As a designer, what business value do you bring to the table?
It’s not just about data-driven design, it’s also about how to translate the value your design can bring into your business.
Some designer asked:“ I do all that user research, I analyze user’s pain points, and use all that design thinking to help our users, but for what? How do I tell other people that I am creating value for our business? Some people just don’t believe in design, some of them even treat design as a road blocker that delays the product launch time.”
Here’s an article to help you understand as a designer, what value do you bring to the table, what impact design can have on your business. And finally, let your stakeholders believe that design actually matters.
Understand your company’s business goal and the relevant success metrics.
You may ask, as a designer, why do I need to understand the business goal. Isn’t that a product manager’s job?
Not really.
No matter who you are, you should always ask what is the business goal, and one level down, what business metrics your organization cares about, and all the way down to your individual part, what are the things I need to do to help with my company’s business goal. It’s very much similar to OKR (Objectives and Key Results).
At one of my previous workplaces, Walmart Lab, we know what is the goal of the year for the whole company. Everyone can see that goal exhibits on the big TV screen in the office lobby. Stats showed that most of the shoppers on Walmart.com only shop once per year, so the goal of 2017 is to increase shoppers’ shopping frequency. If we get the shoppers to shop twice a year, then the company’s revenue might be doubled. So in that year, there are many projects dedicating to that goal. One is up-selling the consumables like detergent, shampoo and toilet papers .etc, which shoppers will need to buy very frequently. And another project is to help the user to repurchase from their order history because users are more likely to buy something they’ve bought before, which is another way to increase shopping frequency.
OK, so what do these mean to me as a designer?
If you knew the business goal, and what metrics that represent the goal, you can make your effort to design your projects towards that goal. And we call that “Data-driven design”. User pain points will not just be “oh this product is hard to use”, it will be more about the pain points within the business context. For example, to help user repurchase from their order history. You can design that order history to be more discoverable when the users need it, you can design a “one-click to rebuy” button to make it easier to use, you can also add a subscription model so the company can deliver the toilet paper to the users every month.
With the business context in mind, it will be easier for you to communicate with your PM. And it’s not just the PM coming to you for mockups for some functionalities, it will be more of a partnership that you and the PM working together to define what functionalities make sense to address the business problem on behalf of the users.
How to translate your design value into business value
Now you’ve understood your business goal, and the representing metrics, you can start to translate your value as a designer. I’ll give the following example:
Business goal: Your company wants more new users to convert to engaged users. Engaged users pay more money, which can directly impact revenue.
Product metrics: Improve the conversion rate from new user to engaged user.
Product problem: There are a few steps the users need to complete. If they did complete the steps, they became more engaged. The current completion rate is only 20%, you want to increase this conversation rate.
Design outcome: As a designer, you can analyze in this context, what are the user pain points that are preventing them to complete those steps. It could be a usability issue, it could be a privacy concern, it could also be other things. Now, you can do user research to discover why people didn’t complete and why they dropped out. You can utilize your design thinking skills to brainstorm with your PMs to find solutions. And you can make design decisions to address the problems you discovered in the user study. In the end, your product design had improved that conversion rate from 20% to 50%.
Revenue impact: Sure it will be a team effort to increase that conversion rate. PM brought in the business perspective, you made the design, and the engineers built the product. So let’s say including PM, eng, designer and other relevant staff, you are a 5 person team, so as a fair share you have 1/5 contribution to this project. And let’s say that a 30% conversion rate increase can bring 1 million revenue annually, then your design has contributed 200K to your company.
That’s how you translate your design value into business value.
If people don’t know about the success metrics yet, help them define it.
If the leaders in your company don’t know about what product metrics they care about yet, help them define it with a design thinking workshop. This situation is more likely to happen in a B2B business. The sales team is robust they got all the deals done, but what’s the product R&D’s impact on the deals made? A lot of the time we don’t have visibilities. Every time we launched a new project, what are the product metrics that are impacted? Do we see more user engagement? How about the feature adoption rate? It won’t always just be NPS(Net Promoter Score) survey or Product CSAT(Customer Satisfaction Score). What else do we care about?
As a designer, you can host a workshop with your PMs to define the product metrics, using the following simple format:
What is your business goal?
What is the representing metrics of that goal?
What are the supporting metrics that indicating the representing metrics?
See, the design thinking workshop you hosted had helped your stakeholders aligning their goal, and bringing visibility into the organization. You’ve added more value to the company.
If you like the article, please give a few claps so more people can see it. Thanks!
Continue to read Drive Growth with Data-Informed Design
