From a business strategy perspective, we reviewed the desires and behavior of “smart markets”, where customers look for choices of solutions and want vendors to provide help in making the right choice. (Read my last post on UX UI Design, if you want to know more about what we found).
Moreover, these “smart customers” desire to provide feedback on the development and deployment of the solutions they use. For any application provider, UX UI design is a key mechanism for such dialog with their “smart customers”. Additionally, it helps the application provider to venture into new market segments without a whole lot of investments.
But one may ask if there is any value by emphasizing UX UI design in their business strategy. Well, it might sound intuitive or perhaps obvious what the answer should be.
Actually, it turns out that there are results from objective measurements. These show that the business value of design is quite significant. The McKinsey report, “The Business Value of Design” nicely quantifies this business value from good design.
More about the McKinsey report on Business Value of Design:
The authors quantify “good design” in terms of the McKinsey Design Index (MDI), which is a composition of four design themes:
(1) analytical leadership in design, which is about measuring and driving design performance with the same rigor as revenues and costs
(2) cross-functional design talent, which makes user-centric design everyone’s responsibility
(3) continuous iteration in design, which is continuous iteration with end-users and
(4) user experience from breaking silos of physical, digital, and service designs.
Companies achieve high MDI scores by implementing the four design themes. For the report, the authors collected data from publicly listed companies. Additionally, these companies were from the Medical Technology, Retail Banking, and Consumer Packaged Goods industry. Moreover, the data was collected from 300 such companies over a period of 5 years and showed that:
- Companies with top-quartile MDI scores outperformed their industry benchmark scores on revenue growth. Also, their total returns to shareholders (TRS) overreached by a 2:1 margin
- The differences in revenue growth and TRS among second, third, and fourth quartile companies were marginal. It indicated that only top-quartile companies got disproportionately rewarded
It’s time to emphasize Design in Business Strategy
So it clearly pays to emphasize design in the workings of the solution provider. According to the report, the value of accurate insights from design-related metrics is significant. For example, an online gaming company noticed that an increase in the usability of the home page was followed by a 25 percent increase in sales.
However, 40% of the surveyed companies are still not talking to their customers during product development. To overcome this situation, let us assume a small SaaS provider without much in-house talent makes a design commitment. It plans to do so by operationalizing analytical leadership and integrating design metrics in the business assessment. Additionally, it plans to streamline user experience across different delivery channels.
To fill the gap in design talent and continuous iteration in design, it hires Divami. How would Divami fill this gap? More on that in the next blog.
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