Design Strategy is Business Strategy
Why product designers are crucial to the success and scalability of your business
Up until recently, design and business have never sat at the same table. Some believe that designers are just tasked with making things look pretty. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Designers are now in a position to leverage their skills in design thinking to shift the trajectory of an entire company. Designers have the ability to lead the company through big-picture thinking and small detailed execution. Furthermore, design thinking will help your business anticipate what your customer base wants and needs. Getting your designers involved in the business strategy earlier will bring additional users and profits in the long run.
Designers design for retention
One primary KPI that many businesses are concerned with is how they can make their product “sticky”. Stickiness is measured by retention. Retention is at the heart of every meaningful metric to your business.
Has your product reached market fit? Are the needs of your users being met? These can be measured with retention and engagement. Getting thousands or millions of users to try your product won’t mean anything if they never come back again.
A study by Bain & Company showed that increasing customer retention by as little as 5% can lead to an increase in profits of 25% — 95%. So how do you increase the customer retention of your product? By leveraging your design team.
For example, not enough companies understand the importance of their onboarding experience. Only 40% of SaaS customers come back a second time. If a user tries out your product and doesn’t understand how it works, you’ve lost them. Product designers ensure that users will keep coming back by creating an educational yet simple New User Experience (NUX).
Designers have to create an effective onboarding strategy to quickly educate your users on your product and its value. I say quickly because users are fickle. Their attention spans can last minutes or even seconds. Designers have to get your users excited in a short amount of time.
As you can see, onboarding is a very nuanced experience to design for. I’ve compiled a list of articles to help your designer(s) navigate through designing a NUX blueprint that will work for your company.
Even after a user is onboarded, they have to keep using the product. The best way to ensure retention is to create mental models that your users are already familiar with. Mental models shape what we think and how we understand. Designers consider the mental models that their customers already have and adapt those into your product.
For example, if you’re building a search feature, your users better comprehend it if it works similar to a product they already know. Such as Google.
Think your customers will easily adapt to a novel process that is unique to your product? Think again. Novel processes typically lead to user frustration, poor CSAT scores, and a frustrated customer service team. Why would your customers stay when there are two other products that are easier to use?
HCD and Design Thinking will grow your user base and save your company money
Better designed products bring in more customers. It’s simple as that. How are well-designed products being made these days? Through collaborative approaches such as Human-centered design (HCD) and design thinking. Companies that use more collaborative approaches to innovation were twice as likely as their counterparts to expect growth rates of 15% or more.
Never heard of HCD and/or Design Thinking? I will break them down one at a time.
Human-Centered Design
HCD is understanding the perspective of a person (your user) who experiences a problem. By understanding a user’s pain points, a company can come up with a solution to effectively address their needs. The simpler the solution, the more likely users are to adopt it.
This sounds great in theory but isn’t easy in practice. It may require a design team to iterate on each design until they find the best solution for the user to accomplish their Jobs To Be Done.
Design Thinking
Design thinking is a methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. These methods include Double Diamond and Dual Track Agile. Using these methods will weed out bad ideas before they are pushed to production. Fortunately, these methods apply to more than just redesigns.
There might come a time when an executive is adamant about a new product. They believe in their heart it will be a boon to the company, but it needs to get done now before competitors catch up. They relay this idea to the rest of the organization, who promptly gets to work.
The engineers spend weeks, months, or even years building the product. The marketing team creates campaigns that tell your users of the benefits. The sales team works hard to pitch the idea to prospective customers. But when the product is finally released to the public, users become confused and angry. They hate the product and feel they have been sold on a lie. This is what happened to the Segway, Microsoft Zune, and the Apple Newton.
Fortunately, there’s a better way and it will prevent you from following the fate of those commercial flops.
If you have an executive that has grand dreams of a new product, have your designers make a quick and inexpensive prototype to validate that idea with users. This will give you qualitative data on how paying customers feel about it. Your customers should be the ones to validate the potential of an idea, not your CEO. Building and designing products in a waterfall-esque, top-down format is a thing of the past.
Employing HCD and design thinking methods can find issues in the design phase before they become an issue in development. The cost to iterate on a design is far cheaper than iterating on a feature in production. The sooner and earlier a designer validates their idea, the less likely they will need to fix it when it’s in production. According to Harrison et al., (1994), American Airlines was able to reduce the cost of development fixes by 60–90% using HCD and design thinking.
There is a saying I love to use when talking to executives about the trade-offs of working right as opposed to working fast.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
How design affects how your product is perceived
Apple’s famous 1984 Superbowl commercial was the start of a design revolution. Prior to Apple, there weren’t many companies turning utilitarian products into experiences. In terms of design, everything generally looked the same: difficult to use and chunky with large blocks of text that made it hard to discern one thing from another.
Product design wasn’t even a profession back then. Don Norman, one of the founding fathers of UX, was the first to have a title that is relevant today. Norman’s self-selected title was User Experience Architect at Apple in 1993.
You can see the difference in having someone who used design thinking by looking at the marketing websites of Apple and Microsoft back in 1999. The experiences a user would have had interacting with Apple’s website versus Microsoft’s website would have been completely different.
Twenty years later, Microsoft has changed the design of their website to match the experience that Apple has been pioneering for years. Although Microsoft and Apple sell physical products, the psychology behind how customers respond to well designed digital products remains the same.
Apple championed the idea that beautifully designed products are easy to use and invested the past 43 years to their design. Now, Apple is the first trillion dollar public company.
If you look at the largest IPO’s that are set to occur this year — Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, and Pinterest — what do they have in common? They all disrupted industries by creating an easier experience that users can trust.
In order to disrupt an industry, you have to build trust with your users. Designers help bridge that trust gap through design. Designers act as a mutual 3rd party friend. They expose enough information for your users to feel comfortable, yet not too much to overwhelm them.
The companies I mentioned above are all IPO’ing between $120 million–$6 billion. More and more early-stage startups are taking note and investing in design. Investing in design earlier in your companies tenure yields only positive results.
Design is more than just what you see on your desktop. It’s a way of thinking. It’s the intersection of a business and its users. If I were to define what product design is to those who don’t know, I would say:
Product Design is the process of accomplishing business objectives through creating experiences that increase user retention and trust, validate features that users will use, and champion your users needs.
Isn’t that worth investing in?
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