Looking at a designer’s contributions beyond the pixels
It’s Friday, the last day of the month. You are waiting for an email from the client whether you should go for 12px or 13px font size (no shade here, I do have a hard time picking Arial or Helvetica). Anyway, the client gets back to you and decides to go for 5px, you and your team are euphoric like you just closed an IPO.
Finally, you sign-off the work, close your computer, and head straight home. Now ask yourself this question:
What financial value did I bring in this week/month as a Digital Product Designer?
Understanding hidden values
While pushing images and abusing the command button is not the best way of quantifying designers’ financial value. Designers need to be aware of what they bring to the table, as it’s not all about wireframes and task flows on user needs. Designers also play a role in the public’s perception of a company, brand value, longevity of a product, and profitability. However, when we talk about financial benefits, there are two values that I would like to throw lights on for those who aren’t aware of it. Let’s start with the value:
1. Design Reduces Your Burn Rate
Companies love the idea of having a successful product team like FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google). Yet, the vast majority of companies today do not invest enough in UX or aren’t aware of how much FAANG spends in it. The heart of designers is about building products that solve customer problems. But, if your product doesn’t solve them efficiently, it will need to be reworked, which costs time and money.
Incorporating the design process allows companies to reduce the time spent on tedious development tasks and redesign costs. According to Experience Dynamics, investing in product designers can save your Dev-team hours of development time by 33–50%. On top of that, fixing a problem in the development stage can cost ten times more than fixing it in design and 100 times more if you’re trying to fix the problem in a product that’s already been released. Having reoccurring reworks without design back-up can lead companies to burn cash too fast and risking running out of money.
“Design-driven businesses have outperformed the S&P by a whopping 228% over the past 10 years. The bottom line, good design = good business.”
- Joanna Ngai, UX designer, Microsoft
2. It takes good design to make money
Figuring out your return on investment (ROI) is not about showing some Fancy Nancy financial projection that we see on Morgan Stanley’s annual report. In design, ROI is sometimes about finding an improvement to the organization’s “money leak” by correcting the problem from the start so that the cost of fixing a problem is less than the ongoing costs of letting the problem continue. The approach can overall increase customer satisfaction — all of which will probably lead to an increase in profits. Household names such as Apple, Tesla, and Netflix has utilized UX and interface design in the development of their products with reliable results. On average, every dollar invested in UX brings 100 dollars in return.
“Every dollar invested in UX yields a return between $2 and $100. Let me repeat it another way: UX yields a return between $2 and $100 on every dollar invested.”
- Charlie Claxton, Head of UX, Amazon
Over to you, old sport
Designers don’t sell yourself short by defining your skills as pixel pusher or color changer etc. I would love designers to look above the pixel-color horizon. And see that your conquest to the digital world comes with financial prosperity and productivity that we tend to overlook. Showcase your client or your organization how incorporating UI, UX, User Research or Design Change Specialist (just made-up the last title) can provide financial benefit. Don’t see yourself as someone who opens and closes your sketch files, and that’s it. Just know that you do play a more significant role than what you are accustomed to.
