Business Designers: Bringing User Focus to Business Needs
“The business doesn’t care about design thinking. The business only cares about market outcomes.” — Phil Gilbert, GM of IBM Design
Businesses are results-driven. Design thinking is user-focused. And yet, study after study shows that businesses that use design thinking are more successful. Creating impact from design thinking hinges on being able to connect and align user and business outcomes in a way that produces a cohesive vision and actionable next steps. In the IBM iX Studio in Cambridge, where I work, we use business designers to bridge the gap between user desirability and business viability to produce an impactful design.
Representing the business perspective in the design process, business designers innovate with human-centered solution design, translate design solutions into measurable business components, and prioritize design outcomes to identify roadmaps and next steps. Using design thinking as a way of working, business designers identify, innovate, and solve for user needs while demonstrating that the solutions also provide measurable business outcomes.
Unifying the worlds of user-focused design and business results, business designers are key to bridging the space between business and user outcomes. At every step from concept to execution, the business is measuring to evaluate if an action makes “business sense”. For example, before funding a new business opportunity, the business would want to quantify the value of the opportunity as an important first step. Business designers establish this value by identifying who benefits and in what way so that they can then quantify the size of the opportunity. Applying design thinking from a business perspective identifies user-centric impacts that can be used to evaluate and build a case for viability.
Mixing industry knowledge, analytics skills, and design thinking expertise, our business designers drive our projects by innovating the user experience, connecting business and user outcomes, and creating a roadmap to guide the execution of the strategy.
So what is a business designer?
Our business designers come from many different backgrounds, but all have three common underlying traits: strong design thinking expertise, analytics skills, and industry-specific strategic knowledge.
First and foremost, our business designers are excellent design thinkers. Most of the business designers in our office are Enterprise Design Thinking Coaches and have years of design experience. Even when representing the business point of view, our business designers focus on identifying impactful user outcomes and behaviors. Design thinking provides a framework for business designers to define problems, perform research, lead workshops, and ideate the future state. Similar to better known UX designers, business designers also focus on user outcomes, but with a focus on how those outcomes create business value. In our studio, we emphasize that design thinking is for anyone who has a human-centric problem to solve and that most business problems involve humans.
Also, our business designers have backgrounds in analytics, which they use to define, measure, and prioritize the design solution. The creative design process does a great job of identifying user experiences and creating user journeys but matches poorly with analytics-driven business decision making. Business designers use backgrounds in analytics to bridge this gap by deconstructing journeys into distinct experiences, translating those experiences into meaningful business outcomes, and quantifying the outcomes to create a prioritization of the experiences.
Finally, as consultants, business designers in our office have deep industry, brand, and strategy specific knowledge to communicate and connect design solutions and business outcomes. This communication needs to go up to project business sponsors, but also out to other project team members. Business designers need to understand the dynamics of the brand and industry to translate user-centric design outputs into language that resonates with business stakeholders to not only build trust and deepen relationships but also ensure the project is tracking to meet the desired business objectives.
Business designers also communicate industry knowledge to the rest of the design team, speeding and strengthening design outputs. By highlighting relevant business insights, business designers help speed the design process by ensuring business objectives are understood and represented upfront in the design process. Business designers also help push ideation by identifying key industry trends and developments that can enhance the end-user experience.
Although the business designers in our Cambridge iX Studio come from different backgrounds, they all have these same underlying abilities. Some of our business designers come from business backgrounds, learning design thinking over time. Others started as visual or UX designers and gained business and analytic acumen from years working in specific industries. The common thread for all of our business designers is that they have the desire and curiosity to tie design thinking and industry expertise together with strategy and analytics.
What does a business designer do?
In our studio, business designers help our design teams by innovating the user experience, connecting business and user outcomes, and creating a roadmap to guide the execution of the strategy. Our business designers are involved at each step of design from defining the problem to enacting a plan to realize the value of the solution.
