Business Thinking for Designers

Link desirability to viability with conditional 
statements
A common dilemma designers face is when a colleague who 
has not participated in observations provides a conclusion. 
When this happens, your other colleagues do what’s natural: 
they base their own guess on their past experiences or prior 
knowledge. This is problematic because it leads to inaccurate 
conclusions across the board and difficult political situations. 
One common approach to working through this dilemma is to 
expose colleagues to users. But another helpful approach is 
to show your logical reasoning. Conditional statements are a 
great way to do this. 
Conditional statements are formed by connecting two 
separate statements. The first provides a hypothesis and 
the second, a conclusion. If you’ve ever developed an app or 
written code, you’re familiar with “if/then” and “if/else.” These 
are examples of conditional statements.
Conditional statements create a cause-and-effect model 
in which being successful with one statement promotes 
the success of the other. This is where the beauty of visual 

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Create conditions for design maturity
diagramming comes into place. Rather than trying to write out 
these statements, you can illustrate them using arrows.
Figure 4-6: A cause-and-effect model of desirability objectives by 
Ryan Rumsey
To illustrate a single conditional statement, simply draw how 
you believe the objectives connect to one another. The goal 
is to draw out multiple statements like this, moving from 
objectives at the bottom to the top. 
Here’s an example of how one of these conditional statements 
might be written out:

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Create conditions for design maturity
If we increase our availability, then we will 
increase awareness, which will reduce errors, 
and in turn, decrease friction to result in 
increased integrations.
While it may not be perfect, it’s one complete conditional 
statement of why desirability matters and how specific 
objectives relate to overall adoption. We’ve now reached the 
point where we can make the breakthrough connection to 
viability. 
Lori Kaplan from Atlassian on overcoming friction to embrace 
alignment (Watch online)

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Create conditions for design maturity