Put Values-Driven Design Into Practice
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Assess how effective your organization is at expressing its stated values.
- Identify how values-driven design enhances an organization's design practice.
Practice Time
Let’s put everything you’ve learned about values-driven design into practice. Now that you know more about being values-driven, including examples and best practices, let’s explore how you can run a Corporate Integrity Workshop to assess how effectively your organization expresses its stated values. Organizations use this workshop and process to:
- Understand the values their products and services express.
- Identify gaps between the current state of value expression and the ideal state.
- Deepen their understanding of why leading with values in the design and build process is key.
- Introduce teams to values in a business context to build the practice of separating personal values from core organizational values.
Corporate Integrity Workshop
As you learned earlier, if an organization prioritizes business goals like fiscal growth above all else, this is also an expression of values, whether intentional or not. But it’s hard to make products and services express specific values without intentionally planning for this from the beginning of the process.
This is why the Corporate Integrity Workshop is beneficial. Though the workshop process is adaptable to different settings—such as online or in-person, group or individual—the general workshop structure asks participants to:
- Analyze a product or service through the lens of values, thinking about what values it currently expresses.
- Compare this expression to their stated organizational core values.
- Brainstorm ways to express the core organizational values they want to focus on, both in terms of changes to existing features and new ideas.
Now that you know about the framework of the workshop, let’s see how each step works in action through an example from our fictional company, Bloomington Caregivers.
Health App, Ed App
Now that Bloomington Caregivers has seen what’s possible with values-driven design, the agency is ready to use this practice for another app it already has in its product pipeline. Bloomington Caregivers schedules a Corporate Integrity Workshop to explore how it can apply a values-driven approach for another app that’s farther along in development, ready to launch soon.
The app helps family members of in-home care clients stay more informed about their loved ones’ care. Family members, who receive consent from clients, can keep information about caregiver visits and health updates from providers in one place and ask questions via text or voice message when they have concerns or questions. During the Corporate Integrity Workshop, Bloomington Caregivers:
- Analyzes what values the app currently expresses. For example, they discuss what value they’re expressing when their user interface (UI) is only available in English.
- Compares this expression to their stated organizational core values—inclusivity, accountability, and customer success. In the instance of inclusivity, the team determines that having one language option is not living up to this value.
- Brainstorms what changes and new ideas help them better express their core values. This includes how building in the option to select UI in English or Spanish enables them to be more inclusive.
As a result of this workshop, Bloomington Caregivers realizes that adding another language option enhances customer success, which is always a top priority. Additionally, the agency discovers that designing with inclusivity also means building inclusivity into the team to ensure the agency considers the diverse needs of customers. Also, leading with accountability helps cultivate relationships by building in more in-app tools to collect feedback consistently and assess customer satisfaction.
It Begins, Again
They’ve come full circle! The Bloomington Caregivers team is ready to engage in another round of values-driven design. By running a Corporate Integrity Workshop, the team realized that they could align this additional app with their core values to expand its features and strengthen customer relationships.
In both app examples, Bloomington Caregivers also used values-driven design to enhance its overall design practice by:
- Developing an understanding that leading with values in its activities and processes creates internal/external alignment.
- Practicing a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) approach, shifting from a “designing for” diverse groups model to a “designing with” model.
- Going through the Corporate Integrity Workshop process to assess the values its product expresses and using this assessment to improve it.
When organizations lead with their values, they create more trusting relationships, internally and externally, making values-driven design a win-win for all.