Problem Definition
At the start of many of our design projects, business designers help shape and scope the project by working with sponsors to define business goals and establish problem statements. By defining business goals, stakeholders and sponsors quickly align around what high-level business and user outcomes are desired. Creating this alignment ensures all stakeholders agree before anyone starts solutioning. In creating the problem statements, business designers will rely on their business understanding, ensuring the problem has business merit, and design thinking experience, ensuring that the problem is user-focused.
Understand
With a problem statement in hand, projects move to understand the current state. For business designers, this means understanding both the user experience and the business landscape. Participating in user research enables the business designer to understand the user needs and pain points. At the same time, by performing business stakeholder interviews, business case reviews, and competitive analysis, our business designers identify the pain points and metrics that define the current business landscape and opportunities.
The business designer has three primary goals from the research phase: identify alignment between user needs and business strategy, prioritize areas for improvement, and establish baselines for improvement. By catching any misalignment between user needs and business strategy at this early phase, a business designer can bring stakeholders together before the project commits more time and resources when there may be issues with the strategy, target users, or both. When user needs and business strategy align, the business designer can begin to identify which pain points will have the greatest impact and prioritize those for ideation. Finally, by identifying the key metrics of the current state, our business designers establish the baselines needed to effectively evaluate the business impact of an idea. Without understanding the current state, a business designer won’t be able to efficiently target or evaluate the design.
Create
With the current state understood, our business designers help design the future state vision.
Our projects typically jumpstart ideation with a workshop. As design thinking coaches, our business designers often plan and lead these workshops. Planning activities range from guiding persona creation to curating attendees; from re-defining problem statements to selecting workshop activities that will contribute to design. Business designers need to ensure the workshop is structured to produce outputs that will help solve the defined problem. A workshop might produce innovative ideas, future state storyboards, as-is scenario maps, experienced-based roadmaps, low-fidelity prototypes, or countless other design outputs.
Coming out of a workshop, our business designers help the project team collect, analyze and synthesize these outputs into the future state vision. The business designer may contribute to the overall design by offering feedback on the solution from a business viability perspective. Alternatively, a business designer may be responsible for design deliverables as well, such as a new business model, process flow, or go-to-market plan. Ultimately, the business designer is responsible for ensuring that the design solution satisfies the business’s needs.
Analyze
As the future state vision begins to take shape, our business designers are tasked with translating the design solution into something that can be evaluated for business value. Starting with design thinking’s user-focused outputs, our business designers partition the solution into smaller, distinct user capabilities, which describe what actions the user will be capable of in the future state. By creating a comprehensive catalog of user capabilities, the business designer has transformed the future state vision into distinct experiences that can be evaluated for desirability, viability, and feasibility.
Capability catalog in hand, business designers measure and prioritize the capabilities to identify which ideas are most impactful to the business and end-users. By measuring the design, business designers provide the basis for strategic business decisions about viability. This analysis can take many forms, from the formality of building a business case to the informality of a survey. Regardless of the analysis approach, business designers seek to differentiate the capabilities that maximize both user and business value.
Plan
Once capabilities are prioritized, our business designers can then collaborate with feasibility experts to create a roadmap. Based on feasibility, technologists or organizational experts can help business designers sequence the prioritized capabilities into a roadmap that focuses on rapidly delivering value to users and the business.
Business designers’ roles often continue past the identification of an initial roadmap. In execution-focused projects, designers may help write development hills and break them into user-centric MVPs, and ultimately into user experience-driven user stories. In strategically focused projects, the business designer may help revise the business case in more detail, providing project sponsors with the tools to fully evaluate the viability and desirability of moving forward. While projects may differ based on a client’s unique business or technology situation, business designers continue to drive projects towards positive user and business outcomes.
Why use business designers?
Business designers bridge the gap between the needs of user and business stakeholders to produce measurable outputs that drive projects forward. The most critical activities a business designer does on a project is contributing the business perspective to the design solution, connect user outcomes to business value, and prioritize aspects of the design solution to drive the project forward. In creating and identifying outputs that are both desired by the user and viable to the business, the business designer ensures that projects are structured enough to demonstrate business viability, but user-centric to ensure the result is delightful user experience.
Dan Stulck is a Business Designer at IBM based in Cambridge. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
