Designing for Value at Design x Us
By: Bonnie Kate Wolf
Tags: Figma, Design, Design X Us, Values

When Design x Us founder Stephen Jordan asked me to help the leadership team conceive and write our company values, I was beyond excited. I love helping teams find the words that speak to their company or brand. When developing values, it is important to choose a core group of people to work on it. If you include too many, it can be easy to get distracted. Too few and you won’t be inclusive enough in your thinking. I usually find 3–6 people is the right number. If you have a very large leadership team, make sure you have time for everyone to participate evenly.

Here’s the exercise our leadership team did to find our values.

Each person got digital post-its with their names in a unique color.

We started in Figma. I set everyone participating up with color-coded frames to begin. From there, I asked everyone to spend 5–10 minutes writing down values and descriptions of those values they associated with Design x Us. People had a lot of ideas. From there, we organized our ideas into categories of similar thoughts; for instance “transparency” and “honesty” had overlapping thoughts.

From there, we identified the key points of each column. Once those major words were established, everyone was given 3 large blue stars and infinite small orange stars. I told them to give their top 3 words a blue star and any other words that felt they deserved a “special mention” an orange star. It became apparent very quickly that we had some common ground.

We gathered all our post-its together by category.

But here’s the trick. The orange stars don’t actually matter less than their bigger blue counterparts. I took every word with a star of any kind and called them out. Giving people the focus of those bigger blue stars allows them to be more targeted, but the orange stars allow for flexibility. From this list, we were able to discuss as a group and identify which 4 words resonated most with the group. If not everyone agrees, you can repeat the star process with your chosen words to identify which are resonating the most. If there is still disagreement, you’ll need to identify who the decision-maker is, and have them decide how to handle it.

We then each wrote a small description of what those words meant. It wasn’t meant to be perfect, just a brainstorm of what we now identified as the value. Stephen then took those words and wrote a description for each, based partially on our previous exercise, and partially on his own goals for the company. From there, I identified words within those descriptions that felt extra important.

We did another round of edits from Stephen’s work and came up with some solid descriptions, but they felt very long. We then spent time discussing how to shorten them to one pithy sentence each. It is valuable to shorten your descriptions as much as possible to avoid adding in extra meaning that distracts from your core message. The fewer words you can use to get your point across, the better. Words have different meanings to different people, so the descriptions are a crucial way to explain what we mean.

Now we’re able to identify what we stand for, and how we stay true to our values, both internally, and with our interviewees.