Design Principles in Evaluation Design

Posted by nnlmneo on June 17th, 2016 Posted in: Blog

---

---

“Sometimes… it seems to me that… all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.” Michelangelo

Michelangelo is not the only one who thinks design is important in all human activities.  In his book A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink considers design to be one of the 6 senses that we need to develop to thrive in this world. As Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer points out “There is brand design. There is industrial design. There is interior design. There is UX and experience design. And there is innovation in strategy.” ¹

There is also evaluation design. Whether we’re talking about designing evaluation for an entire project or just one section, like the needs assessment or presenting evaluation results, evaluators are still actively involved in design.

Most of us don’t think of ourselves as designers, however.  Juice Analytics has a clever tool called “Design Tips for Non-Designers” to teach basic design skills and concepts.  Some of these are very specific design tips for charts and power points (which by the way are very important and useful, like “avoiding chart junk” and “whitespace matters”).  But some of the other tips can be jumping off points for thinking about bigger picture design skills, such as:

• Using Hick’s Law and Occam’s Razor to explain the importance of simplicity
• Learning how to keep your audience in mind by thinking of how to persuade them, balancing Aristotle’s suggested methods of ethical appeal (ethos), emotional appeal (pathos), and logical appeal (logos)
• Learning how Gestalt theory applies to the mind’s ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world
• Considering the psychology of what motivates users to take action

The September 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review highlighted design thinking as corporate strategy in their spotlighted articles (which are freely available online, as long as you don’t open more than 4 a month).  Here are some cool things you can read about in these articles:

• Using design thinking changed the way PepsiCo designed products to fit their users’ needs (my favorite line is how they used to design products for women by taking currently existing products and then applying the strategy of “shrink it or pink it.”)
• Design is about deeply understanding people.
• Principles of design can be applied to the way people work: empathy with users, a discipline of prototyping and tolerance for failure.
• Create models to explain complex problems, and then use prototypes to explore potential solutions.
• If it is likely that a new program or strategy may not be readily accepted, use design principles to plan the program implementation.

Some people are seen as being born with design skills.  But it’s clear that a lot can be learned with study and practice.  Even Michelangelo said, “If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.”

---

¹ James De Vries. “PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer on Creating an Organization Where Design Can Thrive.” Harvard Business Review. 11 Aug 2015.  Web. 17 June 2016.