Revolutionize Your Business with This Game-Changing Design Strategy!

Sumit Biswas
Canadiv’s Technology and Design
6 min readApr 15, 2023

A business strategy, strategic planning, design thinking, and design principles are all connected by design strategy.

In today’s competitive world, simply having a good product or service isn’t enough. You must differentiate yourself from the competition, forge a connection with your audience, and constantly innovate. This is where design strategy comes in.

Design strategy is more than just pretty visuals; it’s a way of thinking that helps businesses translate their strategic vision into actionable steps. By using design thinking techniques, businesses can break down their goals into achievable phases and ensure they are on the right track to success.

One of the key benefits of design strategy is its ability to provide unique insights into how your brand or product will appear in the market. By crafting a visual strategy that stands out from the competition, businesses can forge a close emotional connection with their target market.

Another significant difference between design strategy and traditional business planning is the feedback loop. With design strategy, you’re constantly learning, improving, and progressing, making sure your business stays ahead of the game.

Typically, this incorporates

  1. What success means and how to measure it? (and for whom)
  2. The issue that must be fixed.
  3. Specifically, the value proposition.
  4. A set of design guidelines.

Desirability, viability, and feasibility are all factors in design strategy. To build the best potential solution with a competitive edge, it harmonizes user needs, business objectives, and technical restrictions.

Design strategy does this by connecting marketing, branding, design principles, product design, graphic design, package design, and UX design. It acts as a blueprint for an attractive, fluid, and practical design that also conveys your brand values.

Although the topic of design strategy is broad, let’s focus on three fundamental problems that must be addressed:

  1. What issue or challenge is the business trying to solve, and why?
  2. How can we make life easier for our customers?
  3. How can we make the customer win more than they do today since that is the problem we are principally trying to solve? (If our main goal is to enhance an existing solution)

The significance of design strategy

The relationship between design strategy and design as most people understand it may not be immediately apparent. But successful design results from sound design strategy. And a ssuccessful strategic design can accomplish so much.

Effective design:

  1. Achieves measurable short- and long-term business objectives
    sequences of user/customer thought.
  2. Directs user/customer attention to crucial components at the appropriate time and location by using familiar visual language to increase confidence.
  3. Increases brand memory and recognition.
  4. Improves financial performance across the entire organization.
  5. Increases and preserves your market share while reducing time to market.
  6. Improves client experience and user happiness.

The mysterious art of design strategy exists

Create your design strategy:

I wasn’t sure where it was most frequently used. Perhaps in huge companies and design teams?

I don’t have much experience with huge design teams. However, I’ll have to master it as soon as I put my team together.

To create strategic design solutions, I’m now establishing my design approach to elicit value and opportunity.

This will be covered in a lot of the writing I have planned for the upcoming year.

The concept of strategy may appear to have been developed by wealthy designers employed by large corporations.

List your tactics:

Businesses constantly strive to achieve their aims. Even if it’s only to survive the month without going bankrupt.

Some companies are better at developing and attaining goals than others, and some need a lot of assistance defining and quantifying success.

Designers might have access to one but not the other, therefore to do our duties, we must be aware of what we are attempting to accomplish (beyond designing a new logo or website) and how we plan to determine the project’s success.

Figuring out our standings:

The success of a project depends on its standing in the market. We must ascertain a company’s current position in the market as well as the direction they wish to go as a result of your project in order to position them appropriately.

You begin with the qualities and advantages of the business’s operations.

Discover the principles that guide their decisions.

Discover their positioning statement, which is based on the benefits of choosing them.

Your task is to make that a reality through visual design to get them one step closer to their desired destination.

Marketing and sales funnels:

Funnels are a great reason for someone to choose to learn more about a brand. Your design eventually turns into a component of this funnel.

It follows the transformation of a non-customer into a brand spokesman. Every segment of your target market or user personas will have a variety of people.

You may place that component to move a user farther down the funnel by knowing what state of mind they are in when they reach the thing you are designing for.

Assess available resources:

During the research phase of the design process, you may either be given or collect company data that will give you insight.

In order to keep in mind who and what we are designing for, this useful data frame a significant portion of how we approach and attack the problem.

Designers must contribute to businesses in a way that helps them advance toward success.

When a company starts off, it has specific objectives. They need to make money, and the products and services they offer to their clients give them some sort of value in return.

Because the capacity to design is typically housed in a different section of the brain than the skills for running/managing a business, design strategy is so strange to designers.

Logic and creativity are fundamentally located on opposing sides of the brain.

You may present yourself as more than just a pixel pusher by working with a designer who takes the time to share insights on how to address business problems with creative solutions.

Strategic Thinking Improvement Strategic thinking gets better with practice in design. Here are some pointers for maintaining your polish and wit:

Observe — Keep an eye out for patterns related to your company’s aims. Practice recognizing the wider picture and the client’s importance. Pay attention to any concerns that are brought up during the design process and let the team know about them.

Ask Thoughtful Questions: The language of strategy questions. Ask more questions and listen more frequently as a designer who exercises strategic thinking. Develop an interest in the client, the team, and the process by asking intelligent questions. Look deeper and veer off “the script.”

A fantastic approach is to start organizing verbal and written communication in a way that helps the team stay focused on the main goals and outcomes.

Focus on the Problem: We are all multitasking experts. We attempt to be there at every event and we attend every meeting. Plan your time appropriately and concentrate on problems rather than people. Are we required to attend that meeting? Instead, maybe we should concentrate on the objectives and activities at hand and make sure we are carrying them out.

A strategic thinking attitude is necessary for successfully implementing a design strategy since it allows us to concentrate more on problem-solving, execution, and greater alignment with business objectives.

Execution is what distinguishes you. See you all around with more articles.

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Sumit Biswas
Canadiv’s Technology and Design

Hi.. I’m a engineer turned designer.. trying to solve problems and make this world a little sorted and sweet place.. I casually write about everything..😊