What makes Glare brilliant is its balance. It combines clear data with the creativity and intuition needed for great design. Glare isn’t a strict or step-by-step process—it’s a flexible tool that helps teams cut bad ideas, make sharper decisions, and deliver brighter outcomes for users and businesses.
With Glare, design isn’t just about ideas—it’s about turning them into glaringly obvious solutions.
Precision with Balance
Glare’s four main facets work together to help teams understand user experiences, evaluate design ideas, and improve outcomes. Each facet focuses on specific steps to guide the sequences.
The Define stage lays the groundwork with user research. Teams identify key metrics to track user behavior and performance, define user attributes to understand their audience and collect meaningful data. This stage ensures design decisions start with a clear understanding of user needs, using data and intuition to guide the process.
In the Measure stage, teams test design ideas to see how well they address user challenges. Glare emphasizes setting clear metrics to evaluate success. Teams use their instincts to spot potential issues, refine ideas by asking targeted questions, and analyze user feedback. The goal is to validate ideas with both qualitative insights and measurable results.
The Compare stage helps teams assess their designs by reviewing performance over time or against benchmarks like past versions or competitor standards. This stage uses testing methods, design KPIs, and benchmarking to uncover strengths and areas for improvement. By blending data with design intuition, teams make informed decisions about what to keep, adjust, or refine.
Finally, the Lead stage focuses on long-term improvement and alignment with business goals. Teams build workflows that integrate ongoing measurement and feedback. Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) ensure that design efforts support broader business priorities, tying results to organizational goals. This stage promotes consistency while ensuring the design remains adaptable and effective over time.
The Glare framework is a diamond-shaped system, with its four areas connected to highlight how they support each other. It’s designed to be flexible, allowing teams to focus on the areas most relevant to their needs while keeping the overall process in mind.
A glossary throughout the documentation explains the terms and concepts used to help you navigate the framework. Familiarizing yourself with these will make it easier to use Glare effectively.
Viewing Glare through different Lenses
The Glare framework can be viewed through different lenses allowing teams to focus on specific design and evaluation aspects. These lenses—Challenge, Function, Results, and Documentation—offer distinct perspectives, enabling teams to adapt the framework to their unique needs and priorities. By shifting between these lenses, teams can solve problems, optimize workflows, and achieve impactful outcomes.
Challenge Lens: Tackling Complexity
The Challenge lens emphasizes how Glare helps teams navigate growing complexity and scale in their design efforts. It illustrates how the framework guides teams from basic elements, like understanding user needs, to advanced strategies, like benchmarking and decision-making.
- Focus: Addressing increasing complexity and scaling design solutions for larger projects.
- What It Enables: Breaking down intricate problems into manageable components, ensuring that even the most challenging issues are approached systematically.
This lens is ideal for teams dealing with evolving requirements and multifaceted design problems.
Function Lens: Aligning Roles
The Function lens highlights how different team roles—such as designers, researchers, and leaders—interact with Glare.
It demonstrates how each role contributes to the framework by leveraging specific tools and approaches:
- Designers, Contributors: Use foundational tools like UX metrics and data collection to shape designs.
- Experts, Teams: Focus on methods, KPIs, and benchmarking to refine and validate ideas.
- Leadership, Orgs: Align design efforts with business priorities using workflows, OKRs, and linking strategies.
This lens ensures that Glare works across all levels of an organization, making it actionable and inclusive for every team member.
Results Lens: Delivering Impact
The Results lens focuses on the outcomes Glare delivers, helping teams measure and communicate their design impact.
It organizes the framework around four key areas of design success:
- Design Credibility (Define): Transform subjective insights into measurable data.
- Design Usefulness (Measure): Assess how well designs address user challenges with clear metrics.
- Design Desirability (Compare): Compare designs to benchmarks and uncover what resonates with users.
- Design Viability (Lead): Tie results to organizational goals and ensure scalability and adaptability.
This lens is useful for teams aiming to track progress and demonstrate the real-world value of their design efforts.
Documentation Lens: Providing Guidance
The Documentation lens positions Glare as a structured knowledge resource, enabling teams to navigate and apply the framework effectively.
It organizes Glare into accessible layers:
- Overview Pages: High-level insights into the framework’s four facets—Define, Measure, Compare, and Lead.
- Detailed Pages: In-depth explanations of tools like UX metrics, attributes, and workflows.
- Glossary: Definitions of terms and concepts to ensure clarity and ease of use.
This lens ensures that teams have the resources to fully understand and implement Glare, making it approachable for new and experienced users.
Each lens offers a unique way to view and apply the Glare framework, whether focusing on complexity, role alignment, impact measurement, or guidance. Teams can shift between these lenses as needed, understanding Glare comprehensively while zeroing in on the areas most relevant to their goals. This flexibility makes Glare an adaptable and practical tool for addressing diverse design challenges.