The 4 Components of Making an Impact with Design, Part I: Customer Insight & Demand Analysis
As designers, we talk a lot about the impact our work has on the customers we serve and the businesses we are part of. Not only do we want our individual efforts to have purpose and meaning, but we also want to have a strong, tangible influence on the outcomes we’re looking to drive.
In the pursuit of impact, we aspire to see the measurable results of our efforts and with that, the recognition of the role we play in a system of value creation.
So how can we, as designers, make more of an impact through our work?
Reflecting on my own personal design journey, I can see that my perceptions of the discipline have evolved over time. Whilst the fundamentals of creating human-centric experiences have and always will hold true, early in my career the commercial realities and implications of running a viable business were largely absent from my consideration set.
Fast forward 15 years and multiple experiences with different industries, organisations, situations, and personalities, I started to form the opinion that an individual’s perspective on design, and thus their ability to derive meaningful impact through design, often fall into one of three classifications or archetypes:
Design Idealist: The Design Idealist focuses almost exclusively on the artistry and purism of crafting beautiful design work, largely in the absence of any commercial concerns.
Design Agnostic: The Design Agnostic focuses almost exclusively on the business’s commercial goals and financial success, largely in the absence of craft and experiential quality.
Design Pragmatist: The Design Pragmatist operates at the intersection of solving customer problems, through the application of design, in order to enable the desired outcomes of the business.
This model is purely for illustrative purposes and paints a picture of these as separate and distinct extremes, but we know it’s never quite that clear cut. Folks will likely sit somewhere along that spectrum, either leaning more heavily towards craft — which was certainly true of me earlier in my career — or towards a mindset that favors the application of design in solving business problems.
Our challenge is finding a way to move past design being an ideal, with a focus on expressing our unbounded creativity, to the explicit application of design to solve the most pressing customer and business problems.
The 4 Components of Design Impact
The following are what I believe to be four components that illustrate how design can have greater impact within an organisation. In all likelihood, most designers will have had some level of exposure to one or more of these components, but when practiced together they create a coherent model for decision-making and value creation:
- Customer Insight
- Demand Analysis
- Creative Vision
- Product Thinking
Today we’ll dive into the first two components, customer insight and demand analysis, before continuing with the other two in the next installment of this series.
Customer Insight
Customer Insight speaks to the ability of design (inclusive of User Research) to help an organisation discover, surface, and present new opportunities; define problem spaces, shape roadmaps, and inform solutions. This component (part of this model for impact) is based on the strong belief that insights present opportunities for creativity and innovation.
They reveal the often hidden truths about customers — their behaviours, motivations, and needs –which may map to one or more compelling and commercially-aligned growth opportunities. As such, well-formed insights are often the lifeblood of any successful product decision, where the alternative is fraught with bias and conjecture and unlikely to be a good basis on which to spend the company’s time and money.
However, to do this effectively, design needs to push beyond a pure tactical focus and provide the capacity and capability to support ongoing programmes of strategic enquiry. As such, it’s critical to have the systems, tools, and resources that enable good, qualitative research to take place.
In the majority of cases, teams will need to support and budget for concurrent streams of generative and evaluative research. This allows them to both discover new opportunities and execute well on those they currently plan to address.
A framework like Emma Boulton’s funnel model allows us to describe and be more explicit about these different streams of research, including when they should be deployed and why. You can read more about this in What is a research framework and why do we need one?
Fundamentally, developing a practice that is capable of supporting ongoing streams of Exploratory and Strategic research (both being generative modes of research) is key to our ability to inform the strategy and planning process. Through it we can surface new and valuable opportunities for growth.
So if we look at this model in the wider business context, an end-to-end programme of organisational research can operate across three levels of decision-making. Each one helps narrow in and define the scope of both the offering and specific capabilities associated with that offering:
1. Shaping Portfolios: Research in this space is likely to inform company direction, associated sales and marketing strategies, and the shape of a portfolio of products and services.
2. Shaping Roadmaps: Research in this space is likely to contribute to a vision and roadmap for a product or service; through the intersection of customer problems and business outcomes.
3. Shaping Backlogs: Research in this space is likely to determine a backlog of design and engineering effort required to ship experiments, evaluate the impact of ideas, and iterate towards a chosen solution.
It’s not uncommon for design teams to over-index on more tactical efforts, as opposed to undertaking these streams of strategic or exploratory research in order to answer some of the more fundamental product questions that can inform high impact growth opportunities.
