ROIs and Poetry ✍🏻

Tales of Design & User Experience (ToDUX) #5

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Dear readers and friends,

¿Cómo estáis? ☀️ I’ve waited a little with this issue of the newsletter because I wanted to aggregate some content for you first. Mainly, there are two new articles that have been published recently. One is about calculating the ROI of any design system and the other is about poetry. Yes, you heard right, poetry. But see for yourself:

One Formula to Rule Them All: The ROI of a Design System

Based on our experience with working on establishing a design system at BestSecret Group, my fantastic colleague Guido Baena Wehrmann and I have developed a general formula to calculate the ROI and prove the value of design systems. The formula has only three parameters: upfront investment, maintenance effort, and anticipated productivity gains (spoiler: there’s benchmarks for this). Also, we provide a ready-to-use spreadsheet. 😏

The article has been originally published by the great folks at Smashing Magazine and then cross-posted by the UX Collective.

☞ One formula to rule them all: the ROI of a Design System in The UX Collective

Design is Poetry

With all the talk about return on investment, I think it’s fundamental to also not forget that design is much more than what can be aggregated as a bunch of numbers. In particular, I believe that a lot of design has poetic elements, and treating design more like poetry benefits designers, users, and businesses alike. I write about this in DOC, the new publication by the founders of the UX Collective:

☞ Beyond form and function: Design is poetry in DOC

The “Other Stuff”

Now, the official title of this newsletter is “Tales of Design & User Experience (& Other Stuff)” and finally, here’s some of that Other Stuff. My essay on design and poetry above is already the perfect segue, because literary magazine Impspired has actually published two poems I wrote: “On Freedom” and “Four Stars.” Head over to their page to give them a read.

I plan to publish more poetry in the future and since I don’t wanna misappropriate this newsletter for that, I have started a dedicated Substack for anything poetry-related. So, if you’re generally interested in that, why not subscribe there as well? I would highly appreciate that. And if you’re not, well, why not give it a try anyway? 🙃

☞ Attempts at Poetry on Substack

Enjoy reading and until next time. Also, thank you so, so much for being a subscriber. You’re the best! 🎉 And: I’m always glad to get feedback on my articles and this newsletter. So, please, feel free to just reply to this email.

Cheers,
Max

☕ I love coffee, and if you want to support my work you can always spend me one. ☕

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This is an issue of my newsletter Tales of Design & User Experience (& Other Stuff)—abbreviated ToDUX—that has been cross-posted here for archival reasons. If you want to get my latest takes and writing delivered straight to your inbox, you can subscribe at maxspeicher.com/newsletter. 🗞