The ROI of Design
Below are excepts from a presentation I gave to the Gracenote Product and Technology organization in 2021 outlining the vision for the growing Gracenote UX Design team.
The professional practice of design has changed over time. My own career path reflects this. I have gone from being a “graphic designer,” to a “web designer,” to a “UX/UI designer.” Now many companies have a role for a Product Designer—a design practitioner who is asked to contribute directly to the business goals of the company. With each step in design’s evolution, designers have been offered the opportunity to contribute at deeper levels than ever before, contributing to more than just the surface but to the strategy behind the product itself.
And so, our design staff should be given the opportunity to practice design at a deeper level. One reason to do this is around professional development and retention. Our design staff should be acquiring and practicing the professional skills expected of them as their industry as it stands today. And while we can’t expect our design staff to stay with us forever, giving them opportunities to grow encourages them stick around a little longer. At the same time, we also want to be able to attract great design talent. And finally, infusing design at all points of the product lifestyle lays an important foundation for something that could be a game changer for our organization as we try to accomplish our ambitious goals: greater design maturity.
Evolving toward Design Maturity
Gracenote has set some big goals for itself in 2021. Ambitious growth, scalability to support international expansion, more efficient and usable editorial tools. So how might we get there? I talked about layering design across the product lifecycle. But in addition, we should consider adding design processes across business functions. This means the practice of design may be carried out by folks typically not engaged in design activities such as engineers and the customer experience team. This overlap in activities and collaboration inevitably results in greater design maturity for the organization.
And these four themes made a significant difference in revenue. The companies that demonstrated activities that aligned with the four themes outperformed other companies in revenue by as much as three times in some cases.
Design Maturity and Financial Performance
Why should we embrace design maturity? Because it’s a proven path to success. The management company McKinsey has studied the link between design maturity and financial performance and in October, 2018, they published a report of their findings. They identified and tracked 300 publicly-traded companies over a five year period. They tracked these companies’ design-related activities and collected over two million pieces of financial data to see if there was a correlation between design and financial performance.
McKinsey was able to identify four major areas or themes that seemed to correlate with strong financial performance over that five year period. The themes were:
Measuring customer experience with the rigor as time and cost
Breaking down organizational silos
Making human-centric design everyone’s responsibility
And having an experimental, test to learn culture
Putting it all together
Given that Design as a professional practice has evolved and what is expected of a “designer” has expanded
Given that our organization has big goals for growth and scalability
And given that there is clear evidence that design mature businesses succeed in growth and innovation