However, a seam of new insight and well-framed opportunity is unlikely to have the desired impact and lead to any change in emphasis unless it is part of a wider operating model. We could be doing great research, uncovering new, valuable insights, but to what end?
Here, how we choose where to spend our valuable discovery time has to be aligned with helping the business challenge its organisational biases and address critical, directional assumptions. For research to have impetus and impact it must be tightly integrated with the strategy and planning process.
In this example operating model, we see signals feed into a shared Learning Backlog and reference and/or update foundational artefacts (Personas, JTBD, Value Propositions, and Journeys) to provide the data and insight that can inform, support or challenge strategic choices. In turn, this ultimately shapes the vision and roadmap for our products.
Although rarely simple in practice, the principle still stands: for research to resonate it cannot exist in a vacuum. It must be strategically aligned to make an impact, and is often only effective when valued as key input into cross-functional decisions.
Demand Analysis
Companies like Personio, that place customer-centricity at the heart of their product decisions, reconise that their success is predicated on the success of their customers.
But how do we determine success? We can start by deconstructing success into four elements, each of which we’ll explore in turn:
- Demand: Understanding the progress customers are looking to make in their personal or professional lives.
- Supply: Analysing the degree to which your offering helps them make progress towards or achieves their goals
- Consumption: The customer’s ability to reliably consume and extract value from your offering.
- Opportunity: Identifying the gaps in your offering(s) or pains in consumption that present as opportunities for growth.
Demand
At Personio, we use the Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) framework to understand customer demand and use that understanding as a model for innovation and product design. Jobs-based research reveals what the market demands (i.e. the progress customers are looking to make) and what’s motivating them to “hire” your product or service.
It enables us to push past focusing solely on a current solution and how to make that better. Instead, it encourages us to focus on the customer and what it would take to enable them to make the progress they are looking for.
Supply
Once we understand what the market wants, we have the solid foundations for designing new propositions that seek to enable those goals and address specific customer pains. Similarly, for an existing proposition, a stable picture of the landscape of demand allows us to better evaluate the delta between what the market needs and what we currently supply (our proposition).
In either of these scenarios, we can use tools like Job Maps to understand where our products and services fit into people’s lives. Where do we have gaps — at either a portfolio or product level — that may present growth opportunities? This kind of high-level proposition analysis lets us review and critique both current and prospective offerings to see how, where, and to what degree we meet demand.
Consumption
The last component deals with consumption. Let’s say we have a good picture of demand and a proposition in the market that has achieved fit (see Product Market Fit). The job now is to ensure our target customers can consume it, and have a great experience while doing so. Here, we might use the more traditional tools of design like Journey Maps (as informed by qualitative and quantitative data) to understand the degree to which customers can realise the value of our offering.
As we go through this process, we ask ourselves a few questions: Fundamentally, does what we deliver to our customers live up to what we market and sell? Can we reliably help customers along their journeys and towards these key moments of value (enabling their JTBD)? How do we ensure they are making progress towards their desired outcomes?
Half the strategy is in the execution. So it’s a fundamental necessity that we understand to what degree customers can acquire, implement, onboard, use, and ultimately succeed with the offering. Mapping these experiences and measuring consumption (relative to their JTBD) allows us to determine what success looks like and plot the interactions and behaviors that are indicative of that success.
Opportunity
With this analysis in place we can start to orient ourselves around strategic decisions and various growth strategies, leveraging tools such as Strategyzer’s Value Proposition Canvas as an approach to validating new or alternative propositions.
The Value Proposition Canvas (VPC) provides a visual map of the customer segment; their jobs, pains, and gains to either a current or future proposition. Using this as a model that applies across all stages of the product lifecycle, we can explore at least three different modes of design, relative to where we see the opportunity:
Explore: Exploring new propositions for a target market, in order to address gaps in supply (unmet/underserved needs).
Extend: Extending the reach or applicability of the current proposition to appeal to new or alternative customer segments.
Enhance: Enhancing a current proposition to better address the JTBD and resulting needs (strengthening Product Market Fit) of the current segment.
These are the first of two components that illustrate how design can have greater impact within an organisation. Check back soon for Part II of this blog series to learn more about the other two components, Creative Vision and Product Thinking! Until then, if this type of design thinking appeals to you, check out our careers page to find the next right job for you.
