Aaron Louie - Blog

At the IA Summit this year, an area of the conference will be devoted to showcasing project artifacts: The Wall of Deliverables. It’s a fantastic idea — I love the concept of hundreds of practitioners sharing their best work, learning from each other, and advancing the craft.

But there’s a dark side to the Wall of Deliverables. For those of us in the private sector, especially we who work for consulting companies, our deliverables are our secret recipe. They are one of the differentiating factors that give our clients a visual indicator of the quality of our work. If our competitors knew what our deliverables looked like, we’d lose our competitive edge, right?

It seems to depend on one’s analysis of what makes us competitive. There are many factors that govern a client’s choice to work with a certain consultant. Customer service, personal connection, visual style, portfolio, service offerings, process, culture, etc. are likely more important than the format of a particular deliverable. To what extent do clients choose to work with us based on our documents? If we invent a new way of communicating design to stakeholders, how much of an advantage does that method give us over time? How much can we milk that Cow of Intellectual Property before a competitor comes up with a similar, more effective idea?

I posit that the Law of Diminishing Returns reigns in the Secret Recipe approach. There may be short-term gain from keeping the special deliverable under wraps, but, just as with restaurants, the final product must be consumed by someone outside the organization. And that someone can easily share with another person, reverse engineer the recipe, and make it their own… and claim that they invented it.

The alternate approach is to publish the recipe to the wider community, plastered with your company’s brand. If your method is truly novel, the idea will spread like wildfire, and practitioners all over the world will be passing around a template that is essentially a marketing tool. Potential clients, competitors, and recruits will see it, comment on it, share it, appropriate it, and improve upon it. And, just as with Jesse James Garrett’s IA Visual Vocabulary and Alan Cooper’s Personas, the creator of the recipe becomes a household name. The new deliverable can spark a revolution in the industry and further establish user-centered design professionals as essential, valuable facilitators of strategic change.