Design is the new Black.
How the Human Experience design can build a bold business case
Preroll
The capacity of Brands, to create a new generation data warehouse where it is possible to analyze, request and cross reference big-query information with a higher level of intelligence, is generating enormous business opportunities. The tendency is to take advantage of the speed and flexibility now integrated in the inquiry of the data and increasingly integrate BI in policy making in Business, supplying a dashboard and dataview to manage, iterate and evolve on-going product experience and services.
The Financial Times is an interesting case, in which the strategic use of data represented a real turning point in the company’s transformation into digital. Creating the role of “Head of audience engagement” Renée Kaplan led the process of data analysis, to increase loyalty, personalization of experience, and ultimately subscriptions.
The KPI of FT is a simple formula RxFxV. Recently=time between visits to the site, Frequency=average times site is used, Volume=what is done on site. This KPI has taken the place of unique user and page view metrics, and using this indicator, all marketing actions are defined. Strategic use of user-data is also crucial to define predictive models compared to the elasticity of decision logic such as the price of subscriptions. But what allows them to use the data, making them work with their products and content, and support the increase of the paywall? The design.
The design intended not only as a product design (with the wealth of smart digital can bring to the touch point of the brand) but the design of customer journey that connects the three fundamentals of digital business and designing the interaction between data and product.
Experience & Business
The User Centered Design how Don Norman calls it, or the design process beginning with the understanding of user needs and user insight, is playing an increasingly central role in the majority of the Biggest Companies in order to provide structure and design processes, centered around human and thinking design.
Companies like Airbnb, Slack, TransferWise and even CapitalOne (which recently acquired Adaptive Path) are applying the Customer Experience and design-driven logic to achieve growth targets, with a significant impact on their business and their market share.
Customer Experience (which of course includes the concept of User Experience, but places it in a broader landscape tied to blue-print logic or omni-channel customer journey), has become a business cliché. Design logic derived from design thinking and in general, all design disciplines that have emerged in the last 30 years — instrumental to the design of human-interaction interface systems — seem to be the most effective tools to address the complexity of the market and seize the opportunities that technological acceleration is generating, throughout the industry. The relationship between CX and growth is exceedingly subject to tools and searches (eg. Net Promoter Network) which allow to measure its impact on business. In this regard, one of the latest IDEO cases for Lufthansa for the re-design of the long-haul travel experience, is very interesting.
The customer experience is the mix of utility and emotional value that a company can generate for its customers. The CX is not a single discipline. It is a chaotic mix, cross superimposed and complexity of all the interactions that exist between people and businesses, products, services, interfaces, both offline and online, before, during and after the purchase of the product or service. It can include anything from how well the product or service solves the customer’s problem to understanding if the brand is in line with its ambitions and social status.
What does this all mean?
“89% of companies believe that the CX will be their first lever to compete in the market in the coming years” — Gartner
“90% of management respondents agree on how the engagement and the quality of customer experience are the main objectives of their strategy.” — Sloan / Deloitte MIT
Service design is all about making the service you deliver useful, usable, efficient, effective and desirable.
— UK Design Council, 2010
The customer experience is fast becoming the main battlefield for companies that trying to get ahead of their competitors. Until now all companies that have invested in CX have gained many benefits from the obsessive designing of the customer experience, higher loyalty rate to the reduction of acquisition costs of new prospects, an illuminating case occurred with Ryanair that invested in the CX (New website, Greater baggage allowance, Quieter flights, Reduced penalties, More leg room) and saw an increase of 22% of passengers in 2014 compared to 2013.
To UX & CX from Human Experience: in the end it’s all about people
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” — Walt Disney
I met Donald Norman ten years ago in Milan, after his speech at ‘MeetTheMediaGuru’ and during a dinner with some of his followers, he photographed a hundred different ‘shape human behaviors’, carefully observing all interactions between people, objects, streams. Here’s what he said when he was asked what really matters in the design project “Keep people in mind When designing!”
Here is in a TED Talk with Kevin Kelly a few years ago “Not users but people”, a provocation already carried out some years earlier by pietro turi, Experience Design Lead in Condé Nast Italy, in his manifesto I’m not a User.
Eccolo qui in un suo intervento a TED con Kevin Kelly qualche anno fa “Not users but people”, provocazione già portata avanti da alcuni anni da pietro turi Experience Design Lead in Condé nast Italia, nel suo manifesto I’m not a User. Human Experiences takes on even more importance in customer experience, by getting rid of the concept of user and customer and putting the value of people centered experience related to the business of companies.
