Dear C*Os: Here’s Why You Should Prioritize Product Design At Your Organization
Introduction
Product design is a crucial piece of the software development puzzle. A designer’s ultimate goal is to design a product that delights the user, looks great, and drives business value. However, good design is so much more than just graphics and visuals. Steve Jobs once said that “Design is not just what [the product] looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” That’s why it's critically important that when you think about your product development strategy at your organization, hiring designers that focus on both the user interface (UI) and the user experience (UX) is a must for driving ROI. Read on to learn why.
What is Product Design?
Product design is an umbrella term that encompasses many different roles across the tech space, ranging from interface design to usability testing to user experience design. The ultimate goal is to optimize a product for users, but product designers must find the success paths where both business and user needs can be met. This is what is referred to as design thinking, which is a mindset that focuses on the end users, but also finds creative solutions that simultaneously make the product more enjoyable for users and help to elevate the business.
“Product designers work to optimize the user experience in the solutions they make for their users—and help their brands by making products sustainable for longer-term business needs.”
User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) Design
It’s important to note that there is a difference between user interface (UI) design and user experience (UX) design as they are often mistakenly used interchangeably. UI focuses on the visuals of a product, whereas UX focuses on the journey and interactions through/with the product. For example, UI decides on the color, font, or form of a button within a product so that it’s easily visible and fits into the overall visual cohesion of the product. UX informs where the button lives and what it should say so that the user can clearly understand what action to take. Both UI and UX are essential to creating a quality product and user experience.
Other Types of Design
Much like UI and UX influence each other, all aspects of design interact and overlap with one another. No aspect of design should live in isolation, and each is an important piece of creating a successful product and cohesive user experience. Graphic design refers to the visual elements used to communicate brand messages that stay true to brand identity. Marketing design is a subset of graphic design and refers to the visual content and assets used for marketing and advertising purposes. And lastly, print design refers to visual content that’s intended to be printed in physical form/on a tangible surface, such as paper, plastic, etc.
“Despite both graphic design and user experience (UX) design having the word design in the title, they are not interchangeable or even heavily related. A graphic designer spends their time thinking about how something looks, whereas a UX designer spends their time thinking about how something feels.”
Design as an industry is much like a venn diagram, with key, distinct roles that all work together. Therefore, it’s crucial for organizations to understand that only having one type of design represented—such as only having graphic design—will not enable them to build products that are both loved by users and drive business outcomes.
Why Prioritize Product Design?
Successful companies understand the value of good design. However, good design is often invisible. In other words, design is more than just appearances. It’s inherent to the functionality and joy of use in any product. While good design is hard to measure, bad design will have clear negative impacts. Good design is what pushes companies ahead of their competitors by creating superior targets that address user needs in the best way.
“If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.”
Let’s take a look at some industry examples to better understand how to measure good design:
Apple
Apple is famous not only for their slick appearances that set them apart from traditional PCs, but also for their super intuitive interfaces and interactions (a piece that is often overlooked). Device networks are a great example of this because they enable all Apple products to communicate and cross share with each other. Mac gestures are another good example because they streamline the way a user can interact with the computer and improve their day-to-day processes.
Braun/Oral-B
Oral-B’s electric toothbrushes have long been the industry leader. Instead of just designing a product that looked flashy in sales brochures but was useless day-to-day, Braun hired expert designers to help with new product development that pushed them to think outside the box. A data-tracking tool that tells the user they aren’t brushing their teeth properly or enough piles on the guilt and doesn’t take into account the customer’s experience. A toothbrush that charges on a dock at home and with a USB hookup on the road, plus a button that sends a reminder notification to your phone to order replacement heads, is actually beneficial to the user.
Measuring the direct output of design can be challenging, but if a company makes the investment, they will see a difference. Companies like Airbnb, Apple, Netflix, GE Healthcare, Ford, and Delta all utilize design thinking. A well-designed user experience will be so seamless that the user should be able to finish their task without ever thinking about the design or flow. And truly excellent design will make the user notice it through aspects of delight, like pausing and spending more time on a site or an app simply because it’s fun to use.
