The best design and business decisions consider customer goals, business objects, and what’s feasible. Drop one of those legs from the stool and your decision just can’t stand up as well.

@justo, while it should be second nature to most designers, unfortunately, in my experience, it’s not. Hopefully articles like this, and a handy little app that just launched last week (Reframer, http://getreframer.com) will change that. Reframer is a collaborative, realtime, team driven decision app that helps you decide what to focus on based on value and feasibility. So, you can capture research, tie it to a customer goal, business goal (value), and come up with design concepts, which you rate on feasibility.

Here’s to more goal and data direct design approaches and less guessing.

Although the AH is more complex, each level in the hierarchy (which can be considered to represent one’s view of or interaction with their work domain at that time) can be evaluated such that elements above represent the “why” whereas elements below represent “how”.

Why: “Why do I want to go on holiday”
What: “Go on Holiday”
How: “Find a Location”

As users move up and down in this goal decomposition, the same rules can apply. Taking the example above, if we move down in the decomposition, it *could* look like:

Why: “Go on Holiday”
What: “Find a Location”
How: “View an interactive map of holiday locations”

It’s a lovely concise tool for design ethnographers too – a lot of our work is just trying to figure out what the goals and motivators of the person commissioning research are so we can figure out the facilitator (i.e. the research plan). Thanks. Will pass this around my MSc Design Ethnography students here in Dundee.