I have a spreadsheet for all important relationships in my life. Every time I mention this to a new person, it usually leads to an awkward silence, confused looks and a rapid change of subject. For some reason, so many of us have internalised the belief that strategy belongs in a workplace, and the rest of our lives should miraculously fall into places on their own accord. Any attempts to influence the course of a relationship is seen as controlling — a desperate attempt to forge something others get without effort — as we persist that authentic human connections simply grow out of thin air.

You only need to take a glance at the endless rows of how-to guides in a relationships section of any major bookstore to realise that there are lots of skills involved in bonding with another human being. This includes friendships, as well as romanic connections, as illustrated by Amy Webb’s inspirational book Data: a Love Story. She shares the highlights in her TED Talk titled How I Hacked Online Dating, which has over 8M views and counting:

This deliberate approach to personal, as well as professional lives is growing in popularity. Since Bill Burnett and Dave Evans published their influential book Designing Your Life based on the eponymous course they teach at Stanford University, people from all walks of life began embracing the design thinking as a multipurpose planning tool.

We know these methodologies work because we regularly use them in our professional practice, but they are equally valid in helping you evaluate your social circles, prioritise meaningful connections, build deeper intimacy and even find love. So let’s brush the skepticism aside and look at the practicalities.

Audit

A redesign often starts with an audit because you need to get a picture of what it is that you are working with before you can roll up your sleeves and dive in.

Make a list of all important relationships in your life. Just like the inspiration for brainstorming new features can come from user feedback, business strategy or designer’s own imagination, try to include important connections from all walks of life. Personally, I define “important”, as the relationships I’m willing to invest time and effort into, but feel free to decide on the definition that makes most sense for you.

The output of this exercise can be a simple unordered lists, or you may choose to make a network diagram to indicate connections within your social circles, or use a centric diagram to visualise proximity.

Network diagram allows you to capture the connections within your social circles, which can be a useful data point later on.

Prioritisation

In the design world, brainstorming sessions are often followed by prioritisation exercises, and personal relationships are no exception. To do this, you will need to define criteria to measure against, and a scale with appropriate level of granularity.

User goals

In order to evaluate your connections, you start by defining what relationship aspects matter to you the most. These are your personal user goals and pain points, and articulating them can be an challenging task, so take your time. Just like asking your users what features they would like will leave you with the proverbial “faster horses”, try analysing existing connections in your life in order to identify what aspects make or break them. Draft a list of ideas, then group them by similarity and look for overarching themes until you have 3–5 items that feel right.

In her book Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong Health and Happiness Shasta Nelson proposes the concept of an intimacy triangle formed from positivity, commitment and vulnerability. She encourages her readers to regularly review the current and desired level of intimacy in their friendships against these three metrics to identify so called “friendtimacy gaps”. Hear Shasta explaining the process in her own words:

Rating scales

Next, rate how well each person (feature) meets your needs (user goals). For instance, if Neal is a little flaky but great fun to hang out with, and Maggie constantly complains, but has always been there for you in hard times, your list might look something like this:

I use an equivalent to five-point Likert scale and mark both the current and the desire rating, then look for gaps. If this is too complex, you can get started with a simple traffic light system and mark the aspects you are content with in green, ones with room for improvement in yellow and ones that need urgent work in red.

It’s important to note that the goal isn’t to get all relationships to score five stars on all fronts! Instead, the purpose of this exercise is to better understand what each relationship brings into your life and spot opportunities for improvement. Perhaps you and Neal only hang out in group settings, so you don’t mind that he is often late or cancels at the last moment. On the other hand, if you and Maggie have a long shared history, you might be willing to put effort into organising some fun activities to inject more positivity into your friendship. Each relationship really is unique!

Synthesis

Now that you gathered some data, the fun part begins! Like with all research, looking at your findings through different lenses will help you answer different questions. The possibilities are endless, but here are a few ideas:

Scorecard

The obvious starting point is to calculate the total “value” of each relationship, then reorder the list accordingly.

This is similar to the process Flora Gill describes in her article with a controversial title I have a spreadsheet to rank my friends — and ghost them if they don’t perform, with one crucial difference. Just like a good designer won’t blindly discard less crucial features without exploring their full potential, the goal of this exercise isn’t to break all ties with the bottom half of your contact list. Instead, from this vantage point you can ponder some interesting questions:

• Are any of the results surprising? Did someone I consider a close friend end up low on the list, or did a casual connection score higher than I expected?
• What do I get from the relationships that are lower on the list? (this may help you identify a new scoring criteria that you didn’t consider earlier)
• Are there any relationships I am not prepared to invest any more in? If so, am I content with their score?

Gap analysis

Whichever rating scale you ended up using, look for the biggest gaps between the current and desired state. Can you spot any patters? For instance, do you have similar gaps with people from the same social circle or the connections you made during a particular time in your life? Are the gaps spread evenly or concentrated in a specific area (if so, you may want to consider how you build relationships, not whom you build them with).

If your gaps are clustered around a specific area, you may need to examine the underlying causes. The prevalence of red and yellow in the last column of this chart signals that the person seeks more vulnerability than his current contacts are offering them.

Impact–effort matrix

This is a common design prioritisation technique and can be used to get a combined view of the two exercises above, where scorecard gives you the relationship value, while gap analysis indicates the amount of effort it will take.

This allows you to separate and prioritise two relationship types that may get a similar score: Mark and Neil who bring little value but require no extra effort vs Naomi and Nigel, whom you are closer to, but have things to work through.

An alternative to the impact-effort matrix, in this method you divide the total value by the total effort and reorder the list accordingly.

You will end up with the most fulfilling relationships at the top and connections that take a lot of your time for not much return at the bottom. In the middle, you will have a combination of good-enough contacts and some long-term close friendship with deep problems, and it’s not always helpful to view the two together. That said, many people find an ordered list easier to analyse than a matrix, so I included it here.

MoSCoW

You could use the data from either Scorecard (total value) or RICE (value divided by effort) exercises group your contacts according to MoSCoW principle. For instance, you might decide that:

• Must have: 80% or higher
• Should have: 50–80%
• Could have 20–50%
• Won’t have: 20% or lower

Again, instead of unfriending the bottom quarter on Facebook and updating your Birthday party invite to only include the top quarter, look for interesting insights. How many people are in each category? What does this tell you about the quality of your connections.

What’s next?

You made a list, assigned ratings and prioritised your connections, and you might be wandering what to do with these insights. Just like user research allows me to make informed decisions about how best to allocate the limited resources to achieve most impact, these exercise helps me take a critical look at my friendships. It helps me see the bigger picture and enables me to be proactive not reactive in nurturing the connections that truly enrich my life. I hope it does the same for you.