IF YOU ARE NOT INVESTING ON DESIGN, YOU’RE BEING LEFT BEHIND
In 2015, the DMI released research saying that companies having a design-centric mindset on their strategies grew 211% more than the average of the rest of S&P 500 during the past 10 years (find details here).
In 2018 Gartner, the biggest consultancy company in the world for IT decision makers added Customer Experience as one of the main subjects for its main world-class event (find details here).
Recently, a McKinsey research revealed that companies which invest in design grow, on average, 2 times more than the leading companies of its respective industry (find details here).
Design is already proved
Design, UX, CX, etc already proven itself as something highly valuable. Few years past, it was hard to find examples, but nowadays it’s getting easier and easier to find uncountable examples:
- It was not Netflix who broke Blockbuster. It was the need to return the tapes;
- It was not Uber who broke taxis. It was the bad service and high prices;
- It’s not the digital banks that are stealing large slices of the market share of the big banks. It’s big banks’ lack of transparency and bureaucracy;
People want to interact and will pay more for that, with transparent services. Companies who used to make things confusing so their clients don’t understand are being pushed to change. The UX is the professional who points these issues and transforms the transparency and no-bureaucracy mindset into visible things. Companies are realizing that, and UX is the fifth most demanded profession of 2019 according to LinkedIn.
Why is it still hard for decision-makers to find value on design and afford it?
The same McKinsey report stated that 40% of companies still don’t listen to the user’s opinions on their products. It’s like selling a cookie and not asking who’s eating if it tastes good. Isn’t the 211% (by DMI) or 2x (by McKinsey) convincing?
From what I heard this far, I mention these 3 points below as the main for companies to still decide to keep design outside their projects.
Lack of knowledge
Lack of vision of what design can aggregate and lack of eager to know is the main reason. There are plenty of people on IT and business departments still thinking that the old meaning for “web-designer” is the CX professional. Their skills are very different.
Costs
Closely attached to the previous item, if people don’t understand what the UX professional will do, they won’t give value to its deliveries. Then they tend to consider the UX are just more cost on the project to develop an activity that someone else could do.
Fear of innovation
Every leader likes to say they are innovating. But it may occur they start to fear when someone else close to them is innovating more. Since the design mindset naturally brings parts of innovation just because of its existence, I’ve already seen people sabotaging user-centric initiatives.
