to be companies. But this disconnect between reality and vision, it can actually be quite harmful to the organisation.

A harmful vision

A vision can be far-fetched, ambitious and grand, that’s what visions are for. The disconnect however, is when designers set off trying to reach that vision, but the rest of the organisation needs to prioritise paying salaries, bills and not go into receivership, this is where the danger lies. Especially for more junior designers.

Designers in the early stages of their careers might not be experienced enough with company leadership saying one thing in their marketing, and another in the boardroom. I certainly got very confused when I set out to work as a UX designer in my early days.

I had been working on refining a particular part of a webpage, to reduce the time our users had to spend getting through a specific flow. When I presented this to the management, I was shocked to hear them respond with a quick no. They instead wanted me to make the site more complicated so that users spend more time on it, because that was how their investors determined success.

I didn’t know what to do. As designers, we were using the grand vision of a “a great future where we’ve achieved XYZ” as a framework to build the experience on. But even though it was the vision of the company, the senior management were making their decisions based on a whole lot of other aspects as well, for example, their mission (which is how they intend to serve their key stakeholders, such as investors). Ben Holliday has a definition on the difference between vision and mission.

How to work with visions as a designer

I’m sure there are many ways to work with visions and make it useful for designers, what I want to highlight here is the risk for misalignment.

Designers are used to work towards a vision, doing their best to achieve what that vision depicts. If there is a secondary goal or conditions for the work that the design team is crafting, that has to be clear.

If you’re working with a junior team of designers, remember to talk about this. Talk about the difference between long term goals and short term goals. Bring in experience principles and UX frameworks. Work on aligning those with the greater organisational goals and anchor them with the rest of the organisation.

If you’re new in the field of UX design, remember that the organisations you’ll work for are made up by a bunch of humans, and humans are only humans. Designing solutions to crazy problems is nothing compared to getting a group of humans to align. Misalignment is always going to be an issue for organisations, no matter how great their design team is.

And remember, visions are great tools, you can always create a UX vision, that focuses on the future of your users, and how they experience your product or service.