Recap: Designer’s Perspective to Crafting ROI Value

A meetup hosted by the Figma Africa Aba community to educate designers on how to add values and business benefits through design.

Namnso Ukpanah

Published in

Friends of Figma Lagos

4 min readMar 4, 2020

Event Statistics

Event Venue:
Innovation Growth Hub

Date & Time:
28th February 2020 | 10 AM GMT+1

Attendance:
25 attended out of 33 RSVPs (76%)

Summary

Last week Saturday, 28th February 2020, Figma Africa Aba launched with a hands-on experience workshop on “Designers Perspective To Crafting ROI Value”. Organized by the design aficionado, Ifunanya Onwughalu. Ifunanya currently leads a design community “Beyond The Pixels” an initiative of his new birthed UX design & research agency, redexignafrica.

The workshop which lasted for approximately 4 hours 40 minutes featured Jethro Theo Paul seasoned funnel hacker who guided the participants through a thunder and fire-filled session on how to craft ROI in design solutions. Below is an excerpt from Jethro’s session.

Everything design is baseless without proposing a return on investment on the design as related to either the organization business or product goals. This is true because businesses always find a way to create a balance between the business and user goals.

What designers should actually look out for when trying to add value to the point of intersection between the business and user goals. At this point, they’ll find what’s actually meant to be designed and probably, anything that falls within this point will always be an untenable need that adds value.

A designers process for improving an existing product includes:

Evaluating the product
Understanding the users
Understand what the product is currently and how the users use it
Think of how to improve the product.

Have you heard about the PPSOFS framework? It’s simply:

Problem
Persona
Strategy
Objectives
Features
Solution

Think PPSOFS, create value and have a rewarding yield of returns on input.

There’s never a way a value cane created where there’s no problem. Just like the first step in thinking, Empathy; Observe, and engage with users to dive into them and understand how they feel over a particular issue.

Following up with other steps will enable you to find a problem they suffer most. This now defines what to design and how to design it to ease their problems. While doing this, always remember that the fundamental pyramid of product design revolves around CX, UX & UI.

To easily craft returns on investment for any solution you’re designing or improving, always think in terms of

People
Problem
Promise

Remember, the promise should cut across both the business and user goals.

The workshop was structured in a way where the participants were engaged in two different group sessions where they had a hands-on adding value and crafting an ROI for fictitious stakeholders of a live product chooya.africa.

At the end of the workshop, the participants were made to understand that for a design proposal to be accepted by stakeholders, there must be a value it’s offering which could be meeting either the business or user goals.