Post-Covid: How Focusing on Design Can Help Your Business Grow

As a business owner in these times, you’re looking to trim costs, make changes and get results. “Design” may sound like a luxury, but let me tell you why we at Digiti are doubling down on our focus on design, and what this can mean for your business.

Design means Innovation

We’ve seen fundamental changes in the world before, and the one we’re going through right now may be the biggest one yet. But we’ve also learned that these moments in time force businesses to think about how they can adapt and evolve. It’s true that on the other side of this crisis some businesses will become obsolete, but other businesses will flourish and start exciting new chapters.

So the answer is to adapt, and to adapt quickly. We may still need to figure out together what exact strategy will help your business evolve, but we guarantee it will involve investing in digital. We get questions daily from businesses interested in exploring their options to create or improve their digital channel(s), which means the competition in this space will become even more fierce. We need to make sure you have the advantage over your competitors by focusing on designing a better user experience for your customers. Just ask yourself: if two online shops offer the product that you’re looking for, wouldn’t you choose the one where the ordering process is clear, the delivery is fast, and the customer service reliable? Maybe even if the product was more expensive at that shop?

Design means Efficiency

If you’re a huge company relying mainly on your digital products or services, it makes sense to have designers in-house. Compared to hiring agencies, it makes the process of evolving your digital branch long-term more predictable and cost-effective. But where an agency like ours really shines is being an efficient partner for disruption. Making rapid change is in our DNA, as we have a team of experts in different fields ready to get to work, and able to communicate more freely with different departments, stakeholders and target audiences.

That’s not new though, we’ve always been efficient in that way. What is new is the impact of the adjustments we have all made when it comes to working remotely, both inside the company and collaborating with other companies. On top of that, the tools to support us in achieving this have basically matured overnight. This is all great news for design agencies and clients as it enables us to do things that used to be too cumbersome and expensive for most projects. Let me give you two examples:

• Since people are much more comfortable to work remotely, they are more willing to do so, which makes it easier, faster and cheaper for us to find participants to do user interviews and perform user testing. This hugely impacts the quality of the result, but without breaking the bank.
• Our design tools have evolved to such a degree that not only we as a design team can collaborate more efficiently and organically, but we can also continuously keep our client in the loop, enabling them to see results and provide feedback directly and quickly without wasting time.

Design means Empathy

In this new era of needs and expectations, we as designers must be more empathic than ever before. We need to fully understand the (new) direction of your business, the different roles and stakeholders involved, and of course, your target audience. By understanding the different experiences and needs of these users, we can understand exactly how we’ll reach the desired outcome for your business.

We achieve this in two different ways:

1. To understand your business, its direction and its goals, we tailor a series of workshops to your needs. Since this is one of our specialties, you can expect these workshops to be very structured and efficient, and have the right people at the table. Both stakeholders from your side as experts from ours.
2. To understand your customers or users, we do extensive research, interview people who actually use your product or service, and user test our proposed solutions to make sure we get it right.

Design means Return on Investment

Design isn’t just about branding or creating delightful user interfaces. Design is, now more than ever, about finding out what your goal is and the steps we need to take to get there. It’s about making calculated decisions based on research and facts, estimating what the return will be, and measuring results.

Predicting how much money you’ll earn from investing in user experience is often very feasible. For instance, if conversion and drop-off rate are metrics relevant to your product or service, we can easily calculate the added revenue by a/b testing an early prototype of our improved solution against what’s currently in place. But in some cases improving the user experience is about saving time, or making employees more productive and efficient. You could translate this saved time to money, but more often than not you shouldn’t expect to see this in your bottom line since that time will be spent doing other things (which is of course our goal).

In any case, be it money, productivity, retention, perception, or something else, you can expect us to determine how we can ideally measure the value of our work to your business, and provide you with a thorough estimation of the return.

Conclusion

What is the next step in these uncertain times? How can you use this moment for positive change and growth?

We believe focusing on design is key. And focusing on design is more than designing beautiful products. For us, now more than ever, it’s about efficiently designing the right products that yield a return on your investment.