Take a moment to reflect on your own experiences and think about a time when you were frustrated using a particular product or piece of technology. Maybe something that looked sleek when you were unboxing it turned out to be difficult to use. Or maybe the interface of an application was clunky and awkward, and after a free trial you weren’t willing to stick it out to see more value. Apply that thinking to your own products and get in the heads of your users.
ROI of Design
If you’re still not sold on the importance of prioritizing product design at your organization, we’ve included some excerpts from studies that highlight the ROI of design below:
“Using both primary and secondary research, Forrester created a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) model to empower design thinking practitioners with the tools and vernacular needed to quantify their efforts as well as form a compelling business case for the practice. The model examines design thinking’s financial impact. While the ROI for each organization will differ depending upon the efficiency of the practice, the project, and the specific use case, the model found that mature design thinking practices can deliver an ROI of 85% or greater.”
“A rather prominent study, which for the first time delivered figures for DT impact, was published by IBM and carried out by the consultancy Forrester (IBM, 2018). According to its key result, the Return on Investment (ROI) for Design Thinking amounts to 301%, which means that every dollar invested in DT leads to a return of 3.01 dollars.”
“Top-quartile MDI (McKinsey Design Index) scorers increased their revenues and total returns to shareholders (TRS) substantially faster than their industry counterparts did over a five-year period—32 percentage points higher revenue growth and 56 percentage points higher TRS growth for the period as a whole.”
Product Design and The Balanced Team
Here at Crafted, we use the Balanced Team approach to build high-value, quality software fast for our clients. This highly collaborative, cross-functional unit is made up of product design, product management, and software engineering. Product design is a pivotal piece of the puzzle as designers are advocates for the user. Designers focus on understanding user needs and validating potential solutions so the Balanced Team can build and iterate on the right things. Product designers help ensure the Balanced Team is operating in a state of continuous flow and delivering value to users more often by…
Doing continuous customer discovery and establishing user-centered performance metrics
Having design reviews regularly with the Balanced Team and with stakeholders/leadership
Leveraging pattern libraries and design systems for scalable efficiencies
We believe the best way to build undeniably good products that delight users, drive business value, and scale is by leveraging the Balanced Team. And without product design represented and collaborating with product management and software engineering, you don’t have a Balanced Team.
How to Implement Product Design at Your Organization
Whether you already have product design represented at your organization or you’re ready to hire your first product designer, there are some tactics you can employ today to optimize your design practices.
Lean UX
Lean UX mimics the rapid, iterative cycles of Agile development. Its core objective is to focus on obtaining feedback as early as possible so that it can be used to make quick decisions. Lean UX is broken out into three distinct phases:
Think - Form a hypothesis, such as, “We think moving the button will result in more people seeing it.”
Make - Sketch your idea. Make a wireframe.
Check - Put the idea in front of an actual person. What do they see first?
Discovery Research
Discovery research doesn't have to be intensive and take weeks. If you have a product that is already out in the market, start off easy. Reach out to a few customers, get them on a Zoom meeting, and ask them to tell you a story about the last time they used your product. If you don’t have a product yet, ask them to tell you a story about the last time they encountered the problem you’re trying to solve. Remember to always record the conversations where you can!
Surveys
Surveys are a quick and easy way to start collecting user input. Whether you use Google Forms, Survey Monkey, or Typeform, start getting into the habit of asking questions. If you can’t think of questions to ask, use the five whys technique, which involves asking “why” five times in succession until you get to the root of the problem you are trying to solve. For example, “Why does a user need your product?” And then, “Why do they have that need?” and so on.
Good design relies on good user inputs and a good understanding of the bottom-level goals users are trying to achieve with the product. Research can take on many forms, from quick and dirty to long and intensive studies. But don’t get overwhelmed. Start where you are at, with the most pressing questions you need answered.
Conclusion
Design is a diverse industry with many different roles. It’s important to understand the differences and make sure you are best-utilizing design across your organization. Good design starts with good research. Even implementing simple research efforts will bring you one step closer to understanding your user and optimizing your product for success. Good design can create successful products and as a result, successful companies.
Want to learn more product design best practices from the Crafted team? Reach out and we’d love to connect!
