Holistic vs. feature design: how to stop shipping only individual features
You’ve been asked to design a new feature. You’re not sure that this feature will work without broader changes to the product. However, no one has asked you to design a new feature and a sweeping overhaul of the product. In fact, when you’ve pitched broader changes alongside a feature design in the past, your stakeholders expressed skepticism and dismissed your proposal as scope creep.
Still, you can’t help but feel that these broader changes are sometimes necessary — even if you’ve been having trouble convincing your stakeholders to see things your way.
At Stack Overflow, I’ve often grappled with the question of when and how designers should advocate for more holistic design changes (and therefore, larger scope). Below are tips to help you decide whether to advocate for holistic designs changes, and if so — how to do so effectively.
#1. Identify the holistic changes you want to make and why
Be as specific as possible, and tie these changes back to the feature’s success metrics.
Say you’ve been asked to redesign a bookmark feature. You’d like to redesign the article page that the bookmark lives on, as well as how users are notified about new bookmarks on their articles. At this point, can you hone in on very specific problems and changes? Can you tie those back to feature or business success metrics?
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✅ Do: I want to redesign the left column on the article page because there are currently 8 actions to choose from, and this prevents users from engaging with the most important actions (one of which is bookmarking).
❌ Don’t: I want to redesign the article page because it’s bad UX.
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✅ Do: I want to redesign the author byline because it doesn’t adhere to our design patterns and therefore creates unnecessary cognitive overhead for the user.
❌ Don’t: I want to redesign the author byline because the design is outdated.
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✅ Do: I want to add a notification feature so that users can be notified when someone has bookmarked their post. User research tells us that users are encouraged to post more articles if they see that others are bookmarking their posts.
❌ Don’t: I want to add a notification feature because we don’t have one right now and we need one for bookmarks.
#2. Assess constraints
How much time do you have? Is there a hard deadline and limited resources? If the answers are “yes” and “yes”, then this is probably not a good time to advocate for sweeping overhauls.
#3. Prioritize the changes that are most likely to be high impact, low cost
This is especially important if your org has low design maturity or is strapped for resources. Tools like this impact-effort matrix may be helpful while prioritizing.
Cut the things that can’t be explicitly tied back to feature or business goals. Then cut the things that are likely to be expensive to build if resourcing is a significant constraint. Then cut the things where the benefit is a small experience gain (vs. fixing a broken UX).
Here, I’ve taken the changes outlined above and assigned a priority to each of them.
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🖌 Proposed change: I want to redesign the left column on the article page because there are currently 8 actions to choose from, and this prevents users from engaging with the most important actions (one of which is bookmarking).
⚠️ Priority: High
🤔 Priority reason: The cost of this change appears to be low since this is a redesign of a section of a page and doesn’t seem to involve new feature work. At the same time, it sounds like the impact on feature performance could be high because this change affects a direct, primary path to engagement with the bookmark feature.
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🖌 Proposed change: I want to redesign the author byline because it doesn’t adhere to our design patterns and therefore creates unnecessary cognitive overhead for the user.
⚠️ Priority: Low
🤔 Priority reason: This appears to be low cost since it’s a redesign of an existing section of a page, but it sounds like it won’t have an impact on the feature or business performance. Since this is low cost work with usability gains, however, it may still be worth advocating for or separating into a small, separate project. A change like this is more likely to be accepted if your org already has high design maturity and values things like design patterns and reducing cognitive load.
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🖌 Proposed change: I want to add a notification feature so that users can be notified when someone has bookmarked their post. User research tells us that users are encouraged to post more articles if they see that others are bookmarking their posts.
⚠️ Priority: Medium
🤔 Priority reason: This sounds like a costly change (new feature work) but with a potential for high impact because it may increase the volume of posts per user (an overall business goal!)
In cases like this, try to equip yourself with as much data as you can in order to best understand the actual cost and impact. Can you ask developers to provide a t-shirt estimate for build? What qualitative or quantitative data do you have to help understand the potential impact?
Prioritization is hard, especially when you are convinced in your heart and soul that your redesign is simply better for users, costs and impact be damned.
But when thinking about problems like this, try to put yourself in your Product Manager or stakeholder’s shoes. If they are anything like the ones I work with, they don’t hate design. They are just making constant, hard decisions about priorities and resourcing. You can help them — and in the process, take more control of your design’s destiny — by preemptively thinking about impact, cost, and priorities.
Thanks for reading! If you have any feedback or questions, please share in the comments below or email me at donnachoi30@gmail.com.
