Great design is nice, but at the end of the day, you run a business and need to make money. You’re not against pleasing aesthetics per se, but a maniacal focus on the P&L is the path to success, right?
Not according to countless studies, which have shown time and again that design-led companies consistently outperform their peers when it comes to profitability—and with good reason: they create differentiated, meaningful, seamless experiences that keep their users coming back and allow them to charge a premium.
These companies include Apple, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Herman-Miller, Disney, and many more. They’ve figured out that making business decisions solely on profit is not a way to stand out in the market and ultimately achieve customer preference: that if you build a better experience, customers (and profit) will follow.
Design-Led Begins with Consumer Experience (CX)
Being a customer-experience-focused organization means that you consider your customers’ needs at every step of their journey with your product or service, and you spend as much time thinking about how the design impacts CX as you spend focusing on the development, creation, and sales of the actual product or service.
To be design-led, consider how customers will interact with your brand before, during, and after a sale in order to create an experience that truly engages. This means you need to go where they are, ask them about their journey, and walk in their shoes to gain the types of insights that go beyond surface-level feedback.
By taking your time with the process and developing a complete understanding of what customers want from you, you will give them something they can't get anywhere else. They will seek you out rather than vice versa. This is what brings in more customers and catapults a business to leading their industry.
Shifting Your Focus
To be genuinely design-led, you can't stop at "good enough."
Design-led leadership means creating a product that people love despite financial expectations and hurdles. Your focus must shift from being internally focused—How much profit can we squeeze out of every touchpoint?—to externally focused: How can we create the best experience for our customers?
This "customer first" thinking needs to be embedded in the culture at every level. Finance and logistics don't drive your company’s vision anymore. Instead, your business is guided from a place of real consumer understanding and appreciation.
It may seem unnatural to build a business this way, but historical evidence shows that it pays off.
It's important to realize that this doesn't just happen; it takes trial and research to get it right. You have to provide the best experience for your customers while simultaneously being okay with failing until you find what works. You must accept imperfection, encourage new ideas, create space for your employees' creativity to grow, and reward your people for pushing themselves outside of their comfort zones.
How Can I Help My Organization Become Design-Led?
Becoming a design-led company starts with a leadership mindset. Here are a few of the most critical aspects of leading your company toward a design-centric mentality.
1. Know your user and embrace experience relativity
The first step to becoming a design driven company begins with always having the user in mind and being curious. Constantly ask, "What does this mean for our user experience?" Keep pushing the envelope, digging deeper, and asking why. (Then ask why again and again.)
When you understand your user in a deep way, the solutions you develop will incorporate experience relativity - you’ll have such a thorough understanding of where your customers are now that you can predict where they’ll be and what their needs will be in the future. With that knowledge and understanding, you can design products and services that meet them where they’ll be at launch, not where they were when you started the project.
Starbucks is a great example of a company whose success can be attributed to understanding this concept. As the company has evolved, it’s leaders have placed perfecting customer experience at the top of their list of priorities. Starbucks invests in really getting to know their guests, going as far as strategically placing store designers across the country so that each location captures the spirit of the local community. This attention to delivering on what customers want allows them to deliver an experience that feels like a “third place” - after work and home - where guests want to spend time (and money).
2. Destroy internal silos
You can't be design-led without great internal communication. This means building a culture of open communication that promotes creativity and innovation. You'll end up with better, more cohesive products and services if everyone is working toward a common goal and collaborating at each step along the way.
3. Betray the norm in your design
This is where design-led companies really have an edge. Great design gets to the heart of what customers need, often creating a better solution when users don’t even realize that they are settling for good enough.
Consider Apple's iPhone. At the time, removing the keyboard seemed like a fatal design decision. But Apple knew that the key to a great smartphone experience would be a bigger, more dynamic screen in the most streamlined package. It wasn't until the release of the first iPhone that consumers came to love the keyboard-less interface and realize they didn’t need physical keys.
To succeed, you need to make decisions that you know are right even (and maybe especially) when they fly in the face of convention.
4. Don't be a fast follower
The most significant way design-led companies can distinguish themselves in the marketplace is by defining and owning a unique point of view. Focus less on your competition and more on your users. Be the first one to do something new or different in your field.
5. When it works, leave it alone
Don't continuously change your product with the idea that "new is better,” especially if the changes are confusing or disruptive. There is a difference between evolving and completely reinventing your product.
The perfect example of "if it ain’t broke, don't fix it" is Google. The Google homepage has stayed almost exactly the same for 20 years: a blank white page with a single search bar in the middle. Customers know what to do the instant they see it. Google knows what consumers need and want, and when to leave things alone—even when trends and technology evolve and advance.
Are you ready to drive profitability and human impact with better design?
The world needs leaders who recognize that a business is only as valuable and sustainable as it is helpful to the people who use it. Leaders who know that when they care about creating the best possible solutions for their customers, they’re having a positive impact on human life.
Companies that embrace design-led principles are, by their nature, creating infrastructure that enables long term success. With the focus on creating the best, most seamless experiences, design-led companies move past myopic goals and planning and instead lay the foundation to create repeatable success.
If you're looking to build a product or service that customers will love for years to come, there's no better way than using human-centered design principles. When used correctly, human-centered design generates a competitive edge no other company in your industry can match.
Are you the leader who's going to bet your company on the power of being design-led in your culture, leadership, and business?
If so, let us help you get started.
Mike Welsh is the Chief Creative Officer at Mobiquity, leading a team of experience architects, experience designers, and conversational designers to deliver engaging and compelling solutions in collaboration with engineers who bring these solutions to life. He has been doing this for over 27 years, having joined Mobiquity near it’s beginning. Mike notes that what originally drew him to his role is the ability to transform experiences for companies and their customers. What keeps him and the team engaged is the opportunity to find out what truly transforms human experience and then bring it to life. He’s a firm believer in the power of a team and its ability to create impact derived from insights. Mike makes no special claim of expertise or experience because every engagement is a team effort. Each time he and the team engage with a client’s challenges and opportunities, good things can happen. Curiosity and a core belief that some of the best work comes when a team understands the humans behind their work is central to understanding the role that technology can play. Mike’s time spent with clients and teams includes work within creative, business, and technology fields, bringing many skills to the table including: experience strategy, experience design, product strategy, and product design. His industry knowledge within these functions spans healthcare, retail, ecommerce, and financial services and he has lectured on these topics at University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Moore College of Art and Design and various conferences. In addition, Mike holds a Nielsen Norman Group UXC certificate working toward master certification. While no one is a bigger Mobiquity champion than Mike, much of what fuels his passion comes from the time he spends away from work. He is a father of three, an avid runner, traveler, cook, and outdoorsman. A voracious consumer of audiobooks, Mike is always learning and drawing connections about how we can make a difference today for our future selves. When thinking about what’s to come, Mike believes that artificial intelligence, immersive storytelling, and machine learning will play a significant role in defining experiences humans have with technology.
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