The value of good design
By Lily Parsons
With contributions from Emma Story, Carlota Coiduras & Rachael Hagan
We’ve all experienced technology that’s made us want to tear our hair out, scream, kick something, or possibly even all three. Perhaps the text is so small that you need the Hubble Space Telescope to read it, or maybe a badly placed ad disrupts your whole user flow. We all know the cost of bad design, but what about the value of good design?
In September the VISFO Design and User Research team along with Rachael, our Product Manager, were lucky enough to attend the Business X Design Conference. One of my favorite things about the events put on by Tech Circus is the virtual conference that takes place beforehand. It’s a great way to get your head in the game before the in-person event. With a range of speakers, lectures, and roundtable discussions, this year’s conference focused on one common theme: the value of design.
Through conversations at the summit, I realized that it’s a lot easier to define and measure what bad design is over good design, because the outcomes are so in your face: frustrated users, high drop off, and error rates. Carlota, our Product Designer, shared a similar stance: “Good design is different for everything. It depends on the aim of the product, but to me it’s about having the same goals as the user. Design is a humble process where you take yourself out of the equation to focus on solving someone else’s problem”. At VISFO, we believe in making the right decisions early on, so user research is a crucial part of what we do, as it provides the evidence that drives our product design strategy forward in a user-centric way.
But despite all the work that goes into making good design possible, it’s still an underappreciated discipline.
But, why? The answer is simple: good design makes the user experience so effortless, so frictionless that we don’t ever stop to think about it – we just coast by like we’re floating on a lazy river. When was the last time you paused and thought, “WOW! This user experience is amazing!”? Sure, those who work in user experience (UX) are more inclined to notice it, but I for one don’t often find myself thanking Apple for all the hours they put into user interviews every time I open my iPhone with Face ID. This goes to show how high our expectations are as consumers and highlights that in order to get it right, design and research capabilities are more needed than ever before. But if we don’t always know its value, how can we get business to invest in it?
We all know that by gaining a better understanding of our users through research, we can create designs that truly offer solutions to their problems and benefit the business financially. Many of the speakers touched on this by talking about design maturity models, which explore the relationship between design practices and business performance – one such type being the McKinsey Design Index. In a review published in 2018, McKinsey found that companies with strong design capabilities grow their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry competitors. It was incredibly inspiring to hear Heads of Departments, Directors, all the way up to Chief Design & Experience Officers, all saying the same thing: the impact of design is evolving and growing, with no sign of slowing down. The evidence is there, we just need to leverage it so that design and research play an active role in product vision and strategy.
At VISFO, data-driven decisions are an integral part of what we do and we prioritize early involvement of our users in product development to identify their pain points as soon as possible. By empathizing with the user, we can write actionable user need statements and assign methods of measurement. These statements act as instructions for creating designs that solve the problems faced by the user. Once testing is completed and the product is live, we can measure the metrics from the user need statements, as well as the usage data. This shows explicitly the value of user research and design and allows us to continuously improve the product, providing real solutions which catalyze a high return on investment.
Our work is built around the needs of our clients and one of the first things we did when we began our work on Nudge was engage with our target audience. From those conversations we learnt that Medical Science Liaisons (MSLs) can spend up to 16 hours researching just one opinion leader they plan to meet, leaving them time-short and frustrated. That right there was our gold dust: a clear as day user problem, that we translated into an actionable user need statement with a user-centric metric to match, which could then be used to measure the success of our solution.
Shall we do the math?
Let’s use our Nudge example and run some numbers: the User Research and Design team found that MSLs can spend up to 16 hours on one task. The numbers we’ll use from this point on are for figurative purposes only, but let’s say they did this task roughly twice a month, that’s now 384 hours per person per year. Initially, in the grand scheme of a year, that might not seem like a lot of time spent… Except you don’t have one user, you have 100. We are lucky enough to have a very talented team that through extensive user research was able to really understand this pain point in the MSL workflow, and therefore design and develop a product that cuts research time down to 2 hours. That’s now 48 hours a year, or, as I prefer to say to stakeholders, an 87.5% time saving! Now convert time to money, and that right there is the value of user research and design: priceless.
Once again, a big thank you to Tech Circus for running the Business x Design Conference, we had a fantastic time!
