What is the most important objective for Design?

There are many ways to measure Design concepts and execution. Design needs to be measured because it is intended to achieve specific business objectives. The following are key objectives to evaluate the success of a Design: 

1. Engagement: How successful is a Design in driving key, end-user behaviors?
2. Usability: How intuitively does a Design accommodate key, end-user behaviors?
3. Adoption: What percentage of a potential end-user population repeatedly engage with the Design?

How are these objectives prioritized? Which objective is most important? The short and obvious answer is, "they are ALL important." Design professionals, however, have created confusion by delegating ownership of specific Design objectives to different Design disciplines, resulting in dissent over the prioritization of Design objectives. The dangerous outcome of this dissent, is that one discipline's prioritization wins out, and Design is impacted.

For example, prioritizing Usability over Adoption may result in a highly intuitive, but generic and dull, Design. Over time, the adoption of such an experience may diminish to the point where the business objectives for the Design fail.  If Engagement is prioritized over Usability, on the other hand, a Design may work hard to drive certain user behaviors that are not easily accomplished via the user interface. The level of user frustration that may result, in this scenario, may also have a negative impact on the adoption of the Design.

By compartmentalizing Design objectives and ownership into separate disciplines (Strategy, Information Architecture, and Visual Design), a cohesive user experience design and vision may be lost. All Design disciplines need to keep in mind that they exist to support a business, can do this successfully by listening to the "Voice of the Customer," and realize that the successful adoption of the Design has the potential, over time, to result in interaction design patterns, best practices, and usability conventions. Therefore, Design disciplines need to establish closer collaboration methodologies or consolidate into a single discipline. Further fragmentation of the ownership of Design, and the accountability for its total set of objectives, can only result in its ultimate failure.