Lessons In Design: How Bad Design Will Destroy Your Business

Before I knew design was even the career path I wanted to pursue, I learned a thing or two about design and how it impacted a business’ vitality. Years ago, I worked in Customer Service for a company that made DVD Players, but these DVD Players were different than your standard players. People could choose what they wanted to be edited out of their movies like violence, nudity, profanity, etc.

Now, I know it wasn’t the most ethical decision to work for a company that was editing art and profiting off of it, but like I said early in my career and I like to think I’ve grown and learned from my mistakes. What I did discover at this job was I loved talking with people and solving their problems. To my boss’ dismay, I loved spending time talking with people on the phone and discovering what their pain points were with the product and finding solutions to those problems. I once spent a phone call going through Star Wars Episode III with a customer to make the product was working to her satisfaction. I know — a real sacrifice. We’re talking about the prequels here.

Let’s Talk About Design

So how does this all relate back design? Well, to start, you have to understand the customer’s journey. If a customer wanted to get a DVD Player that filtered the content they wanted, they would order a DVD Player. Once the DVD Player arrived, the customer would open up a package and set up the DVD Player. There was also a USB Drive that a customer would have to go online to download filters. There were four big problems with this.

1- The process was really hard and involved formatting the USB Drive, downloading files, unzipping some files and putting those files unto the USB Drive. Near impossible for anyone over 50.
2- There weren’t great instructions on how to accomplish this.
3- Users pain points weren’t considered when designing the experience of getting filters for movies.
4-Both the DVD Players and USB Drives were cheaply built out of China with little thought about design.

This technically isn’t were the DVD Players were built, but in my head this seems about right.

Let’s Talk About Money

Designing an experience that is user-centric will make you lots of money. By not talking with customers and considering the experience, the company was getting lots of customers service calls and having to replace a lot of machines. Jared Spool wrote about this exact experience.

“A much-overlooked portion of design’s value is that poor design is very costly to an organization. Poor design generates costly support calls. It causes lost sales or dropped subscriptions. Poor design can increase development costs through rework and waste.” — Jared Spool

I witnessed firsthand the influx of calls come in that were incredibly costly to the company. Poor design was a direct result of this. I also saw lots of people end their subscriptions because of a poorly design experience. The company took huge hits because it wasn’t willing to invest in design.

That can’t be right.

Unlike Ryan Howard, I learned early on how much value design brings to a company. I’ve also witnessed as a Designer that what I’ve built has brought significant money and value to the company. When you invest in design, the payoff is huge. When you ignore it, you are putting your company in jepoardy.