The Human Experience is just a representation, a formal element, is a sign that the relationship between a word and meaning is changing perspective, and those in contact with the digital habitat are growing or are being born. Millennials considered the Holy Grail of potential consumers, with nearly a lifetime of purchasing power in front of them (According to a study by eMarketer will have more than $ 1.4 trillion in purchasing power by 2020) and even more Generation Z, that no longer feel like consumers are autonomous, always-on content jumping from media to media with a fragmentation that undermines newspapers, television and traditional media (in the sense of old-style). They feel they that they can make their own choices, critical and aware in deciding where to spend their money and Advocates of a brand or a service when their experience was important, emotional and satisfying for them
“Customers are increasingly choosing products and services based on the quality of the experiences they have with them.” — Brandon Schauer, Ceo Adaptive Path
The concept of consumer must disappear, Brands have to contend with a generation that lives their personal journey not considering themselves a user, nor a consumer, but as the leading actor of their consumption choices and their lives, which is increasingly in relation to their own experiences and less from one product. Here’s an interesting article for Fast Company, Why millennials dont want buy stuff? and how young Americans no longer consider the car the first object of desire.
Here is some interesting insight on Millennials on the only sexy slide in the digital world predictions.
Technology, Business, Human experience is about hybridity = Always a new possibilities
The need of hybridization between technology, business and design is supported by a number of strategic trends from companies and executives, which position the CX in first place in their strategy, but the increase and the effectiveness of this hybridization is not only caused by the synergy of a multi-disciplinary team, hybridization is having leadership figures who know how to think, talk and plan clearly in the three languages.
Technology People ‘have always solved complex problems. ‘Business people’ think synthetically to focus on new opportunities for business. Designers want to import cutting-edge and Beauty into the project, obsessively trying something that will amaze people and make them fall in love with it.
Three dimensions that today have to hybridize, creating harmony and collaboration for a new multi-dimensional approach to design, which will be the key lever in the next ten years of innovation.
In addition, design has become a concrete and tangible market value over the past five years in terms of M&A for Venture Capitalists. There are increasing tech companies acquiring designer-led companies to innovate and renew themselves.
The old concept of User Experiences is evolving and is no longer limited to the disciplines of design.
The acquisition of design-center companies continuing, 42 have been acquired since 2004, of which 50% in the last year.
“[Silicon Valley] didn’t think a designer could build and run a company.They were straight up about it. We weren’t MBAs, we weren’t two PhD students from Stanford. Being designer they thought we were people that worked for people that ran companies.” — Brian Chesky, Co-founder of Airbnb
Business design is evolving, is not only cool for VC, it is a key factor with an impactful ROI on business. In the last year more designers have entered VC than in the last five years. Designer-led startups have increased their access to investment capital. Designers are increasingly becoming executives and are often successful co-founders of companies that have radically changed the appearance of their business industries: 36% of the top 25 start-ups now have a designer co-founder. 20% more than in 2015, and 21% of the Unicorn Companies today claim to have embraced design in all its forms as the main lever for acceleration and innovation.
Methodology, process, tools: building a design-driven culture
“Design of digital experiences change all the time and live inside your pocket… Design of systems that are so big that their scale can be hard to comprehend.”
— Margaret Stewart TED 2014
John Maeda highlights this in a comparison between the gap of Classical Design Principles vs. #DesignInTech.
Margaret Stewart, VP of Product Design in Facebook states, that in design today you have to deal with the shape behaviors never seen before, it must be able to impact its own proposition of hundreds of millions of people, it must always be able to evolve by learning how people interact with products, ready to leave behind prior decisions, to iterate their designs based on tests and research on end users.
“Computational design” (linked more to technology) and “design thinking” (more instrumental to business) are two ways of interpreting design that now more than ever an impact on billions of people, in real time, large-scale and always TBD.
The work-flow and methodologies to trigger this new scenario can be obtained from design tools that allow one to pursue these fundamental principles, just as when cooking for the first time a recipe with chili it is necessary to dose it according to one’s needs and tastes.
Similarly the tools needed must be acquired and made to work together, depending on the basement on which they rest, the objectives, and fundamental anthropological evidence of the place in which they apply, always keeping in mind the Human Experience .
Always basing the design process thinking on the doppio diamante, divergence, convergence, divergence, convergence, with the now-established stages and applied by the major owners in the sector, from IDEO to Google: Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. In recent years more than 900 well documented design methods have been consolidated from which to draw from. The flexibility and variety of these tools allows one to filter and assemble them in the most appropriate way to the nature of the project, the business areas in which we move, the timing available, the skill of the team and the Brand Client.
It is all about choosing the right one and applying it to ones business.
Design is the new Black.
