How we are moving away from the traditional digital design company to the ‘design with data company’
Introducing the design with data company VOUW Design: the logical transformational step of BrunsNiks.
UPDATE: Today VOUW Design is called CONVINCE or cnvnc.com
How we realised our design agency was not relevant anymore
As a small digital design company we asked ourselves the question: “Are we relevant today?” The answer was blunt but honest: “No.”
We wondered whether we would become more relevant in the next years if we would stay the way we were operating: a hard working creative digital design agency with a strong network. We realised that we probably get some tough times ahead if we would not change our positioning. We also learned that most digital design companies are doing the same as we are:
- They also are strategic thinkers
- They — like us — claim to be more than just ‘designers’
- And they know a hell lot about digital
- And obviously they a great portfolio with wonderful clients
Whenever we pitched to a potential client, we sometimes lost. And when we did, it was frustrating. We were too focussed on the competition.
There are two options at this stage for us and any digital design agency:
- You can either compete on price; or
- You can differentiate;
We looked into both.
1. Competing on price
First we tried by being more transparent in our pricing, causing eventually headaches to potential clients when they learned the final price on the actual proposal was a lot higher compared to what they thought the price would be. Still being transparent about pricing lead us also to new clients that appreciated the transparency. But it did not necessary felt like the way to go.
If we were going to compete on price, we have to know what prices are offered for similar services in the future. So we started researching about new developments in technology that could replace the designer as we know him/her today. We came across Logojoy a tool that lets people generate logos for their businesses.
We learnt that Adobe was developing Adobe Sensei that would in parts remove a lot of the work of traditional designer. We also saw that Autodesk was aiming to deliver new software that would let even 12 year old kids design their own cars, drones and bicycles using AI that could calculate the best frames and structures for your designs.
But the biggest and most real threat was already here: People per Hour, 99 Designs and UpWork. These sites are offering good design for a extremely low prices. When we asked ourselves, how come we are still making a living. The main reasons were that:
- Clients trust us;
- We are friendly and fun to work with;
- We deliver high quality work (still true); and
- Our network is strong (so people reference to us a lot).
Then we asked ourselves what these online services need to do (and are doing) to slowly eliminate the traditional design company. They need to:
- Increase trust (of their services)
- Build a top notch rating system (of their designer’s database)
- Build a better trackrecord (of similar clients like ours)
- Increase their marketing budget (get more people to find and use them)
The majority of the traditional design companies (including us) is basically being eaten by 15 year olds (that are present on these services, designing and developing faster and cheaper than we ever could) and by robot designers. Anyways, it again proved our point: we should not compete price, it’s too tricky.
Differentiation of our company is therefore inevitable and very necessary. Competing on the price is a no-go.
2. Differentiation: Combining data analysis with design
Along our differentiation process we got introduced to Thomas Ghys: A Belgian data scientist (and former New York McKinsey Consultant) who told us about machine learning and big data analysis.
Ghys concluded that it would make a lot of sense for a design office to incorporate data analysis and eventually add machine learning in the design services to slowly eliminate repeating design choices. We were excited. But it would prove really worth when we incorporated his vision (of merging data analysis with design) when working with an existing client: CSR Europe. We proposed to visualise incoming data on youth apprenticeships in 12 European countries through a questionnaire. Our client was showcasing the results to his peers and told us afterwards: “I am on cloud 9”.
When later redesigning a presentation deck for one of the largest media companies in the Netherlands and replacing their content centred approach graphic with a data centred approach graphic. We were immediately asked to transform our vision for them into a working product.
That’s also when we decided to transform our existing design company into a design company that does not just make beautiful designs, it makes them smarter to.
What does a ‘design with data company’ do?
You have either a design company entirely focussed on the creative process: from analysis to conceptualization. When the product was designed it was finished.
Or you have the data analysis companies (most big consultancies) only focussing on the getting all the data and too little the creative process. Having a firm believe that knowing all about users you will automatically find the solution, is simply wrong.
A design with data company like VOUW Design can make multiple decisions and test the results real-time on the user and then again adapt the designed product immediately to the input of the user or its environment. This way the product or service keeps being more relevant as it adapts to incoming data but not neglecting the creative design element. This is way more interesting, because it’s more cost-effective and you have much more chance to deliver your user the product that he/she likes the most at any time and place.
So we’re combining the best both worlds: data analysis and creative thinking (design).
A very direct approach to that is visualising incoming results immediately as we did for CSR Europe’s EUtalent campaign. The design choises help companies in this case make better decisions on their traineeships by making the results insightful. But you can also extend it to furniture or housing that adapts to the time of the day (eg a table that adjusts to the user’s calendar), or show the fertility of an area of land based on continuously updated measurements, including data that does not seem related all that in the first place (air pollution, amount of noise in certain areas, Japanese tourism).
In the next years we want to start developing physical products that are embedded with sensors that adapt to the circumstances.
Why merge data analysis with design thinking?
If the data analytics for a company is done by a data analist, he/she will end up handing over all data in datasets which will leave the client with too much information to make a good decision. A designer can apply design thinking leaving out the information that isn’t relevant to the product or service: making it much more logical to combine the two.
The designer is supposed to think for the user but also have an opinion of its own.
The keys to paradise
Working with a data and design company gives you:
- Better insights into how your products are being used
- More independence as the design is always adapting to your users
- Happier users as they are less confronted with things they don’t need to see or use
How we deliver
There are several services we are developing or looking to develop in the next months to deliver ‘the keys to paradise’.
- Interactive data visualisations with that help clients and their users making faster better decisions
- Brand identities based on data analysis: We are able to go a big ‘scan’ though all existing datasets and draw better
- Smart web and app development: we’re looking for ways to help our clients get content faster to the right target group by using relevant parameters (such as the time of the day, location, weather, etc.)
- Let’s-build-a-product-in-a-day-service: usually designing and developing a new working prototype can take months. You can change that by getting the smartest people in a room for one day and develop a working prototype in a day to tackle the biggest challenges of the client with the speed of a start-up.
It’s more than obvious that our business today transforms and should transform from the traditional digital design agency to the smarter design agency by combining the best of both worlds (data analysis and design). Eventually designers will be eliminated, but it’s better to own te transition to fully automated design than to be owned.
VOUW Design is part of the VOUW, it holds other divisions such as VOUW Products and VOUW Projects, all to be launched soon.
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