How to Integrate UX into your Business Strategy
On June 10th, UX Kitchen community Nairobi was honoured to represent Kenya at the 24 hours of UX conference . This was a phenomenal event packed with great UX insights from grass-root UX communities all over the world & notable keynotes.
If you haven’t yet, check out Njiiri’s article on Why UX is Foundational to Business Strategy which was the first part of our talk during the 24 hours of UX event. For those of you who’ve read the first part, now you’re probably thinking ‘YES! I need to prioritize UX for my business! But how?!’
There’s been a growing recognition and appreciation of design thinking’s ability to solve business problems over the last few years. New roles with the titles ‘business designer’ and ‘UX strategist’ are popping up in many organizations as some of the top business schools are incorporating design thinking into their curricula. For many of us though, this is far from the case. We work in companies where business and UX happen separately. The commercials team will go off to their revenue meetings while designers will be conducting usability tests in another room. Because of these siloed operations there are often clashes between the design and business teams, in terms of goals, priorities and decisions.
But not to worry! There are already some great resources out there in the field of business design that can help you get started in bringing these fields together. What is business design and how do I become a Business Designer? is a great guide that breaks down how business designers use design methodologies, mindsets and business tools to solve business challenges. Similarly, Design a Better Business comes with a great set of comprehensive tools to help you manage uncertainty in your business.
In this article, however, we want to show you our what we’ve learnt that has been especially helpful to us working as UX Designers in the Kenyan context. We’ll draw from both local and international examples to illustrate the points below on how to combine UX and Business Strategy.
- Reframing Business Goals to UX Goals
- Designing Business Models for Better User Experience
- Prototyping to Inform Business Strategy
- Using User Research to Unlock New Business Opportunities
1. Reframing Business Goals to UX Goals
According to Satyam Kantamneni in his talk Design is [Business], all business problems are related to at least one of the following outcomes: adoption, retention, satisfaction, engagement and efficiency. I’m sure that everyone working in a business is familiar with targets like ‘we need to increase sign ups by 50%’ or ‘we need to reduce churn by 20%’.
The problem with such goals is that they are often abstract without a clear route that maps out how to get there, or how achieving these goals can also improve the lives of their customers. In Why UX Outcomes make better goals than Business Outcomes, Spool highlights how framing goals in such ways can trap businesses into unhelpful patterns. It can lead them to take the easy route such as improved landing pages or heavy marketing campaigns to increase sign ups or even darker habits where they trick users into unintentionally signing up or renewing subscriptions.
While better landing pages and improved marketing campaigns can sometimes be good, they neglect the user’s actual needs. As Spool points out, if we kept the question ‘how will we improve our user’s lives?’ in the process of achieving these goals, it will keep them in the center of our decision process.
Here are some examples of ways in which you can reframe business goals:
- A bank in Kenya may increase adoption with the goal to Improve financial literacy and poor savings habits among the youth rather than just getting more sign ups
- An insurance company may increase policy renewals by making the claims process easy, straightforward and less stressful rather than just increasing retention
- An API company can reduce technical support calls by making the API documentation easy to navigate and understand with thorough instructions rather than increasing efficiency and reducing costs.
By reframing goals in this way, you are ensuring that your user is the priority and subsequent strategic decisions are more likely to create lasting positive change for your business.
2. Designing your Business Models for Better User Experience
While you can design landing pages and apps, you can also design business models. The way in which a business model has been designed usually trickles down to the user experience of the product. Simply put, bad business models obstruct the user experience and good business models improve it. Let’s take a look at an example of each:
Bad business models obstruct the user experience: ADS, ADS, ADS! UGH! Need I say more?
Good business models improve the user experience: Netflix, for instance, allows you to binge all the seasons of That 70s Show, a documentary episode about How China is becoming the modern economic super power and a really corny romcom without having to pay to see each one individually. The same goes for all other streaming services with a subscription model e.g. Spotify, HBO etc.
For a more local example, let’s look at M_KOPA SOLAR, a Kenyan company that is providing affordable access to solar power to some of the most under-served communities in the country through an innovative pay-as-you-go model. Here, customers can make an initial deposit of 3,500 shillings (~$35) and then daily payments of 50 cents for up to a year until they fully own the solar power system. What would have been a large and unaffordable investment for clean electricity has been broken down into a more manageable and flexible payment process. If they had to pay for these products in one payment, it may have involved a difficult choice between making this investment and another such as their children’s school fees. This new innovative model allows them to experience a cleaner form of electricity and see the value of it over time without having to make any trade-offs.
These examples have shown that through the intentional design of business models, you can give the customer more opportunities to see the value that your product or service delivers without making them question whether they made the wrong decision with any purchases.
3. Prototyping and Testing to Inform your Business Strategy
User Experience Designers should extend their mindset of experimentation into the business realm. For a business strategy to be successful, you need to ensure that your assumptions are valid. One wrong assumption can make the entire plan fall apart. Prototyping is a great way to test out your assumptions with real customers outside of your office, and can even be done with things that are as abstract as business models and strategies.
Prototyping can help you figure out how to present your offering, find an effective pricing model and even how to organize your sales pipeline. There are lots of ways to prototype your business, from the classic business model canvas, to the ‘lemonade stand’ technique. You can read more about such techniques in How to Prototype a New Business by IDEO U. In the next example, we’ll show you how protoyping has helped us.
At Decoded Africa, a startup that aims to support tech communities in Nairobi, we were trying to figure out how to present our co-working space offerings and how to price it. From testing different methods of charging customers (hourly, daily, monthly, etc.) and offering packages with varying access to the amenities, we were able to create a range of packages with reasonable pricing options that customers were willing to pay for. One interesting learning that came out of this was that some customers were willing to pay just to use the meeting rooms so that they could conduct interviews and hold meetings with external stakeholders, so we were able to create a package that solely offered the meeting room.
4. Using User Research to Unlock New Business Opportunities
Experience Designers probably have the most well rounded understanding of their customers, and this is understanding is immensely valuable to innovation. They are always talking to their users and trying to understand how they use products and services. Sometimes these users may use these products in unintended ways, and by paying attention to this, you can unlock new market opportunities. We’ll show you how such observations have led to the creation of new startups below.
Africa’s Talking (where we currently work), is a company that builds payment and communication APIs. Through their integrations with over 25 Telecommunications providers across Africa, you can easily create customized solutions using SMS, USSD, Airtime, Voice and Payments to reach your customers and scale your business. Two new startups emerged from observing how their customers were using these APIs to create their own solutions: 1) A customer engagement platform that allowed businesses to create virtual call centers, distribute airtime and create bulk SMS campaigns without the need for developers; and 2) a product that allowed businesses to send call blasts to their customers with pre-recorded messages for notifications and marketing campaigns.
User research allows businesses to expand their thinking around where they should be, to where they could be.
Conclusion
Designers are typically best placed in your organization to spearhead innovation. They talk to users, make sense of complex data and interface between the technical and commercial sides of an organization. Designers are already equipped with the mindsets and methodologies to solve business challenges and drive strategy in an age where experience is more important than ever.
